If you’re awake and paying attention you may have noticed that things aren’t going so well right now. The oil spill in the gulf is a harbinger of more difficult challenges ahead as we have to go to greater depths, literally and figuratively, to find the oil that powers our world. That’s because the end of easy cheap oil is here. That’s bad news for the economic reality of the life we’ve become accustomed to. Because to work properly, the dynamics of our current economy depend on constant growth fueled by cheap oil. So the end of life as we know it is near. And the change that is bearing down on us is not pretty.

Of course it’s not like the economic system we have has been working all that well anyway. The middle class is going backward and the millennials are really going backward in terms of prosperity. The world economy had to stop growing sometime. Constant growth—in the stock market, in home prices, in ever more affordable energy—has never been possible. But it’s only now, when it’s ending that we realize we shouldn’t have expected an ever-rising arrow of economic well-being.

The idea that most of our kids will have a better life than we did has already ended. With cheap energy ending, global warming coming and a world economic system increasingly unable to sustain itself at the current level, life as we’ve come to know it is definitely ending.

The question is how bad will it be when it ends? You see, many great civilizations, such as Rome and the Egyptians, collapsed not because of conquerors, but primarily because they grew too large for the energy resources available. Their agricultural land went fallow and in the case of Rome at least, the dark ages ensued. (This is laid out in the great 2009 book The Empathetic Civilization by Jeremy Rifkin.) Right before the industrial revolution Europe was entering an energy crisis because the wood they used for virtually all housing and energy was almost gone. Fortunately rail and mining technology arrived just in time for a transition to coal without a real nasty economic collapse.

Will we be so fortunate? Or will we only transition to new forms of cleaner, sustainable energy after life as we know it ends? Right now the power lies in the hands of those who control the oil and the industries that rely on it. Unless we all rise up and recognize it’s already ending and work together to make a transition many of the humans on this planet are definitely going feel extreme stress. I don’t want civilization as I’ve known it to end. But unless we radically change course, the end truly is near. It’s too bad that many in power have let self-interest be a blanket they pull up over their heads to keep from having to acknowledge how near the end is.