Nobody alive today will be around to see the "collapse" collapse, the extremely dire breakdown that comes as a sudden crisis in civilisation terms, but we will continue to see a lot of hardship from our dated and crumbling institutions and our society slowly losing its grasp on what it is, etc.

In the end, just like the romans, our civilisation's collapse doesn't mean apocalypse, it's not the end.

All civilisations rise and fall, and while ours is by far the grandest and strongest in many respects, it's also the weakest, relying entirely on extremely fragile global systems that, should they fail for even a single month, would throw the planet into chaos (electricity grids/Internet), hastening or even triggering that final sudden crisis, once three slow rot of a dying civilisation has already set in.

But until then, such events will be overcome. Not until that rot has truly set in, and a sudden crisis is upon us all, will things finally collapse as we know it.

So that's kinda good news for us, right? :-)