Collapses tend to be, ahem, interesting times through which to live. For that reason I'd be grateful if the next one could be deferred until I am safely dead. (I'm currently 55.) Having said that, an awful lot of signs and studies all point to some sort of climacteric. People tend to have no intuitive grasp of just how fast exponential growth goes in its last stages before exhaustion of a resource, and it seems to me that a lot of resources, including atmospheric sink capacity, are in their last stages before exhaustion.

But we're an inventive species. If we understand how close we are to collapse, perhaps we can make it a managed decline.