Simulpocalyse: A word to describe a growing number of post-apocalyptic looking locations and everyday modern society going on simultaneously

I coined a new word to describe how we have locations, regions, and people that are post-apocalyptic to some degree, while most of society continues on its regular course

Abandoned motel in Studio City, 2021. Graffiti and street art, including a well known piece. This property got demolished a few months later. #steveemigphotos

Simulpocalypse- (SIGH-mole-pock-uh-lips): The idea that some locations, regions, and groups of people are decaying or devolving into post-apocalyptic-like conditions, while the majority of society goes on as usual.

Writer’s note- January 2, 2025- Right after I published this post on December 26, 2024, New Year’s Day 2025 came in with a couple of really terrible events within 24 hours. Since I work from a library computer right now, I just heard about these tragedies today, January 2nd. I want to be clear, the large group of trends that I’m calling the “Simulpocalypse,” is a decades long trend that has left tens of thousands of homes and commercial buildings vacant across the United States, and other industrialized countries. In time, these abandoned places decay and look post-apocalyptic. These trends have also led to larger, long term numbers of homeless people, and thousands of senior citizens living in cars, vans, or RV’s, still working short term jobs, unable to truly retire. These trends have also led to large regions with high unemployment, the well established opiate epidemic, over 7 million people living off of government checks, and higher levels of crime.

The Simulpocalypse is a group of long term continuing trends, due to a group of technological, economic, business, and social changes and trends, over the last 40 to 50 years. This isn’t the end of the world, a revolution by populists or some other group, or attacks by one extremist group or another. There are a series of Big Picture forces that are leading to thousands of abandoned buildings, and the other effects I just mentioned. The Simulpocalypse continues no matter which political party is in office, and the Big Picture is never mentioned or even acknowledged by politicians. Politicians, as a whole, think in spans of two to six years, they don’t think about truly long terms trends. These major trends will keep happening, leaving many more buildings abandoned, for at least 10 or 15 more years, probably longer. In this series of posts, I’m going to look at all of these thousands of abandoned buildings, why these trends are happening, look at specific areas hit by these forces, and the many facets of these interlocking trends. I’m not predicting the end of the world or a collapse of society. I’m looking at the big, long term trends that are leaving locations and areas in a post-apocalyptic looking condition, leaving many people struggling, and look for how we can make positive use of some of these buildings, and these trends in general. Now back to my original post.

A few of my high school friends and I were sitting around the living room of my best friend’s house, our usual hangout spot. It was a year after we had graduated high school, the summer of 1985, in Boise, Idaho. A commercial for the movie, Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome came on TV. A young Mel Gibson, and singer Tina Turner starred in the post-apocalyptic thriller, where two factions of survivors fought for their dominance. One of my friends quipped, “Man, the apocalypse better hurry up and happen, or we’re all going to have to go out and find real jobs.” We all laughed, “Yeah, no kidding.” Compared to working on an assembly line for life, the post-apocalyptic scenario looked like more fun, to be honest.

The guys in our group that day were all some of the older members of what would later become known as Generation X. We grew up having to hide under our tiny school desks, for regular drills, preparing for the possibility of a nuclear war. Even in 2nd or 3rd grade, we had figured out that our little desks wouldn’t do shit in a nuclear attack, or even a tornado, but we had to do the drills anyway. The Soviet Union (Russia & Co.) was the enemy of the U.S. then, and an all out nuclear war/nuclear apocalypse was widely feared by most people. During our childhood, a series of post-apocalyptic movies and TV shows drilled the possibility of a full scale nuclear holocaust into our psyche. These were some of those post-apocalyptic movies and TV shows that came out, or played on TV, when we were kids and teens:

The Time Machine- (1960)

Planet of the Apes (1968)

The Omega Man (1971)

Soylent Green (1973)

A Boy and His Dog (1975)

Roller Ball (1975)

Logan’s Run (movie-1976)

Ark II (TV series- 1976)

Damnation Alley (1977)

Logan’s Run (TV series- 1977)

Mad Max (1979)

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)

The Day After (TV movie- 1983)

The Terminator (1984)

Mad Max 3- Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

and years later, my personal favorite post-apocalyptic movie

Tank Girl trailer (1995) Tank Girl opening scene

None of us saw all of these growing up, be we all some of these movies and TV shows. Between movies and TV shows like these, and the news reporting about the continuing threat of a Soviet Union first strike nuclear missile attack on the United States, the idea of World War III and a nuclear apocalypse was always a possibility in the back of our minds. That’s how my high school friends and I came to joke about that day in the summer of 1985. The first U.S. factories were beginning to shut down as we were in junior high and high school. That day of joking about the apocalypse was 39… almost 40 years ago.

In those four decades since, our world has changed in ways none of us could have predicted in 1985. One of the first factories to shut down was a steel plant in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1977, across the state from where I lived then. Forty years later, Youngstown had not recovered. Detroit, the city I knew as a kid to be the thriving industrial giant where many American cars were made, became the poster city for the decline of what’s now known as the Rust Belt. Gary, Indiana, much smaller, but a city built around a huge steel mill, had become another city now known for 20th century urban ruins. Almost every former industrial city now has abandoned factories that now look like something out of the post-apocalyptic movies and TV shows we watched as kids.

This article on the Mansfield (Ohio) News Journal website has photos of Plymouth Locomotive Works, an abandoned factory in the small town of Plymouth, Ohio. This is the first factory that I remember my dad taking me to when I was a kid, and the last one he worked at, before our family moved to New Mexico in 1980. We moved because there were rumors that PLW was going to get bought out and shut down. When I visited this factory in 2010, a guy living right next to it said it closed in 1983. These aren’t just places we’ve seen in videos and photos, many of us, including me, have memories of these buildings when their businesses were thriving.

These abandoned buildings include factories, dead malls, storefronts in small towns and larger cities, along with whole subdivisions, amusement parks, hotels, and other sites are all over this country, and many other countries as well. But we didn’t have the feared World War III and nuclear apocalypse, so feared when I was a kid in the 1970’s. These abandoned sites are mostly the victims of a combination economic, technological, and social apocalypses. No one declared war on American factories, rather a combination of new technologies, new business practices and laws, and economics led to the factories being closed and abandoned. Yes, millions of U.S. jobs were lost to outsourcing work to other countries. But a similar number of jobs were lost to industrial robots, mechanical innovations, and computer-led systems. The now prolific ATM machines took around 800,000 jobs away from bank employees, to cite one non-industrial example. In addition, some places, like the 9th ward in New Orleans, devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and more recently, Asheville, North Carolina, devastated by Hurricane Helene in the fall of 2024, are the product of natural disasters not economic ones.

Homeless hand-built dwelling, in a park-n-ride that turned into a park-n-live during the pandemic. San Fernando Valley, CA, 2021. #steveemigphotos

In addition, we have growing homeless populations in nearly every major city across the U.S., and many smaller cities and towns. There are also regions ravaged by long term unemployment, rampant drug use, and crime. We have individual locations, whole areas and regions, and groups of people that are living in somewhat post-apocalyptic conditions.

As someone who has managed to live many, many years at various levels of homelessness, without drugs and alcohol, an idea occurred to me a couple days ago. The word for the idea is “simulpocalypse.” It’s the idea that we have a growing number of post-apocalyptic-like locations, areas, regions, and even groups of people, while most of society continues on with normal life. Both are happening simultaneously.

Yes, to some degree, there have always been abandoned buildings, ghost towns from previous eras, and run down places. But over the past few decades the number of these places has grown dramatically. I have some thoughts and insights into why this is happening. I’ve been writing on these issues for years in my various blogs, looking for both answers and solutions.

This insight, the word “simulpocalypse,” got me looking into the whole genre of post-apocalyptic stories, novels, movies, TV shows, and video games. These stories go back to the earliest human history we have, with the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh flood story going back 4,000 years, and the similar story of Noah and the flood in the Bible, written sometime later. Mary Shelley, who created the science fiction genre with her novel Frankenstein, later wrote a novel called The Last Man, published in 1826. So she gets the nod for creating the post-apocalyptic genre in “modern” writing, as well as inventing sci-fi.

In just digging into this idea for a couple of days, I’ve found all kinds of interesting ideas and themes around these related subjects. So I’m going to dig into them deeper. More on the whole idea of the post-apocalyptic idea, and our modern ruins and struggling groups of people, coming here in my Substack. Stay tuned.

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