Toba, Then and Now: A Reflection on Cycles, Survival, and the Unshakable Feeling of Change

 They say that around 74,000 years ago, the Toba Supervolcano erupted, nearly wiping out the human race. Some estimates suggest that before the eruption, the human population was in the tens of thousands, and afterward, it may have dwindled to as few as a few thousand. A bottleneck, a reset. A moment in history where nature decided who would stay and who would go.

Today, I can’t shake the feeling that we’re in another one of those moments. Not caused by a single eruption, but a slow-building catastrophe—climate change, war, AI, economic collapse, the unraveling of society in ways we don’t even fully understand yet. Every day, something shifts, something cracks, something pushes us closer to an event that we don’t see coming until it’s here.

Some people scoff. They say we have technology, we have solutions, we’ll innovate our way out of this. But I look around and see the same blindness that must have existed before every great collapse in history. The same belief that we are too advanced, too civilized, too powerful to fall. Just like civilizations before us thought they were invincible—until they weren’t.

I walk in the rain, watching people rush past in their cars, wrapped in their bubbles, jogging in their own rhythm, disconnected from the earth beneath their feet. And I think about how much energy we waste, how much we take for granted, how far we’ve drifted from nature. Once, we lived by the sun, by the seasons, by the land. Now, we live by algorithms, consumption, and artificial demands.

I am not here to convince anyone. Maybe I’m just Sarah Connor, screaming about a future no one believes in yet. Maybe it doesn’t matter what I say. But I feel it. That something is coming. That the world is shifting. That we are standing at the edge of something we can’t control.

The Toba eruption didn’t erase humanity—it just forced it to change, to adapt, to start again. If we are heading for another kind of reset, the question isn’t whether we can stop it. The question is: Who will be left standing? And what kind of world will they rebuild?