I would say about form and flatlines is that our perception of time as mobile organisms with a narrative based culture, is that we experience it as the present moving past to future, but the reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

So energy is conserved, because it is the present and its changing form creates time.

So the energy, as process, goes past to future, while the forms generated go future top past.

Think of a wave. The energy is what drives it, while the forms rise and fall.

Galaxies are energy radiating toward infinity, while form coalesces toward equilibrium. They are both entropic, so reality will always be that fluctuation in the middle.

I doubt society is going back to individual self reliance any time soon. I suspect we will evolve cultures that adapt to changing circumstances.

For instance, I've spent my life in various sectors of agriculture and while giantism, industrialization and corporatism have come to dominate, I'm getting the sense many in the field are looking to more diversity and less monoculture. Everything from more complex crop rotations, changing with the climate, etc, that while our political structures might break down, many of the actual processes will be adapting to the realities people will be facing. Sort of like the fall of the Roman Empire, the people just moved on.

Though from our own personal, very finite situations, remember, we are living in times the future historians will be obsessing over for centuries.

Probably have a meteor strike before this year is over, or at least a California earthquake.