It has become cliche to observe that we are living in “unprecedented times.” Existential threats—climate collapse, skyrocketing wealth inequality, genocide—are ubiquitous, and are made constantly accessible through social media, its algorithms portraying each event as more catastrophic than the last. At the same time, people are also constantly reminded that they must act normally, that the world is conducting business as usual, and that the status quo need not be changed. This contradiction—everything is falling apart, and everything is fine—creates anxiety (i.e., dissonance) that results in compensatory reinvestment in individual mundane activities, and disinvestment in collective action needed to better the world. Integrating materialist economic perspectives with theories of compensatory cognition from social, political, and existential psychology, we theorize that the subjective experience of daily life amidst a slow-motion political and societal collapse a) induces a desperate reinvestment in the individual and b) demotivates collective action. Through the lens of cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1962), we also predict that, paradoxically, these effects will grow stronger as existential threats become more salient, as this individualistic turn inward represents an attempt to resolve this contradiction. Crucially, we frame existential threat and its subsequent individualistic reinvestment as a mechanism that exacerbates inequality and, more broadly, reactionary political attitudes and behaviors, by incentivizing behaviors such as resource hoarding and social climbing instead of communal behaviors such as mutual aid and direct collective political action. Through this lens, we seek to apply theory to better understand—in order to radically change—the psychological attitudes and political behaviors of everyday people amidst a bleak political reality that is increasingly rife with contradictions.