Well rome didnt see a meteoric rise of technology in 100 or so years before collapse. also modern weaponry could make collapse a lot more interesting than we imagine. I dont agree with a lot of r/collapse but have to accommodate that post ww2 prosperity has brought in a lot of 'global optimizations'. take that away and access to cheap plentiful energy & things could get bad fast.
Rome didn't collapse overnight, it took literally hundreds of years. It was a "collapse" in the sense that the standard of living and technology fell from the previous peak in some regions, but even then, not much of one because Constantinople endured and other empires were untouched (e.g. China).
The only sudden collapse that's possible is the result of a full-scale nuclear exchange that kills most of the major cities on Earth - but the risk of that has steadily decreased sine it's peak around the 60s-70s.
A long, slow multi-generational decline however is quite possible for a place like the US though: the US has an ideological bent that allows it to decide to sacrifice it's own citizens, and that's been growing stronger. Increasing rates of crises due to climate change could definitely lead to some new generational poverty, but that's the point: that's a "collapse" in the true Roman sense, and definitely not in the "I'm going to survive it in my fortified bunker" sense. It's more Americans losing their houses and discovering what it's like to be poor when the bailout money is "efficiently" managed.
