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I've made this point before, but I think everyone is really really under-appreciating the likelihood of major human suffering emerging from the spillover and overlap of multiple non-apocalyptic disaster scenarios. Like...
(a) political competency crisis;
(b) a natural disaster;
(c) widespread and deep technical debt in infrastructure makes a regular-ish power outage into a medium-term ordeal;
(d) during the emergency conditions a prion disease spreads unchecked between wildlife and livestock.
The thing you understand after reading a lot of ancient history is that civilizations weather lots of crises. But in the "later days" (EG the reign of Justinian) a civilization is barely getting over 1 crisis and draws 2-3 more, putting it into a death spiral. And there's no reason to presume that natural disasters can't strike while we're barely coping with human-led disasters.