Speaking personally as a believer in a decades-long Doom process, I am making plans that will effect my Grandkids. Doom is coming, has been coming in one sense since your Grandfather's time, and will continue.
Yes, it pretty much was fossil fuels that ended/is ending/will end what we laughably think of as civilization, over the last century and the next century.
As the price of FF's escalates on the downslope after peak, the first casualties will be those places where those fuels make the difference between misery and starvation. Those same 3rd World places where the misguided charity of the wealthier nations enabled a population boom.
I admit, I used to perform charitable works. Not only did I give money, but for a couple of decades, I stood in a soup kitchen and dished out food at Thanksgiving. Every Tuesday for years, we prepared food and donated it to a local shelter for battered women and kids. There are now more homeless around me by at least an order of magnitude than there were then. Silicon Valley is in the throes of a crime wave, entirely because we enabled the homeless and refuse to enforce the laws against vagrancy, trespassing, mail theft, and endless other things. The basic problem: we accept the homeless, while other states and cities give them one-way bus tickets, to this place and others.
In a similar fashion, the charity of the Western World has enabled the 3rd World. We exported mobile devices, we gave them Mercy Ships, we exported ships full of dried grain, we designed cheap solar stills and solar cookers and LED lighting systems and composting toilets for them, complete with methane digestors for cooking fuel. Now there are 7.7 billion humans, they are growing more and more as we find new ways of "helping them" or "ending suffering".
The planet's ecosystem dies. We are killing the oceans, replacing diversity with a narrow spectrum of plant and animal food species, spewing more pollution, and widening the gap between the 1% and the vast majority. This is the way and more or less the order in which the world will die:
1) The most vulnerable are those 3rd World nations where FF energy has enabled a huge population increase, making the difference between being malnourished and having enough food to think about recreational sex more often, without the education or the means or even the desire to control reproduction. As somebody pointed out, all population control efforts are way underfunded.
2) The next to go are those places where the quality of life depends heavily upon exporting labor and manufactured goods. Mainly this means China, but also India and in fact every place where the 1st World has been "investing" in factories or "exploiting the workers" if you will. The economic downturn will end most import/export activity.
3) In the 1st World nations, the homeless, the pensioners, and increasingly, the so-called "working poor". Mostly because of worsening inflation and all the myriad forms of income redistribution that will not keep pace with the currency dilution.
4) The Middle Class of the 1st World.
5) The 1%.
Somewhere between #4 and #5, the equilibrium between the new feeble non-FF energy sources and the population will stabilize. I believe this will be a new World population somewhere between 77 million (literally the 1%) and 1 billion (roughly the number of people that this planet can support long term). The timeframe will be 1-3 centuries, and really there are too many variables to call it any closer than that.
It will not be a new Dark Age. Information stored in digital form will never be lost. We will have the chilling record of the loss of so many humans in bit-perfect clarity. The human species will evolve, both culturally (because of TEOTWAWKI trauma) and physically (because of genetic engineering).
You can make plans to preserve your own bloodline. One way is joining the 1%, because they will be the only ones consuming FF's on the latter part of the bell curve. In fact, that's probably your best bet. Alternatively, you can build a Doomstead, and if you are good enough and put enough effort into it, it will allow you to live a few years, even perhaps a few decades, of increasing misery. I'm personally planning for long term creature comforts in an era when they will be hard to afford. Things like clean water, HVAC, Internet and HDTV, and plumbing. I'll leave my Grandkids as nice a place or places as I can make them. I'll encourage them to do what I did: work smart, work long, and make plans for the future.
It's not Ragnarök, it's TGOC - The Great Overshoot Correction. It's happening, has been happening for a while, and will continue, whether you believe or not. The human population hasn't peaked yet, but growth is slowing. There probably is some "Seneca Cliff" in the population curve, as the humans war over resources. Make a plan, live through Transition, preserve your bloodline, and as they say: