Five systems.
One timeline.
The grid compresses four years into a single view: 48 months, from January 2021 to December 2024.
Five systems move in parallel: displacement, energy, food, fertilizer, military spending. Before the invasion of Ukraine, the grid is mostly dark. Pressure is visible, but contained.
The systems bend. They do not break.
The line is not decoration.
It is the rupture.
The vertical line marks February 24, 2022. It is not a design choice. It is the day every system in this grid changed state.
The cells to the right do not simply continue the pattern on the left. They belong to another phase.
Refugees accelerate. Energy explodes. Fertilizer jumps. Military spending enters a new cycle. The grid does not return to its pre-2022 shape.
Not sequentially.
All at once.
The shock did not travel neatly from one system to the next. It arrived everywhere.
Refugee numbers surged. Gas prices multiplied. Fertilizer costs spiked. Food systems tightened. Military spending reached new records.
Each row tells a different story. Together, they show the same event moving through global infrastructure.
Some prices fell.
The damage remained.
By 2023 and 2024, parts of the commodity shock had eased. Some prices corrected. Some markets cooled.
But recovery was uneven. Real wages in many OECD countries remained below early-2021 levels even as nominal pay increased.
Military spending did not correct: by 2024 it sat at index 120 — a fifth above the January 2021 baseline.