In March 2019, we launched the Deep Adaptation Forum (DAF) as a mechanism for people to collaborate with each other as their best selves in the face of societal collapse. It was my main response to the explosion of interest in the ‘deep adaptation’ paper. The aim of the new Forum was not only to connect people, but also to catalyse and promote initiatives around the world. We served that goal with a small grant and a team of part time freelancers, with the understanding that ‘deep adaptation’ would be shaped by its participants and take myriad forms around the world. Consistent with that bottom-up ethos, I left the Forum in October 2020 and observed from afar as it evolved – and continues to evolve. Last year I was contacted by one of the many national groups that make this movement real-in-place and we discussed the idea of marking the 5th anniversary of the start of this movement. The group is in Hungary, which had emerged as the largest and most active group in the world.
That is why in April this year I visited Budapest to celebrate the dynamism of ‘Deep Adaptation Hungary’ and launch the Hungarian translation of Breaking Together. The draft text of my talk to open the World Adaptation Forum, which they organised, follows below. I focused on the fact that people are making hugely significant and positive changes in their lives due to their acceptance of societal collapse. That doesn’t mean things won’t be tough, or there aren’t many more things that could be done… rather, it’s time to recognise that many people are becoming their best selves because they are not lying to themselves anymore. It is thanks to Balazs Stumpf-Biro and Krisztina Csapó, since 2019, that Hungarians have been finding each other to explore that.
I enjoyed my time in Budapest and learned a lot. I especially appreciated the contribution from Szilvia Gyurkó, who explained how the framework of children’s rights is useful for guiding our engagement with young people on the topic of societal disruption and collapse. I’m pleased DA Hungary will be prioritising the education and readying of young people for a disrupted future. I recommend US writer Felix de Rosen’s summary of Szilvia’s talk, as well as the entire event. He aptly noted how the Hungarian cultural context means that senior leaders can invite attention to collapse-readiness and response:
“Collapse remains taboo in conventional discourse because it denies the legitimacy of existing power structures. Hungary’s history, and its location at the edges of Western power, gives it a certain freedom of thought. How else can you explain that the conference was hosted by the National University of Public Service? In his opening talk, the rector of the university shared rather matter-of-factly that “the goal of global sustainability will give way to the goal of local resilience,” and that the role of the state and its public servants was to empower local communities in the face of social-political breakdown. I simply cannot imagine that type of discourse coming from the leadership of any American university.”
The text of my talk follows below, and at the end I list some of my early essays on aspects of the Deep Adaptation Forum. While I was in Budapest, I was interviewed by some of their leading journalists. You could use auto-translation and see how they covered the topic (here and here).
My talk in Hungary was my last until October, at which point I will launch Breaking Together in Spanish in Mexico, and in French in Geneva. I will also be visiting California that month to teach the course ‘Leading Through Collapse’. Until then I will be focusing more on the organic farm school, Bekandze Farm. We recently welcomed our first intern from the local agricultural school, thereby taking a small step to engage the younger generations in collapse-readiness efforts.
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Rough Text of my talk “Sacred Pessimism” at the World Adaptation Forum, Budapest, 19th April 2024.
Thank you to the organisers for inviting me to speak today at the first World Adaptation Forum. Me being here, in front of you today, is rather strange. I am here because of failure. My failure. And the failure of the profession and social movement I was part of. And because I admitted that publicly. In 2018 I concluded that my two decades of hard work towards environmental sustainability had been insignificant and, worse, deluded. I am here because I was so dismayed by realising that failure, and wanting to prevent myself from continuing in my old profession, that I wrote an uncompromising paper about my findings. The ‘deep adaptation’ paper on our climate tragedy went viral, with over a million downloads. But my motivation to complete it was to self-sabotage my career, to force myself off the stage, to reject my previous pursuit of respectability. So it is strange that those actions in 2018 started a process that led me to be standing here today. The paper helped people come together on a new basis, to be courageously and creatively responding to an unfolding breakdown and ultimate collapse of industrial consumer societies. Clearly there was already the latent need for people to find each other on this topic, this predicament, and discover how to live differently with such knowledge and emotion.
Looking back at how I came to be here today offers yet another reminder of what can arise out of setback, disruption and even destruction. For instance, Covid-19 has been a huge disruption. The disease was and is unwelcome, its long-term effects are unwelcome, and the policy responses have been, mostly, unwelcome. But some amazing things have happened as a result. My parents, divorced for 25 years, ‘bubbled together’ and became closer friends which led to them remarrying. And in my own little world, I discovered a new musicality because of Covid. That’s alive for me right now as last week I released a new music video, Healing Hearts. It was inspired by conversations with my Brazilian friend Luciana, who had been key to me getting more into music. [Healing Hearts by Barefoot Stars – YouTube]
That happened back in July 2021 in Indonesia where I was living. I was with a group of friends on a small tropical island off Bali. Suddenly we heard there was a new type of lock down. It meant that we were not allowed to travel between islands. On a WhatsApp group we saw that the army was on the streets in the port town we had travelled from, by boat. We decided to stay put and extend our holiday. I had a guitar with me that I had only recently begun playing. I knew only one song all the way through which I proudly played at the breach. My friend Luciana heard this and then asked if I would play in her cacao ceremony band the following morning. I guess that apart from her, I was the only “guitarist” on the island. Being a beginner, I was a bit freaked out by this invitation to learn five songs in one evening to play in front of people, for the first time ever, the following day. But I was in the middle of a medical apocalypse on a tropical island, so it felt like the right thing to do. I remember I practised all evening and only stopped when I realised I might get blisters that would stop me playing. The following day went well, and I experienced the shock of people coming up to me afterward and thanking me for a beautiful experience. In my focus on playing the songs correctly I’d forgotten about the audience and their experience. That opportunity within adversity started me on a new path, and within a month I was writing my own music and within a few months even playing some of my songs at cacao ceremonies.
I mention this to you today because although we don’t wish adversity on each other, we all know that something positive can come from adversity. Just as we don’t wish suffering on each other, but we all know that we can change because of it in ways that we value.
That is what we have been discovering personally and collectively over these last 5 years in the Deep Adaptation movement. The term ‘deep adaptation’ describes the idea that we can respond to the breakdown of our societies in meaningful ways, to help soften the crash, plant the seeds of something new, and learn from the process. For people with such a perspective, the pain of realising our planetary predicament does not go away, but it is supplemented by the joy of connection and personal transformation. What is key for that supplementary benefit is to allow our perception of our situation to enter our conversations so we can integrate it and act on it.
Here in Hungary that is happening perhaps more than anywhere else in the world. That is not because societal collapse is more progressed here than elsewhere. It certainly is not. But it seems to be because, culturally, the elites and managerial class here are not so allergic to the idea that society, as we know it, is breaking down. That means it has been regarded as one credible perspective in your mainstream media. So, citizens here have been hearing from smart, concerned and dynamic people working on adaptation, whether deep or not. That profile and dialogue has encouraged a vibrant range of activity in Hungary at local levels that doesn’t rely on the national government. Instead, progress can be made without much attention to the latest acts in the theatrics of national and international politics.
In many other countries the topic of societal collapse remains taboo within mainstream media. Therefore, the truth of our predicament is only squeezing out into the mainstream through art and music. That is because creativity comes from reflection on reality and only resonates with people if it touches the truth of their own experience. As the Hungarian poet Attila József, claimed, “the poet never lies, He’s either truthful or he dies.” And many people are leading lives they consider to be more creative directly as a result of facing the truth of unfolding collapse. That’s certainly my story… even if people don’t like my music.
Some people take years to integrate this perspective. But some, such as one of the first coordinators of the Deep Adaptation Forum, change direction immediately. I met Zori Tomova after an improv theatre class. I’d just finished the DA paper, so the question “what do you do” seemed a bit awkward to answer over dinner with someone I’d just met. But I explained and it resonated with her deeply. As she had been paying some attention to the environmental situation: she asked me “how long have we got?” I answered that I don’t know but I’m living as if I’ve got ten more years before things collapse around me and make survival more difficult. That was five years ago. At the time, Zori had planned to return home to start a recycling business. But within a day or two she had decided to drop that plan and explore what she most wanted to do if we only had 10 years left. That set her on a journey which means she is now a life coach and facilitator who works closely with Guatemalan shamans and, also, now into music too. Other people changed everything to become full-time climate activists or to work on community resilience projects. In my book I describe such people ‘doomsters’. They integrate their collapse acceptance into their lives and become more dynamic as a result. As such they are masters of doom, rather than deniers or victims of it.
If you aren’t on board with this outlook on society, then I understand. It took me years to look into the scholarship on it, accept it, and then years to change my life as a result of that. The issue is so big and so life changing you will need to do your own reading and cross-checking. I can’t convince you now, and I won’t try. But you could keep the following in mind, as you consider the situation we are in.
The Human Development Index is an authoritative indicator on societies. It has been declining each year since 2019 in 80% of countries, in all regions of the world. Some of that data is collected 2 years before release. So it’s a decline that began pre-pandemic. Previously it had been rising, always, in richer countries since 1990. Data on our quality of life shows a global plateauing since 2016 and that 90% of countries have a declining quality of life. In the rich OECD countries this fall has been consistent since 2016. And some of that data was also collected a few years prior. So that suggests a persistent decline starting before 2015.
In my book Breaking Together, I connect these cracks on the surface of modern societies to the crumbling foundations in our economic, energy, environmental, and food systems. Climate change is an accelerator of all these fractures, as well as being a problem in itself. Specific societies have been disrupted terribly for centuries both by natural disasters and political violence. But the evidence I present in Breaking Together supports the view that we have reached a point where most modern societies, while continuing to function on the surface, are already in the early stages of their collapse.
Unfortunately, tech won’t save us. For energy, we have the problem with battery tech. The problem includes the time required to mine the necessary metals, where they are, and that there aren’t enough of them. One report for the IEA calculated that production would need to be boosted many thousands of times, and there aren’t enough reserves to enable the replacement of hydrocarbon energy generation, which accounts for over 80% of primary energy generation today. We will likely hear more on that from Dr Simon Michaux later. Others have highlighted these metals are found in some of the most pristine wildernesses on Earth. For agriculture, we have the problem with fertilisers. The grain monocultures our societies are dependent on require inputs made from fossilised gas, and alternatives aren’t scalable, while organic methods of farming can’t scale quick enough. I say that as someone who has just put a lot of my savings into an organic farm school in Indonesia, so I fully support reviving organic farming. But I do that because it might beautifully soften the crash, not prevent it.
The reality is we live in a hydrocarbon-based civilisation that must power down, with the rich going first. That is not going to happen because we live within the tyranny of an expansionist monetary system. Incumbent power is entrenched in economic systems, through banking laws and institutions. It is entrenched in political systems through lobbying and bond markets. It is entrenched in social systems through how we are manipulated by the corporate curation of both mass media and social media. And incumbent power is entrenched in professional systems through the incentives and disincentives we are given by our employers and the marketplace. In many economically advanced countries the precursors to massive social change, including our health, face-to-face social connection, and free time, are all far less than in decades past. Therefore, reform will continue to fail, and large-scale transformation will remain a self-serving wish of the privileged, while societies will continue to break down.
I explain in my book that when we recognise our situation, it’s possible for our past preoccupations to break down, so we get to choose to live more consciously and creatively. In the book I argue for a freedom-loving response to collapse. That arises from the knowledge that it was the manipulation of hearts and minds that drove such wholescale destruction, and so liberating our true natures is part of the response. A freedom-loving response therefore involves letting go of familiar but failing systems of comfort and security, to begin to find mutually beneficial ways of living with all Life, including each other.
My view is that unless we talk about collapse then our suppressed anxieties will be manipulated by incumbent power to make matters worse. Unfortunately, some people get very angry with us for having this view and they try to shame us in order to shut us up and get other people to turn away. When I mentioned Covid earlier, perhaps some of you had some nervousness about what I might say. I believe that awkward feeling is an aspect and indicator of societal collapse. For we have been subjected to communications that try to make us disgusted at each other for having views that deviate from the narratives promoted by incumbent power. The elites do not want us to agree to disagree on matters like the conflict in Ukraine, in Palestine, or on gender identity, or the implications of the latest climate data. They want anyone who questions power to be shamed and cancelled, and that to serve as a warning to others to keep their mouths shut. This is something I anticipated, along with other aggressive ways of responding to societal disruption. It is why the DA forum, in its inception, focused on helping us all avoid that way of responding.
We did that because we knew that becoming more conscious of our mortality can have different effects on people. Broadly speaking there are two very opposite responses. Ego affirmation versus ego transcendence. The former is where people are frightened into doubling down on a sense of security they gain from their identity and worldview. That can become illogical and abusive. Normally it is used to describe religious fundamentalisms, but it can also help us understand how people in modern secular societies can become obsessive about technology being the answer to everything. And aggressive with those of us who don’t worship tech in the same way. That is to do with the ego being under threat.
Thankfully death awareness can do the opposite. It can push us to transcend our ego, and become more curious, kind and courageous. With that in mind, the American spiritual teacher Ram Das recommended: “keep death on your shoulder and identify with your soul.” Allowing a deeper sense of the finite nature of life to affect us, so that we prioritise discovering our truth and living our values is something that explains the journey of many people I’ve met over the last 5 years. It points to a kind of ‘sacred pessimism’. Not a nihilistic, apathetic, numbing or defeatist pessimism but a fuller acceptance of the difficulties and impermanence of life, and an uncertainty about the significance of our lives in this plane of existence or any other. It brings us more fully into the truth of our current lives.
In my own life I have found Buddhist philosophy and practice of great help. It can complement other spiritual and religious traditions. It helps us live with the personal destabilisation that occurs when we lose our sense of certainty, security, status and meaning. The Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa summed it up nicely when he said “The bad news is you’re falling through the air, nothing to hang on to, no parachute. The good news is, there’s no ground.” That is highly relevant as we face societal collapse, as we don’t know how far humanity will fall. And we don’t know how far we ourselves will fall, or how far we might be freed through that process.
Therefore, I know there is useful work to be done in helping each other process our feelings about insecurity and mortality, so that more of us respond with ego transcendence rather than ego affirmation. There are many ways to help with that, which involve drawing on wisdom teachings, but also through human connection, nature connection and mindfulness. That inner work is as important as the external work of community gardening, skill sharing and suchlike. Although it is better to build garden beds than bunkers, without the inner work we have less chance of responding well when situations become more stressful.
It is not just strange me standing here. It is strange you are sitting there. We might seem many today but we are amongst the small minority in the world that has the presence and courage to allow intuitive knowing to come into consciousness. To allow the transformative power of honesty to come into our lives. To allow ourselves to trust that within adversity we can find a way to live meaningfully. And to decide to prioritise that today, rather than hope this difficult situation can be forgotten about for a few more years. Thank you for being so strange in a beautiful and meaningful way.
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My articles on the establishing of the Deep Adaptation Forum
The Deep Adaptation Forum launches.
The Love in Deep Adaptation – A Philosophy for the Forum – Prof Jem Bendell
Glocalising DA – launching Deep Adaptation Groups Network.
The Creativity and Agency of Collapse-Anticipation.
Deep Adaptation is Up to You as Founder Transitions.
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Prof Jem Bendell 
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