In recent Q&As, I have been asked how I sustain myself in these times. To understand my reply, you would need to understand my outlook on the future. I think a process of the collapse of modern societies has begun, and that catastrophic loss of life will occur on all populated continents in the years to come. If I live another twenty years, I would be witnessing that disaster unfolding. That is the context for my choices over the past five years.
I think I can’t plan to realistically avoid societal collapse myself but can try to avoid some of the early pain. That involves choices about where and how to live (moving to Indonesia). I also want to help soften the crash in the area I intend to live (through an organic farm school and other projects). I no longer believe I can contribute much to systemic changes that would reduce harm at scale (which was the motivation of my previous career). But I don’t want to give up on that entirely, due both to my sense of responsibility, as well as my relevant skills, experience, professional status, and network (so I wrote a book, and still blog and teach). Aside from these matters of personal security and contribution to society, I have felt a strong desire to live more lovingly and creatively than I did in the past, which has led to me becoming a musician and meditation retreat leader.
Already you might have noticed that collapse acceptance touches on all aspects of a life, including the personal and professional. In my case I have sought a balance between the variety of aims and desires I described above. But I could not have sought that balance if I had not freed myself from economic pressures and worries. With that freedom I could focus on what feels true to my outlook on the future and allow my ideas to evolve over time without compromise. Gaining that economic freedom required me to move to a country in the Global South, where I could live cheaply and start projects more cheaply than in the West. It meant I could resign from my ‘job-for-life’ professorship. I’ve learned that leaving traditional employment in this way is quite natural when ‘going wild’ in one’s collapse acceptance. However, as I’ve noted elsewhere, many people have more obligations than I and need to find ways to integrate their collapse awareness within their existing career. In my case, I now dabble in academia occasionally as a ‘barefoot professor,’ to share key ideas that might be too awkward for salaried academics to consider or share.
Fundamentally important for my wellbeing has been the shift towards not thinking I need to do everything and save everything. It might sound ridiculous that I once thought that. I didn’t quite realise it, but I had the typical activist energy of taking on the woes of the world as mine to fix. The shift away from that means I aim for a balance in my focus, between doing some of what I think is mine to do to help the most, while reserving some of my time, energy, and money for other things that enliven me. At the moment, what does that are playing music, spiritual inquiry and celebration, being a friend, men’s circles, going to random workshops, racket sports, and walks in nature. Being a cat owner was also surprisingly meaningful for me, after I adopted a four-week-old kitten that had been abandoned at a Buddhist temple. Perhaps that filled a hole in my life for caring, as I don’t have kids.
There are a few things I’d like to say more about, in case they encourage you to explore in similar ways, or affirm what is already important to you, as you integrate collapse acceptance into your own life. Therefore, if you are in the mood, please read on as I make the rare switch on this blog to write about my personal life.
Faith. I have a faith that however bad situations become, or appear likely, our existence and the nature of the universe ‘makes sense’ at a fundamental level. When I say ‘makes sense’ I mean that it feels like there is meaning, despite the pain, suffering, and loss in the world. My faith in there being meaning doesn’t involve me becoming confident in explaining what that meaning is. That is because I accept human cognition and language is limited in conceptualising the nature of the universe and its meaning. Such a faith helps me as I pay attention to difficulties in the world and an apparent lack of impact from my actions or those of others who care.
Wonder. Despite being someone who has prioritised rationality and scientific analysis, I have been sustained by a general sense of appreciative wonder about reality. For instance, while walking in a forest, or looking at a landscape, or observing another animal. This sense of wonder is an uplifting feeling and adds to the faith I described earlier. My sense of wonder also means that I am open to mystical experiences, such as moments of telepathy or insights when visiting special places, whether that comes from a different part of my being, or a greater field of consciousness, or the divine, or something else. This appreciative wonder helps restore my joy at being alive, despite my awareness of the suffering in the present and to come.
Community. I am blessed to know people who have chosen ways of living that are somewhat free from the rush, striving, and worry of modern life, so they naturally have more of the vibe of wonder, gratitude, playfulness, and forgiveness. They have time and ability to be meaningfully caring and supportive. Although I meet them in many ways, the format of weekly men’s circles has been important for me at times over the last five years. They are loosely (and not exclusively) informed by some of the ideas of the Mankind Project. Most of my friends are not doomsters, and I don’t talk about the predicament of humanity unless they bring it up. I don’t push things, as I already respect the way of life they have chosen. Over the years, more and more of them arrive at a doomster outlook. However, I still don’t know many people who I can meet in person, rather than online, who share my outlook. Therefore, I still value immensely the ability to converse and correspond with people around the world who are working toward a more just and gentle collapse.
Sacred ceremony. Although I was born into a Christian context, I do not go to church. Therefore, I would not have regular invitations to reflect on my life and the universe unless I had another form of ceremony in my life. I was fortunate that some friends invited me to join the music band for their fortnightly cacao ceremonies. This involves a few hours of singing mantras and heart-opening songs, as well as guided reflection and dialogue. We also drink lovely Balinese cacao. The ceremonies help reconnect me with the joy and wonder of being alive, with how I wish and choose to be, and what to let go of. That would be important even without my perspective on societal collapse, but feels vital to help me avoid panicked or aggressive responses to our predicament. I also benefit from regular retreats from my normal life. In particular, I visit a Buddhist temple for a few days of silent meditation, fully offline, at least a few times a year, which I’ll say more about below.
Philosophy and practice. I have found it really useful to have a philosophy, and related techniques, which help me observe my thoughts and emotions and choose a more curious and gentle approach to them. A 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat with the Zen monk Henk Barendregt helped me by confirming a perspective on the way my mind and body works, where subtle wishes and aversions influence how I make sense of reality – unless I notice them better. Rather than just theory, the retreat helped me witness my mental processing of stimuli, whether pleasant or painful. Meditation can reveal the constant cascade from stimuli to feeling to thought to feeling, which can produce habitual reactions and unconscious adherence to certain ideas. How much we are attached to, and protective of, our idea of ourselves, and how much we experience ourselves as an aspect of universal existence, are key to shaping that cascade, and therefore our experience of reality. Maintaining a regular daily practice of meditation has not been easy for me and so regular meditation retreats have been useful. With my friend and musical collaborator Vasudev, we co-host weekend retreats with a theme of self-love for people who live in Indonesia. They serve as a great way to check-in with where I am at. Vasudev’s short books are instructive, one on self-love (here) and another on personal needs (here). Singing Buddhist mantras together in the evening is a highlight of the retreats and has been supportive of my own musical journey.
Musicality. During the first retreat I co-organized at a Buddhist temple at the end of 2020, I discovered how much I enjoyed singing mantras. Over the coming year, I discovered that other people enjoyed me singing mantras. I also began to play guitar. In July 2021, when I was sick in bed with Covid, I began to write my own songs for the first time. I discovered that whenever I felt a difficult emotion, I could explore it to write lyrics and melody. It was a tangible way of transmuting pain into something beautiful (at least to me!). That month I was the only ‘guitarist’ (I stretch the term) on the island of Lembongan, and my friend Luciana asked if I’d join her band for a cacao ceremony the following day. Her invitation accelerated my involvement in helping people host circles of devotional singing. Sometimes I would even play one of my new compositions. Coming to music like that in middle age rekindled a sense of gratitude and wonder about being alive – a huge balance to the darkness of the science and news of what is unfolding around us in an era of collapse. I am pleased to be able to share the release of a song from my new band, the Barefoot Stars. I wrote the song after a few months with a lot of grief, and after an evening with Luciana, who was also grieving at the time. Healing Hearts is available on all major platforms, and we also released a music video.
Readying. To know a lot about the collapse of modern societies but be one of the first to suffer badly from it would be a bit ironic. In such a situation self-judgement would probably be one of my least concerns. Nevertheless, my wish to ‘get cracking’ with my attempts at softening my own crash, while doing something fabulous in the process meant that I moved to a country where I could afford to enact my ideas. In Indonesia, I rented land for 15 years to co-found an organic farm school. My hope is that I will be contributing to more food production that doesn’t rely on imports to keep going in future, and that I will have a useful role in that network. Various factors went into my choice of place and activity, which I won’t go into here. But one key idea was that because anything, from extreme weather to extreme politics, could disrupt my own ability to benefit from the initiative, I wanted the work to be beautiful and useful to many in the process. I do not have a survivalist ‘prepper’ mentality. I am into garden beds, not bunkers, but know those beds might get washed away one day.
Contribution. Although there is contribution to others and therefore society from the things I have mentioned so far, I have always been interested in my own contribution to make. I wondered about the best use of my set of skills, experiences, and network. That drove me to do a lot of research, writing, educating, and advising over the years. Although I badly wanted to change my life, I felt I couldn’t walk away from academia without sharing what I’d concluded on climate, through the Deep Adaptation paper in 2018, and then, on the broader issue of social collapse, with the Breaking Together book in 2023. Both involved years of work, attention, and emotional engagement. Part of what sustains me now is the knowledge that I persevered to complete those publications, despite how exhausting they were. The book in particular messed with my quality of life for over a year. I am also pleased that I focused on connecting people by launching the non-profit Deep Adaptation Forum, before moving on. Feeling I have ‘done my bit’ might help me, psychologically, as suffering grows, including my own.
Sports. Am I sounding a bit earnest? Well, I’m still an animal like everyone else😉. I have learned how important fun physical activity is for me. Currently my colleagues don’t need me on the farm but in front of the laptop, doing the boring stuff: the strategy, legals, financing, fundraising, and communicating. I don’t like the gym and feel too old to go jogging. Instead, I have found tennis and padel to be great for my health, physicality, and mood. I experience additional pleasure from how odd it is to have my worldview, make the choices I have, and still enjoy the smell and bounce of new tennis balls, while cherishing each game knowing that this sport won’t be available to me, or perhaps anyone, in the years to come. When a TV crew came to make a documentary about a British Professor who got so freaked out by climate change that he quit everything and became a musician, meditator, and farmer, I said (somewhat jokingly) that hitting tennis balls around was also important for me. But that wasn’t interesting to them. So, I didn’t get to tell them that as I’m older now, I find a massage the day after a match to be helpful to get me back to feeling supple. It is a huge benefit of where I have chosen to live that I can afford a weekly massage. I even feel sad about those countries and cultures where it is only available as an extravagance for the well-off.
I hope reading this blog didn’t turn out to be too dull or annoying. It’s rare I write about my personal life, and when I do it is with a dual belief that it might help others to hear, and me to tell. That was my reasoning when I shared previously about what I had learned about, and from, my childhood suffering. This time, my personal reason has been a wish to own everything I do, and the reasons I do it. That is because I have made a major switch in life and am about to go further by winding down my analysis, writing, advocacy, and education on collapse risk, readiness, and response. Despite having a hundred ideas on what to share, I am going to write less from now on, one essay a fortnight or so on this blog. Instead, I will be doing more of the things I’ve mentioned in this article. I might also get my hands dirtier at the farm. Which could really do with your support as otherwise we won’t reach our crowdfunding target by Earth Day, April 22nd! Nudge nudge…
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