Jem Bendell — Sacred Pessimism Living to the Max at a Time of Collapse
A 2024 presentation at the World Adaptation Forum
Jem Bendell presented at a 2024 World Adaptation Forum conference. I had short quotes from all presenters at the 2024 and 2025 WAF conferences except one from Bendell, so I generated an AI overview/transcript to find a quote. Instead, I decided to just link to his presentation instead of giving him a short quote. I’ve read Bendell’s offerings, enough over the last seven years, to no want to read more, so the AI transcript and overview is unread by me and unedited for AI errors. I’ll just copy and past with minor formating changes.
Jem Bendell — Sacred Pessimism Living to the Max at a Time of Collapse
Overview
Dr. András Gelencsér welcomed Jem Bendell to Hungary, highlighting the impact of Bendell’s work on many people, including tens of thousands in Hungary. Bendell expressed gratitude to Balazs and the organizing committee for their leadership in bringing the community together to discuss deep adaptation. He emphasized the importance of inner work, such as wisdom teachings, human connection, nature, and mindfulness, alongside external community efforts like skill sharing and community gardening. Bendell acknowledged the rarity of such open conversations and encouraged the participants to foster courage and creativity, urging them to connect and collaborate meaningfully.
Action Items
[ ] Read Jem Bendell’s book “Breaking Together” to learn more about the evidence he presents on societal collapse.
[ ] Consider exploring Buddhist philosophy and practices as a way to process the personal destabilization that comes with losing a sense of certainty and security.
[ ] Check out Jem Bendell’s new music single “Healing Hearts” on Spotify and YouTube.
Outline
Jem Bendell’s Introduction and Acknowledgements
Speaker 1 introduces Jem Bendell, highlighting the impact of his 2017 paper on environmental sustainability.
Jem Bendell thanks Balazs and the organizing committee for their leadership in bringing everyone together.
Jem Bendell reflects on his failure in the environmental sustainability profession and the impact of his paper, “Deep Adaptation.”
The paper aimed to force Jem Bendell to leave his profession and confront the harsh realities of climate change.
The Viral Impact of “Deep Adaptation”
Jem Bendell discusses the unexpected viral success of his paper, with over a million downloads in 18 months.
People from various walks of life sought his advice on personal and professional issues related to climate change.
The paper helped initiate the Deep Adaptation movement, encouraging people to talk about the difficult outlook on the future.
Jem Bendell emphasizes the positive outcomes that can arise from adversity, using COVID-19 as an example.
Personal Transformation and New Career
Jem Bendell shares a personal story about his new career in music, inspired by adversity during the COVID-19 pandemic.
He describes learning to play guitar and performing at cacao ceremonies on a tropical island.
The experience led to a new sense of wonder and purpose, inspiring him to write and perform music.
Jem Bendell highlights the positive changes that can occur when people face adversity and find new ways to express themselves.
The Deep Adaptation Movement and Its Impact
Jem Bendell explains the concept of Deep Adaptation, which involves responding to societal breakdown in meaningful ways.
He emphasizes the importance of integrating the awareness of our planetary predicament into our lives and work.
Jem Bendell notes that Hungary is leading the way in this movement, with a more open discussion of societal collapse in mainstream media.
The movement encourages local activities and adaptations without relying on national government action.
Challenges and Realities of Societal Collapse
Jem Bendell discusses the challenges of societal collapse, including the decline in the Human Development Index and quality of life.
He argues that sustainable development is a failed ideology, and modern societies are in the early stages of collapse.
Jem Bendell highlights the limitations of technology, particularly in energy production and food systems.
He calls for a freedom-loving response to collapse, involving letting go of failing systems and finding mutually beneficial ways of living.
The Role of Technology and Energy in Collapse
Jem Bendell critiques the idea that technology will save us, citing the challenges of battery technology and mineral extraction.
He discusses the reliance on fossil fuels for fertilizers and the limitations of organic farming.
Jem Bendell emphasizes the need for honesty about our hydrocarbon civilization and the necessity of powering down.
He argues that the rich must go first in this process, but they are unlikely to choose it voluntarily.
The Importance of Inner Work and Human Connection
Jem Bendell stresses the importance of inner work, including mindfulness and human connection, in responding to collapse.
He discusses the role of wisdom teachings and nature in helping people process their feelings about insecurity and mortality.
Jem Bendell calls for a shift from ego-affirmation to ego-transcendence in dealing with societal collapse.
He highlights the need for open dialog and functional communication to avoid aggressive and divisive behaviors.
Personal Stories of Transformation
Jem Bendell shares personal stories of people who have undergone significant transformations due to the Deep Adaptation movement.
He recounts the story of Zory Tomova, who changed her career path after reading his paper.
Jem Bendell describes how people are finding new ways to contribute to their communities and respond to the challenges of collapse.
He emphasizes the importance of personal transformation in the face of societal breakdown.
The Role of Art and Creativity in Addressing Collapse
Jem Bendell discusses how art and creativity can address societal collapse by reflecting and resonating with our experiences.
He mentions Hungarian poet Attila Joseph and the role of poets in telling the truth.
Jem Bendell highlights the importance of creativity in helping people face the truth of societal breakdown.
He calls for more creative expressions in addressing the challenges of collapse.
Conclusion and Call to Action
Jem Bendell concludes by encouraging people to embrace the strange and meaningful conversations about collapse.
He calls for more human connection and collaboration in addressing societal collapse.
Jem Bendell thanks the organizers and participants for their efforts in promoting the Deep Adaptation movement.
He emphasizes the importance of intuitive knowing and courage in responding to the challenges of collapse.
Transcript
0:19
For many in this room and beyond. This moment has been eagerly awaited. One man penned words on paper six years ago, unwittingly but profoundly altering the lives of many, including 10s of 1000s of Hungarians. These people rightfully deserve these words. Mr. Jambenda, welcome to Hungary. Applause.
1:00
You. Well, good morning. First up, I should say, Well, I think we could all thank balaj and the organizing committee for your leadership in bringing us all together today. What an impressive gathering. What an impressive amount of support for something which is not an easy topic, particularly in professional settings. Yeah. So it’s amazing to be here. Thank you very much. Yeah.
1:45
Did you hear that? Or should I start again? But yeah, in a way, me being here in front of you today is deeply strange, because I’m here because of failure, my failure and the failure of the profession and the social movement I was part of for over two decades. And I’m here because I admitted that failure publicly, that profession, that social movement was environmental sustainability.
2:25
It was my passion, it was my life. It was my meaning of life. And so looking in 2017 at the latest Climatology and also the latest data on that was deeply troubling to me. And so the paper I wrote deep adaptation was, in part, a kind of a scream or a howl about what I was discovering. And in that, I think, a desire to connect and to talk about it with other people.
3:07
But another part of it was I wanted to force myself to leave my profession, to leave the security of my job, to leave the security of the status of an academic position environment. I didn’t trust myself that I wouldn’t fall back into denial. So I thought, I’ll put this paper out there, this uncompromising paper, deep adaptation, about my conclusions, and it will burn my bridges with my profession, and I’ll have to move on.
3:35
But what I didn’t realize was what would happen if it went viral. And so it did go viral, and over a million downloads within about 18 months, and people were turning to me to ask me what to do about it, from all walks of life, from all parts of the globe, and it was to do with personal issues, about should I have Children, professional issues.
4:01
Should I stay in my job all sorts? And faced with that, I thought, well, I just want to get them talking to each other. Like, sorry. I thought I was only writing this for my corporate sustainability profession, so that’s what then helped the movement come about. Yeah, and so I got people and talked to each other, and then the deep adaptation movement began.
4:28
So the paper helped people come together on a new basis to courageously and creatively explore how to live with this very difficult outlook on the future. So clearly it unlocked something. There was a latent need for people to talk about this, and the paper gave a bit of impetus to that, and a framework for that and a set of questions to get you started.
4:57
And I’ve been amazed at how people have been i. I have been working from that basis, but I think looking back at that, there’s a lesson in there, and it’s a reminder of what can happen that’s positive. That comes about because of adversity, comes out, comes about because of setbacks, comes out, comes about because of suffering, and we have continual reminders of that.
5:32
So our experience with COVID 19 is a recent example of that. You know, the disease was unwelcome. Is unwelcome. Some of the policy responses are unwelcome, but there’s another side to it. In my own personal life, my parents were divorced for 25 years, but with the lockdown, they bubbled together, became friends again, and then remarried in my own little world, the experience of lockdowns and actually getting the disease both, both of them led to a new musicality, and I was thinking about that just recently, because that’s very alive for me at the moment, because last week, my newest single came out as a music video.
6:24
It’s called Healing Hearts, by the way, healing issues. It’s on Spotify and YouTube and everywhere. Check it out. I’m still sort of trying to change careers, as you can see. But yeah, that came about because of adversity. So it was July 2021 I was living in Bali, and I was I went on holiday with some friends to an island just off the coast of Bali called Lembongan.
6:51
And July 21 in Indonesia, there was a new wave, and suddenly there was a new level of lockdown announced, where people couldn’t travel between the islands and and they were enforcing it. So we looked on our WhatsApp groups of our friends, and there were pictures of the army on the streets in the port town we’d left from.
7:12
So we decided to stay put on a small tropical island. You know, we didn’t have it too bad in our lockdown. But the thing was, I just started playing guitar, and I had my guitar with me. I knew one song all the way through, and I was really proud of that. So at sunset, there I was playing my song, and Luciana, my Brazilian friend, said, wow, would you like to be in my cacao ceremony band tomorrow morning?
7:41
And she said, Oh, the songs are really easy, only four or five, and you can learn them like this. Now I’d never, you know that was only one song I’d learned, and I’d never played in front of a group of people as part of a music band, but we were in the middle of a medical Apocalypse on a tropical island, and it seemed like the best thing to do with my time.
8:08
And so, yeah, that adversity. I was probably the only guitarist on the island. So, I mean, she didn’t have anyone else to ask. But the that that night, I practiced into the night, I stopped when I thought my fingers are getting really sore and I don’t want to have blisters tomorrow morning on this during the ceremony. So I played the next day, and I was so focused on everything and getting it right that I even forgotten there was an audience.
8:34
So when the audience members came up to me afterwards and said, Wow, that was amazing. Thank you. You really opened my heart. It was like, Oh, wow, wow. I can actually help people have joyous, sacred experiences together. And that created a whole new sense of wonder of this thing, of being alive me, you know, at the age of 50, can somehow suddenly start playing music, and I started writing songs, and within a couple of months, I was playing some of my songs at these cacao ceremonies.
9:09
So I wanted to tell you that story, because although we don’t wish adversity on each other, we all know that something positive can come from adversity, and just as we don’t wish suffering on each other, we all know that we can change because of it and in ways that we come to value. And that’s what I’ve been discovering, personally and collectively over these last five years of the deep adaptation movement.
9:38
That term deep adaptation describes the idea that we can respond to the breakdown of our society in meaningful ways to help soften the crash, plant the seeds of something new and to learn from the process. For people with such a perspective, the pain of realizing our planetary predicament doesn’t. Go away, but it’s supplemented by a joy, a joy of connection and of personal transformation.
10:09
So what is key for that supplementary benefit is to allow allow our perception of our situation to enter our consciousness more often and enter our conversations more often with each other, so we can begin to integrate it into our lives and work out together how to live from now on. I wouldn’t mind a glass of water, actually, if someone could get me one. Thank you. I think there might be water in in the through, through there, behind the curtains, yeah, thanks.
10:44
Here in Hungary, I think that’s happening more than anywhere else in the world, and that’s not because societal collapse is more progressed here than elsewhere. It certainly is not. I’m super impressed with Budapest, by the way, it seems to be, because culturally here in Hungary, the elites and the managerial class aren’t so allergic to the idea that society as we know it might be breaking.
11:18
That means it’s been regarded as a credible opinion to have, and therefore it’s been platformed in mainstream media as something worthy of discussion. So that means citizens in Hungary have been hearing from smart, concerned and dynamic people working on all kinds of adaptation, including deep adaptation, so that profile and dialog has encouraged a range of activity, a dynamic range of activity here in Hungary, at local levels, that’s not relying on or waiting for national government to act.
11:52
It’s just people deciding to get on with what they believe to be true in their own lives and in their own communities. But in many other countries, most 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 through music, and that’s because creativity comes from reflection and reality and can only resonate with us if it’s touching something of a truth of our own experience.
12:23
I know there’s a Hungarian poet called Atella Joseph. I don’t know if I pronounced that properly. I probably didn’t, but thank you very much. He said, the poet never lies. He’s either truthful or he dies. And many people are leading lives they consider to be more creative, perhaps more poetic, directly, as a result of facing the truth of unfolding societal breakdown and ultimately collapse. And that’s certainly my story, and I’m happy about it, even if people don’t like my music.
12:59
I took years to integrate this perspective. Some people don’t looking back on the deep adaptation forum now, five years after we launched it, the first coordinator after me, zory tomova, I was thinking back to when I first talked to her about this. It was after an improvisational theater class, and we went to dinner, a group of us, and as what normally happens, the question, what do you do?
13:31
And I had just finished writing the deep adaptation paper, and I thought this is going to be a bit awkward, so I decided, okay, I’ll tell her, I’ll tell her that I am a researcher, that I’ve taken a year off university because I was so scared of what’s happening with the climate, and I’ve gone back to the primary climate science, looking at it for myself, and I’ve concluded that there is enough self reinforcing, self amplifying feedbacks to mean that we’re no longer in control, that we are having rapid, possibly abrupt climate change, and it’s going to have catastrophic effects on society in our lifetimes.
14:07
What’s for dessert? So she, like quite a lot of people, because she was an environmentalist, and she was going to Bulgaria and launch a recycling business. That was her sense of what she would be doing. But she said, yeah, that kind of makes sense to me. I must read your paper. So how long have we got? And I said, Well, I don’t know.
14:36
In highly complex systems, it’s impossible to say. And who’s the we where in the world, but I’m living my life now as if I’ve only got 10 years more before my life is very different, where society will be breaking around me, and where I’ll be more focused on survival. That’s how I felt at the time that was five years ago. Okay, and she within 24 hours, read the paper, checked some of the references, and decided that it was her truth.
15:13
And she dropped her ideas of what she wanted to do, and she instead thought, Okay, if I’ve only got 10 years left to be able to do whatever I want to do in the world. What do I believe in? And she believed in connecting people in a spirit of play and love and to connect with each other and with nature and the divine. And then she became a facilitator, a life coach, launched a connection playground, ended up moving to Guatemala, learning from shaman and then becoming a shaman herself, and now recently getting into music.
15:41
So doing completely different things as a direct result of this information. Who knows whether it would have been better for the world and her if she’d gone back to Bulgaria and started her recycling startup? But I think it’s very interesting to see how massive personal transformations that come from the heart are possible when people allow themselves to accept the how difficult things are now for humanity, I’m actually, I mean, people respond in other ways. So some people go full time in extinction rebellion as activists, some people become community leaders. Some people start permaculture farms and farm schools.
16:27
Myself included, I’ve decided we should actually be proud of the transformations we undergo. And I’ve, in my new book, I call ourselves doomsters. So not gloomy Doomers, doomsters. So that comes from the idea of sort of being masters of doom, socially engaged masters of doom, people who decide that we don’t want to be victims or apathetic, we’re actually going to allow this to change us, and we’re going to try and be our best selves as more and more difficulties unfold.
17:00
Now if you’re not on board with this outlook on society, then I understand, because it did take me years to look into the scholarship on it, accept it, and then years to change my life as a result of that. And the issue is so big and so life changing. Of course, you’re going to need to do your own reading, your own cross checking, and I’m not going to be able to convince you now, so I won’t try, but I will mention a few things, which I invite you to keep in mind, and perhaps if you’re not convinced, that will help you.
17:31
Help you decide today to look further at this, rather than think this is all a bit strange, extreme, gloomy, the human development index. I used to work at the UN the human development index, I think, was launched in 1992 it’s considered the best analysis of the level of standard standard of living in societies around the globe. It’s been declining each year since 2019 in 80% of countries in all regions of the world, and some of that data is collected two years before release.
18:05
So it’s a decline that began pre pandemic. Previously, it had been rising, always in richer countries since 1990 so it’s 1990 it started then also the I talk about the data on the quality of life in the world from Numbeo, that’s also in chapter one of my book breaking together, and it shows a global plateauing of quality of life in 90% of countries since 2016 90% now have a declining quality of life in the last few years, and that includes rich OECD countries that have been the fall has been consistent since 2016 and remember also, some of that data was collected a few years prior, so prior to 2015 so yes, deep adaptation is inviting us to ditch sustainability and sustainable development as our paradigm.
19:02
It is saying that that is based on a failed ideology. Things are going backwards, and they have been almost for 10 years, in fact, when people were signing off on those sustainable development goals in New York, when the leaders, the majority of their societies, had already begun their persistent decline. In my book breaking together, I’m connecting these cracks on the surface of modern societies to crumbling foundations in the economic, monetary and energy, environmental and food systems.
19:32
And of course, climate change is an accelerator of all those fractures, impacts on food systems, for example. And of course, it’s a terrible problem in and of itself, through natural disasters, 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.
20:00
We’ve reached a point where most modern societies, while continuing to function okay on the surface, particularly if you’re middle class or above and you can buy yourself out of the difficulties, despite that they are in their early stages of collapse. I believe that because I’ve looked at technology and I realized that it will not save us. We’re going to hear more probably about energy from from Simon, later, Simon Micho, but I talk about it in a chapter on energy collapse in the book.
20:35
The problem is with battery technology. I mean, the the amount of metals we need for the amount of batteries we need, you know, and where the metals are, how long it’s going to there’s not enough of them, and it’s going to take too long to get them out of the ground. One report from the International Energy Agency calculated we’re going to need to increase mining of these critical minerals and rare rare earth minerals from 400 to 4,000% and that’s that’s assuming we can replace 80% of primary energy generation as over 80% which comes from fossil fuels.
21:16
At the moment, other people have highlighted how those minerals and metals are in some of the most pristine wilderness areas on the planet. And so we will be trashing the planet in order to sustain the idea that we can somehow continue our lifestyles and just electrify the economy, and we can all drive electric vehicles and stop worrying.
21:39
So that is quite a ironic tragedy that is now beginning to happen. We’ve also got a problem with fertilizers, which require fossil natural gas. The grain monocultures are what our civilization depends on. I think 80% of calories that humanity eats are from a handful of basic grains, either we eat them directly or the livestock we feed them to. I believe in organic farming.
22:11
I now co own an organic farm in Indonesia, in a farm school, and it’s really important, but I do that to help soften the crash, it won’t stop the crash. So, yeah, I think we need to just be honest about about the terrifying situation we’re in. The reality is we are a hydrocarbon civilization, and we must power down. And to do that, the rich must go first, and they won’t choose to it’s not going to happen, because we live in the tyranny of an expansionist monetary system where incumbent power is entrenched in our economic systems through lobbying and through the bond markets.
22:57
It’s entrenched in social systems through how we’re manipulated by the corporate curation of our mainstream media and our social media. It’s entrenched in professional systems, through the incentives and disincentives we each are given by our employers and by the job market in many economically advanced countries, the precursors to massive social change, including our health, face to face, social connection, free time.
23:23
These are all far less the data shows than in decades past. So it’s unlikely we’re going to see massive social change more today than before, unless, of course, it’s because people wake up to how things are breaking down. So I think this means that reform is going to continue to fail, and large scale transformation to avert a collapse is just not just not a sensible it’s not a very robust analysis of the situation. I think it therefore is actually going to be a self serving fairy tale, self serving for the elites. And so the sooner we wake up and start building something different, the better.
24:06
I explain in my book that when we recognize 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 the collapse, and that arises from the knowledge that it was the manipulation of our hearts and minds that drove such wholesale destruction and so liberating our true natures from the systems that have oppressed us, has to be part of our response.
24:36
So a freedom loving response 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. So my view is that unless we talk about collapse, then our suppressed anxieties can be manipulated by those in power who will then make matters. Is worse, unfortunately, some people get very angry with us for having this view, and then try to shame us in order to shut us up and to try and get other people to turn away from this topic.
25:12
You know, when I mentioned COVID earlier, perhaps some of you had a little bit of nervousness about what I might say, and I believe that nervousness is itself an aspect of and an indicator of social breakdown. For we’ve been subjected to communications that try to make us disgusted at each other for our disagreements. Elites don’t want us to agree to disagree agreeably on matters like Ukraine, COVID, the nature and implications of climate science on gender identity and all sorts of things, there’s this encouragement to somehow get angry with each other rather than explore in open dialog that’s functional.
26:03
Bringing more shame into public life means we’re all going to be more scared about asking questions. It serves to shut us up and divide us. It’s why, in the deep adaptation forum since its inception, we focused on helping us avoid that kind of way of thinking and dialoguing and being aware of how our anxieties, whether conscious or suppressed, can lead us into sort of aggressive, angry, divisive ways of thinking, othering people that we disagree with.
26:39
We did that because we knew that becoming more conscious of collapse means we’re becoming more conscious of our mortality, and that can have very different effects on people. Broadly speaking, there are two very opposite responses, ego affirmation versus ego transcendence. So the former ego transcendence is where people sorry, the former ego affirmation is where we’re frightened so that we double down on our identity and our worldview, and that can become illogical and abusive.
27:14
And the people who came up with this is in terror management theory psychologists, and they call it worldview defense, and they did that by actually looking at the rise of religious fundamentalisms. But I think it can actually be used to describe sort of a technological optimist fundamentalism, where you kind of escape the pain of this by just saying, Oh, well, humans will fix it with technology.
27:37
It’s at that level of sort of fanatical faith, rather than actually applying scientific method to analyze what may or may not be possible with technology. And it’s why, therefore, that people can be who have that sort of eco modern outlook become can become so illogical and aggressive with people who don’t worship technology in the way they do and say heretical things like I do.
28:05
It’s about the ego being under threat. But thankfully, awareness of mortality can do the opposite than that, and that’s been my experience with so many people. It can through a period of despair, dismay and despair, we can drop our old story of self, our old sense of what made us feel okay in the world, and we can emerge from that more curious kind, courageous and creative, more present to each other and ourselves and our emotions. I do like the American spiritual teacher, Ram Dass, and I listen to a lot of his lectures nowadays, and I, one of my friends, was taught by Him, and I find him a great a great guide for me.
28:54
Ram Dass said we should keep death on our shoulder and identify with our soul. What he’s getting at is allowing a deeper sense of the finite nature of life to affect us day to day, so that we prioritize discovering our truth and living our values. And that does really help explain the journey of so many people I’ve met over the last five years.
29:18
So it’s pointing to a kind of almost sacred pessimism, not a nihilistic, apathetic, numbing or defeatist pessimism, but actually a fuller acceptance that the difficulties and setbacks and sufferings of life are just as much part of life as the things that we like. So basically, it’s bringing us more into full acceptance of life. So in my own journey, I found Buddhist philosophy and practice to be of great help. And what I also like is it can really complement other religious traditions, rather than displace them. It helps us live with the personal destabilization that occurs when. Lose our sense of certainty, security, status and meaning,
30:04
I think the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Choctaw Trumper 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. We don’t know how far we ourselves will fall, or how far we might actually even be freed through that process.
30:42
Therefore, I know there’s useful work to be done in helping each other process our feelings about insecurity and mortality, so that more of us will respond with ego transcendence rather than a defensive 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.
33:11
Thank you. [applause]