Jem Bendell had postponed his personal crisis long enough. For years, he’d been setting aside the worrying news about climate change he came across in a folder on his computer, waiting until he had the time (and emotional capacity) to look at it. In 2017, he took leave from his job as a professor of sustainability leadership at the University of Cumbria, in the United Kingdom, to finally dive in. He read that melting permafrost was releasing methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that speeds up warming — which in turn, melts more permafrost. It was a dangerous feedback loop that he had learned about as a student at Cambridge in the 1990s and had been told would likely start in 2050, if climate change went unchecked. Unfortunately, it arrived early. Bendell read more and more about unprecedented floods, devastating forest fires, and vanishing Arctic sea ice. It was all happening too fast. He became convinced that the rich world’s way of life — year-round strawberries, next-day delivery, flights across oceans — was nearing its end. That meant his life’s work had been, in his words, ‘all a bit deluded.’ He’d just spent two decades arguing that businesses could help fix environmental problems and heal the flaws of capitalism, writing books, organizing international conferences, and teaching MBA courses on corporate sustainability. That had left little time for his family, his health, and, you know, having fun. All those sacrifices, and for what? ‘I felt raw, cracked open by all of this,’ Bendell said, ‘and I had lost my previous sense of identity and purpose.’ So he tried to fill the cracks with something else, searching for meaning in a world that felt like it was coming apart. Bendell channeled his thoughts into a paper he self-published online in July 2018, titled ‘Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy.’ Normally, when people talked about adapting to climate change, they’d been looking for solutions that would allow their current way of life to continue. Bendell, instead, started from the premise that people will have to give up a lot, posing the question, ‘What do we value most that we want to keep, and how?’ Bendell says he began questioning his life’s work when he realized the havoc climate change was wreaking on the planet. Tito Bagaskoro Deep Adaptation warned that a near-term collapse was coming, and that people needed to get ready to learn to accept it — emotionally, socially, and practically. (An academic journal had rejected it for being too strong in its conclusions.) Though climate change had long been talked about as a challenge for future generations, Bendell saw it as an impending catastrophe. He defined ‘collapse’ as ‘an uneven ending of our normal modes of sustenance, shelter, security, pleasure, identity, and meaning.’ The paper — which he described to me as a ‘howl of pain’ — painted a picture of a bleak world, devoid of the comforts of modern life. ‘With the power down, soon you wouldn’t have water coming out of your tap,’ he wrote. ‘You will depend on your neighbours for food and some warmth. You will become malnourished. You won’t know whether to stay or go. You will fear being violently killed before starving to death.’ The paper was largely Bendell’s way of explaining why he was quitting the field of corporate sustainability after so many years. But it went far beyond its intended audience. Over the next year and half, it was downloaded more than a million times, he said, after which he stopped keeping track. Bendell wasn’t the first to suggest that climate change could tear modern life apart, but he helped popularize the idea. ‘I think he is the modern-day forefather of collapse understanding and awareness,’ said Maya Frost, who lives in the Netherlands and is the founder of the consultancy Collapse Forward, which helps women turn their grief and despair about the state of the world into creative energy. A subset of people who are deeply alarmed about climate change have come to believe that it won’t just disrupt our lives; it will end life as we know it. Some call them ‘doomers’; they might consider themselves realists, preppers, or truth-tellers. The surge of interest in Bendell’s paper showed that people were craving answers about just how bad things will get, and how soon. Some were so shaken after reading it, they made major life decisions: to quit their jobs, to join a radical protest group, to move somewhere they felt would be safer to ride out the chaos. But Deep Adaptation also sparked a debate over whether Bendell went too far in his conclusions about climate science and what it meant for society, spreading a sense of defeat. Today, Bendell’s ominous predictions feel simultaneously dated and prescient. Climate change has slipped out of the public conversation amid wars in Gaza and Iran, and seemingly endless political chaos. It’s become just one of many contenders in scientists’ discussions over the possible drivers of doomsday, eclipsed by nuclear war and artificial intelligence. But the general mood has shifted toward the fate he imagined: Surveys show that the public’s optimism about the future is fading, hitting the lowest level since pollsters at Gallup started asking. A recent study found that one in three Americans now think the world will end in their lifetime. As a sense of dread creeps into more people’s lives, the specific threat may matter less than the ability to carry on in the dark. What happens when you accept the possibility of societal collapse — and then have to live with that conviction, day after day, year after year? As Bendell found out, you can’t stay in panic mode forever. Especially if the crisis you’re confronting is not a sudden shock, but a slow unraveling. The first thing to understand about the collapse of society is that the Hollywood version is wrong. Unlike the post-apocalyptic nightmare you’ve seen in movies, where everyone turns on each other in a moment of chaos and panic, civilizations don’t usually come to quick ends. Their falls happen gradually, over the course of decades or centuries, and might not have even been recognizable as a ‘collapse’ to the people who lived through it. We could even be living through it now. ‘To a historian, the fall of Rome may look like an obvious event in global history,’ Luke Kemp writes in his recent book Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse. ‘To a peasant in Spain, it may have barely been perceptible.’ Kemp, who researches existential risk, writes that civilizations (aka ‘Goliaths’) contain ‘the seeds of their own demise.’ They are hierarchies, with those in power extracting more and more wealth and power until inequality threatens to topple the whole thing over. ‘We’re not dealing with golden ages of empires that helped a flourishing population grow healthier and better,’ Kemp said. ‘We tend to more or less be dealing with protection rackets.’ In their fragile state, near the end, they become so vulnerable that they can be tipped into oblivion by a threat like a changing climate, disease, or invaders. For instance, the Roman Republic, with its senate and popular assemblies, gave way to dictatorships and eventually the tyrannical Roman Empire. As its territory expanded, economic inequality and corruption deepened, and its institutions became overstretched as it struggled to support the far-flung military operations it relied on for loot. As Kemp tells it, that fragility made Rome vulnerable to shocks that accelerated its long decline: rebelling Germanic troops, plague, and climate disruptions, such as volcanic eruptions that disrupted food supplies. But after the end of the empire, life went on. In fact, after the fall of Rome, archaeological evidence shows that people in the Mediterranean got taller, with fewer bone lesions and cavities in their teeth, signs that they were healthier. That’s not to say that the disintegration of society today would be all fine and dandy; it could even resemble the dire portrait Bendell painted. Kemp warns the risks now are uniquely dangerous: ‘Our world is scarred by a pandemic, beset by unprecedented global heating, riven by inequality, dizzied by rapid technological change, and living under the shadow of around 10,000 stockpiled nuclear warheads,’ he writes. There’s a long tradition of people prophesying the end is near, from Nostradamus to Y2K survivalists, and their stories borrow from the fears of their day — plagues, famine, or modern technology gone wrong. Climate change burst into the apocalypse conversation in the late 2010s, when scary scientific predictions about climate change were in vogue. In 2017, the journalist David Wallace-Wells wrote a viral article in New York Magazine titled ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ (subhead: ‘Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak — sooner than you think’). Scientists worried about climate ‘tipping points’ — points of no return in critical Earth systems — and called on governments to do something about rising emissions. So when Bendell’s paper landed, people were already primed to expect the worst. And once Deep Adaptation was out in the world, it took on a life of its own. A month after Bendell had released the paper, with no publicity whatsoever, he’d gotten 300 emails from strangers around the world. ‘There were people who were just waking up to this and emotionally troubled by it,’ he said. Bendell didn’t want to be in charge of some new movement, but he wanted the newly alarmed to have a way to find each other and get support. He set up the Deep Adaptation Forum online and then left, letting volunteers run it. Deep Adaptation groups sprung up around the globe, in places as distant as India, Hungary, and Chile. In the United Kingdom, where Bendell lived, people read his paper and quit their jobs to join a new activist group called Extinction Rebellion. Members blocked roads and occupied museums in brightly colored, theatrical protests meant to force people to pay attention to the climate crisis. Environmental activists carry a coffin with ‘our future’ written on it to the gates of Buckingham Palace in central London in 2018 during a demonstration organized by Extinction Rebellion. Niklas Halle’n / AFP via Getty Images ‘This was all very surprising to me, because I didn’t think going out there to try and get arrested, to disrupt normal life, to put this on the front pages, to try to get bold action from the government on carbon cuts, would be the most obvious response to the paper,’ Bendell said. The problem was, a lot of climate advocates still needed hope to confront what felt like an existential crisis, and they thought his paper did a pretty good job of destroying it. ‘Experts got annoyed,’ Bendell said with a laugh. ‘Some of them very annoyed.’ Online critics of the fear-forward approach of writers like Bendell and Wallace-Wells called it ‘doomism’; they thought laying out worst-case scenarios was just as dangerous as denial since it could spur resignation instead of resistance. They pointed to social science research showing that all this talk of doom could overwhelm people, leading them to check out emotionally. Climate scientists, meanwhile, raised a narrower critique: that Bendell’s conclusion — the end of modern life was inevitable — went beyond what the scientific consensus could support. They challenged Bendell’s portrayal of climate ‘tipping points,’ saying that his claims about melting Arctic sea ice and methane escaping from permafrost were exaggerated or cherry-picked. In response, Bendell acknowledged a few corrections in 2020 and updated his paper, adding a caveat that he couldn’t prove the collapse of society was certain. His conviction wasn’t based solely on climate science, after all, but his instincts about how society would respond to environmental chaos. Bendell delivers a keynote at a United Nations conference in 2018. Tony Wilkinson By mid-2020, according to Bendell, there was a widespread effort to paint Deep Adaptation as unhelpful doomism, debunk the paper, and smear him. He described it as a shocking and painful experience, and he coped by reading the book The Courage to Be Disliked, by the Japanese writers Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga. When he responded to criticism, often coming from young people, he admits he often came across as an arrogant, older professor. ‘It was all a bit awkward,’ he said. But he felt compelled to defend the Deep Adaptation community, because they were trying to do something good: not just prepare for the worst, but to face it with honesty and compassion. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, a scholar of societal transformation, has also experienced blowback from talking about how modern society might break down. In her books, she’s argued that the oppressive, unsustainable mindset underpinning the status quo is reaching its limits, and we need to learn to let it go. (‘What if you know — in your bones, not just in your mind — that major social and ecological collapse is on the horizon?’ she wrote in her book that came out last year, Outgrowing Modernity.) People would argue with her that airing these ideas was irresponsible, because it opens up a range of dangerous reactions. But she says it’s irresponsible not to talk about what the future holds. ‘If you haven’t really processed the feelings that you have around loss and grief in a very different way, when you are face-to-face with it, you won’t be able to coordinate — you will be stunned, right?’ Machado de Oliveira said. She describes a handful of common ways people respond when they’re confronted with the idea of collapse. The first is avoidance: a coping strategy where, even though you can sense the danger, you don’t let it change your worldview or behavior. The second is the typical prepper response: ‘Let me just protect what I can protect, and arm myself to the teeth,’ Machado de Oliveira said. Then there’s the party hard approach, the idea that if everything’s going to come crashing down, you might as well enjoy life while you can. The fourth is the impulse to exit, which Machado de Oliveira struggled with herself — ‘Like, if everything that is beautiful is being destroyed, why would I want to stay here?’ And the fifth approach is misanthropy: deciding that humans themselves are the problem. At first, Bendell went toward the exit. He yearned to stop arguing and immerse himself in nature instead, exploring spirituality and his interest in music. He’d spent some time in Bali, where it was warm and cheaper to live, and ended up staying there through the COVID-19 pandemic, when he was working remotely and part-time at his university job. ‘I remember agreeing with friends that the worst way to spend my last years of modern convenience would be arguing with people about the evidence base for societal collapse,’ he later wrote. Bendell teaches deep adaptation at a school in Bali in late 2018. Courtesy of Jem Bendell But it wasn’t long before the siren call of societal collapse beckoned again. He knew it wasn’t just him; lots of people were worried: A survey in 2021 showed that half of young people in several countries around the world believed humanity was doomed. One day, he was strolling along the beach and listening to a message from Clare Farrell, one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion, when he heard her say, ‘It’s time you got on the front foot.’ As he looked out at the waves crashing ashore, he felt a mix of emotions, even a strange sort of joy. Because he knew it was time to dive back into what he called ‘the most annoying and uninspiring topic there is — the collapse of modern societies.’ When Bendell wrote the Deep Adaptation paper in 2018, the question of when modern society would disintegrate felt urgent. ‘Should you drop everything now and move somewhere more suitable for self-sufficiency?’ he wrote. ‘Should you be spending time reading the rest of this article? Should I even finish writing it?’ But three years later, as he dove deeper into research for a new book, he came to understand that collapse was often not as quick, or as obvious, as he had assumed. Not an asteroid that wipes out billions of people overnight, but a series of tragedies that unfold gradually and unevenly. Bendell published his book Breaking Together in 2023, taking a more thorough look at how modern life might crumble, from the economy to modern agriculture. The process was actually already underway, he argued, after starting sometime before 2016 — a point at which measurements of people’s quality of life around the world began to plateau or decline, after years of steadily rising. Once he’d reached that conclusion, it became a lens to make sense of what was happening in the world: rising food prices, weird misinformation spreading online, the steady drumbeat of disasters on the news. Instead of taking everything in isolation, Bendell saw signs we were living in a rapidly declining industrial society. People in the Deep Adaptation movement, which expanded on its own without Bendell’s help, have been uniquely attuned to the signs of turmoil around them. When COVID-19 hit, the Deep Adaptation group in Auroville, India, mobilized quickly to help migrant construction workers who were stranded nearby because of the lockdowns, Bendell said. ‘For the people who showed up at the Deep Adaptation group, it was very natural to them,’ he said. ‘They’d been sort of ready for disasters and disruption to strike.’ In recent years, there have been efforts to reframe the prepper stereotype, characterizing disaster preparedness as a form of mutual aid and neighborly support, bucking the image of a scared man hiding in a bunker piled with canned food and ammunition. More in this series Prepping for a disaster? You’ll probably want to pack a little treat. Frida Garza Hungary’s Deep Adaptation branch, the largest in the world, has more than 25,000 members on Facebook, and in-person meetups in 16 places around the country, according to Krisztina Csapo, a mental health professional who specializes in grief and climate psychology and also moderates the group’s Facebook page. ‘I always emphasize that this is a support group for those brave people who have the courage to face reality,’ she said. Hungary is feeling the effects of global warming faster than the rest of Europe, with intense heat waves, drought, and other extremes threatening the viability of growing food in the country’s main agricultural region. In addition to emotional support, the Deep Adaptation group has provided practical guidance on how to prepare for disaster, including self-defense classes and training in permaculture (a way of growing food that imitates natural ecosystems). There’s also a program in development to help parents, teachers, and young people navigate the fraying of systems, with resources grounded in psychology. Groups like Deep Adaptation play a role in helping people understand that they aren’t alone, said Frost, who helps ‘collapse-aware’ people work through their emotions. But she says they can sometimes be counterproductive. ‘You get in that pattern of, every week, talking about how bad things are,’ she said. She works with people who were just starting to feel better about things, only to have another conversation about collapse that left them devastated again. ‘It’s like ripping off the scab every week,’ Frost said. Others argue that the word ‘collapse,’ with its slippery definition, might be a problem in itself. Dagomar Degroot, an environmental history professor at Georgetown University, said that there’s little evidence, at the moment, that we’re living through a collapse in the way most people think of it — that is, a massive and abrupt drop in population, which is quite rare in history. The clearest examples of that, he said, were the Black Death in the 14th century, or the catastrophic disintegration of Indigenous societies in the Americas following European conquest. ‘If you’re focused on climate, I think, from my perspective at least, there are no signs that this is imminent,’ Degroot said. Yet Degroot acknowledges that big, society-shaping changes are coming, no matter what you call them. ‘If you look at coastal areas around the United States, there’s a very good chance that in one, two centuries, there will be a massive migration,’ he said. ‘At what point is that a collapse of the coast of the United States versus an example of resilient adaptation?’ For Bendell, the question of whether society is collapsing comes down to how comprehensive those shifts are, and how hard they are to reverse — with hitting ecological limits being especially tough to recover from. In Breaking Together, he predicts that the industrial, consumer lifestyles some people enjoy now will have vanished in most countries by the end of this decade. It’s a strong claim. But the years since Bendell’s Deep Adaptation paper came out have reinforced the sense that modern life is brittle, maybe on the edge of breaking. A pandemic, economic shocks, and rising political violence have played out against a backdrop of worsening drought, fires, and floods. In some ways, the outlook for global warming is less dire than it looked a decade ago, with the worst-case scenario for emissions now looking unlikely as countries have accelerated the adoption of clean energy. In other ways, it looks worse: Activists had tried to rally the world around limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius — a threat to the existence of low-lying nations as sea levels rise, and a point of no return for coral reefs — but that goal is now out of reach. The planet appears to have crossed the 1.5-degree threshold. On top of that, the warming that’s already here is having much more widespread and severe effects than many scientists had anticipated, including melting permafrost, forests ravaged by wildfires and pests, and supercharged droughts and heat waves that damage food production. The broader dynamic has changed the way many people think about the collapse of society; it’s less of a fringe conviction, and more of just another way of making sense of what’s already happening. ‘‘Polite society’ now feels that collapse is a reputable topic to muse upon,’ Bendell wrote to me. The implicit message, he said, ‘is that smart people are right to be worried but not alarmed, and can feel safer and more confident by having ways to talk about it.’ It’s no longer taboo to talk about the breakdown of society. But most people resist truly letting the idea in, and letting it change them the way it changed Bendell. There’s still an instinct to hide the most terrifying revelations. Earlier this year, the news came out that the United Kingdom had suppressed a report looking at the connections between global biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation, and national security for being too negative. An abridged version the government was forced to release found a ‘realistic possibility’ of a ‘global competition for food’ starting in the early 2030s, due to the decline of forests and rivers fed by melting glaciers. The full report, viewed by the British newspaper The Times, warned of much worse: that ecosystems around the world could soon pass tipping points that would be virtually impossible to come back from, and that this could motivate eco-terrorism, drive migration that leads to yet more polarized politics, and cause conflicts between countries over what remained. You can see why Bendell, clued in to these kinds of national security reports, started his own organic farm in Bali in 2023. ‘In some ways, having your own garden, though, is not much better than having your own bunker,’ he said. Sure, you can feed yourself, but what about the hundreds of other people nearby? He hoped to teach the locals in Bali how to farm more resiliently and lessen their dependence on synthetic pesticides and fertilizers, and offered free courses. But farmers had limited time, and there wasn’t as much interest in his classes — or as much of a market for his organic products — as he’d hoped. Jem Bendell poses for a photo at Bekandze Farm in 2023. Courtesy of Jem Bendell These days, Bendell doesn’t do many interviews or give lots of talks, as he’s trying to preserve time for what makes his life richer: music, meditation retreats, and spending time with friends. He launched a monthly dialogue discussing how to ‘live well’ at a time when society is fracturing and the world faces an overlapping ‘metacrisis,’ which paying subscribers to his blog can join. But there’s always the background awareness that a dramatic rupture might be around the corner. In one breath, he told me he was trying to protect his emotional and mental well-being and enjoy being alive; in the next, he mused about whether ‘multi-breadbasket failure’ of major crop harvests could happen any year now. As time passed, his feelings have changed, too. ‘You can’t stay in an emotion of panic or shock or grief or despair, where those are sort of dominating emotions,’ he said. Even though the sense of panic sometimes returns, it’s like greeting a familiar companion: ‘‘Oh, there’s panic, hello panic’ — rather than it consuming me.’ His partner is also an environmentalist worried about the fragility of modern life — she took up archery a decade ago for that reason. She’s also ready to start a family, while he’s not sure about having kids, imagining what they might say to him one day about the decision to bring them into a world on the brink. Bendell wonders if his partner’s way of looking at things is better, and he’s trying to warm up to the idea of having a family. ‘It might be a deeper integration of collapse awareness, where you don’t let the sense of dread or foreboding limit what you do now,’ he said. As Bendell ponders what to do next, he’s thinking about how to help his loved ones through a ‘lesser collapse,’ rather than a single, catastrophic conclusion. ‘Things don’t end, just because life as we knew it is ending.’ This story was originally published by Grist with the headline What to expect when you’re expecting the end of the world on Apr 8, 2026.

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