This week on Book Chat, Susan Harley and Zahra Sethna began a series of discussions on Breaking Together by Professor Jem Bendell — a challenging and provocative book about deep adaptation, societal collapse, and what it means to honestly face the future when the old systems are already breaking down.
Bendell’s central argument is that collapse is already underway, not some future event. The question, then, is not what do we do to stop it, but how do we adapt to life under these new circumstances: what do we preserve, what do we relinquish, what can we restore, and how we reconcile ourselves to uncertainty?
Today’s conversation ranged from preparedness and denial to financial fragility, local food, community, climate narratives, freedom, and the emotional burden of being collapse-aware. One of the hardest questions we kept circling was: if awareness is supposed to be liberating, why does it often feel so heavy?
Bendell is best known for his 2018 paper on “Deep Adaptation,” which went viral after he argued that since societal collapse was a reality already underway, much more attention needed to be paid to resilience, relinquishment, restoration, and reconciliation.
You can find that paper here: https://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf
This is the first in a series that will culminate in a live conversation with Professor Bendell on June 28. Whether or not you’ve read the book, we’d love to have you join us for the entire series of conversations.
The book can be downloaded here: https://lifeworth.com/BreakingTogetherEPUB.epub
