Now What? — Richard Adamson

About the Writer

Richard Adamson is formerly from North Carolina and has attended The Men's Council's Gatherings for many years. He now lives in Northern Ontario, Canada, with his wife, Beth, and dogs Tigger and Jackpine. He has been an engineer, manager, entrepreneur, and executive, spending most of his career advancing research, technology development, and the commercialization of climate solutions. Having spent decades working to help save an unsustainable civilization, he has returned to a question that has unsettled him for years, and now lies at the heart of his forthcoming book: Now what?

The Great Remembering

An excerpt from the Introduction to The Great Remembering — After the End of the World as We Know It (Wolf Mountain Press, forthcoming October 2026).

Something has gone missing from the way we inhabit the world.

Most of us feel it, even if we struggle to name it. There is speed without direction. Information without wisdom. Connection without intimacy. We move faster, produce more, communicate constantly, and yet many people feel a loss of meaning, depth, and belonging.

This project begins from that unease. It treats it as a signal worth attention.

The crises we face — ecological, social, political, psychological — are often treated as separate failures requiring separate solutions. New technologies, better policies, more data, sharper incentives. These responses are incomplete. They address symptoms without touching the deeper orientation that gives rise to them.

The deeper issue is how we attend.

Modern culture privileges a way of knowing that isolates, measures, categorizes, and, above all, controls. It excels at analysis, prediction, and optimization. It has given us powerful tools and broad reach. But when this mode of knowing becomes dominant and loses contact with context, relationship (human or non-human), and presence, it begins to erode the very world it seeks to manage.

It also carries its own values. It rewards winning, speed, scale, and control. It elevates the individual achiever, the one at the center who acts and prevails. Until perhaps the last remaining story has become the hero's journey, and our ultimate models of success are billionaires, whose wealth and power, political and economic, completely eclipse anything the overwhelming majority of the global population could ever conceive. And even more, it is that very inaccessibility that is the marker of the value of their attainment. One consequence of these implicit values may be a diminished sense of others as fellow members of a community, joined in common purpose and facing common threats. They begin to appear more like what gamers call non-player characters: figures without full moral weight, there to assist, obstruct, or absorb the costs of someone else's advance.

This is a perceptual failure.

The Great Remembering — the book and the project of Wolf Mountain Press — begins with a simple recognition: human beings have always known the world in more than one way. Alongside analytical thought is another mode of awareness — relational, embodied, contextual — through which meaning is encountered within a wider field of relationship, one that includes human and nonhuman, living and non-living. This way of knowing does not stand apart from the world. It participates in it.

Across much of human history, these ways of knowing were held in closer balance. Story, ritual, art, and lived relationship carried knowledge that could not be reduced to instruction or explanation.

Meaning was not something one possessed. It was something one was shaped by.

Over time, that balance shifted. One way of knowing came to dominate, while the other receded from awareness. It did not disappear, but was given a secondary status. It survived in residual form, pushed into the corners of life under categories such as art, recreation, dance, or performance — things to witness, enjoy, or consume, but largely set apart from what modern culture treats as the real business of life. The result has been great power and growing disconnection from life itself.

This project is not an argument against reason, science, or technology. Nor is it a call to abandon modernity or return to an imagined past. The tools we have developed are remarkable. The problem comes when tools are mistaken for truths, maps for territory, and control for understanding.

What has been forgotten is relationship.

To remember is not to gather new information. It is to recover a capacity for attention that is already present, though often neglected. It is to sense the world as a field of relationships in which we participate.

For decades, people have declared that our civilization is unsustainable, but nobody seems to ask "Then what comes next?"

This project is not intended to persuade or propose answers. It is to engage in a conversation; a collective thought process in which we explore the values and principles that we might choose to build from the rubble of the inevitable transformation - whether abrupt or gradual.

Every idea, indeed every word, is unique to the reader in that you bring your own context and experience to it. The project fails without your thoughts, ideas, and reflections.

What constitutes a rich life to you?

How much is enough?

How might we get in touch with our own values? (Not those that have been handed down by elders, experts, or authorities.)

How do you know?