How the regenerative movement risks becoming another jargon of authenticity

These days, the concept of the regenerative is emerging as a somewhat fuzzy term in various fields ranging from architecture, design, and art to tourism, leadership, and many more.

As a new field, it is exciting to see how regenerative practices are starting to develop as both a philosophical system and a practice in these fields – I, too, have participated in that discussion by co-authoring The Regenerative Design Manifesto myself.

At the heart of the regenerative are two different strands of contemporary thought:

1. Sustainability is not enough. The damage has already been done, so we need action that creates positive change rather than merely reducing negative.

2. We need to understand ourselves through relations with something other than ourselves. The human subject is not separated from, towering above, the world but an open, porous being deeply and inseparably intertwined with the world.

The implications of particularly the last point are huge. It is a critique of the previous few hundred years of Enlightenment thinking, reconfiguring and understanding humanity not as the center of everything but through relationships and interconnectedness.

However, I have also noted a nostalgic, romantic tendency within the regenerative movement – a dream of going back to nature – to restore what never was.

Perhaps even worse: Often, the movement tends to reaffirm the individual human subject as the center of the universe despite pretending to do the opposite.  

We have been here before!

It all feels like a replay of Theodor W. Adorno’s 1964 critique in Jargon of Authenticity, aimed at existentialists like Buber and Heidegger. 

For Adorno, the existentialists developed a form of speaking that prioritized subjective experience and the idea of authenticity at the expense of objective analysis and social critique. Adorno noted how their jargon, their way of speaking, tried to create a sense of immediacy and authentic experience, which was highly artificial and idealized. The jargon of authenticity used existentialistic terms to develop a mode of magical expression that stretched the words beyond their connection to the world, creating instead a mere semblance of authenticity. Sacred words without sacred content.

According to Adorno, the language of the existentialists undermines their own project because it severs us from reality, creating instead an almost religious experience of inwardness and the subjective.

The regenerative has a tendency to do the same – especially the kind of regenerative thinking that emerges from leadership, work-life balance, and well-being discussions.

It takes the form of mysticism, leaning into activities that resemble religious rituals, such as joint meditations and pauses, communal silent retreats, or evenings spent by the bonfire in the Swedish woods. Alternatively, they might do so by emphasizing cosmological cohesion and unity, proposing that inner well-being should be viewed and understood in the context of the cyclical shifts of the seasons, lunar phases, or alignment of the stars.

Just like the existentialists, the regenerative may talk in vague, poetic, abstract, and most often empty words (I, myself, am also too guilty of this). Just listen to how Laura Storm and Giles Hutchins end their book Regenerative Leadership by telling us their secret:

The Logic of Life is nothing more nor less than … Love. Nature’s Wisdom is Love, pure and simple. Regenerative leadership is living and leading with Love. Love creates conditions conducive for life. Love feeds on and grows from Love. Love breeds virtuous cycles.

All right, then! Can we be any vaguer?

There is a real danger here that the regenerative is emptied of any meaningful and actionable content. That it becomes nothing more than the superficial coming together of like-minded people deeply occupied with their own interior experience of life – placing that at the center of everything. But suppose the regenerative is to be more than a mere reversal of the hierarchy of Enlightenment where rational, objective discourse trumped the subjective experience. In that case, we must insist that the regenerative is not about the individual’s inner well-being or feelings.

As I briefly mentioned earlier, regenerative practitioners often invoke a form of restorative nostalgia by alluding to some sort of original, holistic way of being that we have lost in our modern, Western life. The wisdom of indigenous people, Eastern philosophy, and other traditions is often touted as a magical remedy for all our ailments. Although we can learn a great deal by reexamining lost practices of the past, they may also appear as viable solutions because we view them through the romantic lens of being far away. In reality, though, we can never go “back to nature.” The regenerative should abandon trying to reconnect to a past before “the fall of man” and instead examine concretely how we forge and strengthen our experience of interconnectedness.

So, what must the regenerative truly be if it is to avoid the pitfalls of being just another jargon of authenticity?

• It must be about creating real, positive change – not just reducing harm, not just feeling better, but actively healing and improving the world around us.
• It must decenter the individual – not as the hero or the center, but as one node in a vast web of relationships, responsibilities, and mutual dependencies.
• It must reject nostalgia for a lost paradise. The work is not to return but to move forward – rooted in the present, facing the complexity of the here and now.
• It must be grounded in the real: in material conditions, in social and ecological systems, in the messy, entangled world – not in vague abstractions or poetic mysticism.
• It must embrace interconnectedness as a practice, not a slogan: building concrete relationships, fostering reciprocity, and designing for the flourishing of whole systems – human and more-than-human.
• It must remain critical: always questioning its own assumptions, language, and effects, refusing to become just another jargon or ritual of self-congratulation.

The regenerative must be a commitment to action, relationship, and responsibility.