Why Don’t You…Not Attend Davos Meeting

As a kid in 1970s Britain, the BBC’s children’s television series Why Don’t You Just Switch Off The Television Set And Do Something Less Boring Instead, with its corresponding theme song left an impression, and the theme song is still stuck in my head!

With this in mind, I say to all paying delegates, planning to shell out potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars to attend the WEF Davos meeting, why don’t you not go and do something more useful instead?

Let’s face it, if this meeting was going to do something useful to tackle the collective crises we face, it would have done it already.

Instead of taking the private jet to the Davos glorified trade fair, why not spend the week volunteering to clean up ghost nets? Simply pick a charity, any charity and spend a week at the coal face, boots on the ground, getting your hands dirty, because the WEF annual Davos meeting is irrelevant.

Even the handsomely paid escorts frequenting the event have spilled the beans, with one revealing that attendees fall into two categories when considering the climate crisis. Interviewed in 2025, Salome Balthus, a 40-year-old escort and author from Berlin said, “[O]ne group thinks it only affects the poor, the ‘not-white race,’ while the others fear that it could get worse but believe there’s no point in trying to stop it. They just enjoy themselves.”, adding, “The one half is in despair, and the other, dumber, half is celebrating future mass deaths. It’s not just like that in Davos, but it’s concentrated there [during the WEF meeting].”. Hardly great PR for the event, so what is the purpose of the Davos meeting?

Well yes, there are the business opportunities and deals to be done. But more than that, this is an annual gathering to reassure the other members of the global elite that you are happy to maintain the virtue signalling while having no plans to change the status-quo.

Elite solidarity is what matters when it comes to maintaining unsustainable extraction and pollution while the world burns, floods and people are displaced. If no one breaks rank, the status quo can remain.

And, if no one shows any real empathy to the world outside their gilded cage, the destruction can continue until there is nothing left. Another of Salome Balthus comments shows how disconnected attendees are, “The public must know that the enemies of the poor are not the migrants but the super-rich. Tax the Rich etc. is a joke behind closed doors. There’s a guy at the bar who shouts, ‘Tax the Rich’ with every new shot. They feel untouchable.”.

But even those that feel untouchable need a little bit of reassurance by association. Jem Bendell reflects in his book Breaking Together, “I had naively thought that people with the kind of wealth, success and seniority to be hobnobbing at Davos would not be into social climbing or entertaining each other with the delusional stories of progress”.  This neediness for status provides an insight into how to manipulate this group – we need to redefine status because the current status narratives are killing the planet. 

As a sponsored delegate, invited to bring a different perspective, Jem Bendell says, “Being made a Young Global Leader by the WEF in 2012 meant I was able to attend Davos and other high level summits for a few years”, continuing, “For a few years, I attended Davos summits with the hope I could help promote serious engagement in the environmental crisis”.

At least this meant Bendell got to observe the realities of it all, outlining in his book, “The ideas and policies emerging at Davos primarily focus on accessing more public money for private ventures with dubious ecological credentials”, continuing, “In recent years, most spokespersons for the Western-centred environment movement have been encouraging [political] leaders to transfer even more public wealth into private hands [for projects] with dubious ecological merit”. He concludes, “I worry about the absence of a globally vocal organised environmental alternative to [the] corporate agenda”.

It wasn’t that long ago that the WEF’s stated mission was “improving the state of the world by engaging business, political, academic, and other leaders of society to shape global, regional, and industry agendas”.  But the mission statement subtly changed and now says, “engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas”.

While the “improving the state of the world” can be found throughout the WEFs presentations and reports it seems like it is no longer a formal part of its mission. Could this be because “peak” Davos was attained in 1973? This was the year that Aurelio Peccei, the Italian industrialist, philanthropist and co-founder of the Club of Rome, delivered a speech on the 1972 report “The Limits to Growth”, which had been commissioned by the Club of Rome. But year-after-year nothing has changed.

The WEF Davos meeting is irrelevant, so why not skip is and do something useful instead? Around the world so much help is needed. Clean up the fishing nets from beaches that are killing wildlife. Spend a week with a rewilding project, get involved in a charity supporting homeless people in your city, help at a community garden, walk rescue dogs at the local shelter. Most importantly “boots on the ground, at the coal face, getting your hands dirty” style.

Frankly these will all likely help you be a better leader than attending Davos, why? Because of the leadership/wealth – empathy gap impacts problem solving ability. A perfect example of how stuck people are is they continue to project the belief in the shareholder primacy model or can’t contemplate that unlimited growth isn’t possible on a finite planet.

The problem is this old thinking means that while as an investor, business leader or politician you may have accepted collapse is now inevitable, what you haven’t accepted is how deep we fall depends on how quickly you realise that collapse is nothing like a crisis. Remember status can only be given, it can’t be taken. Why would you give these people any status?