The residents of the Villa Vie Odyssey were given about seven hours to pack up and leave the cruise ship they had made their home. The vessel was in Cambodia, and its operator said it could no longer afford the fuel needed to keep sailing.
Villa Vie Residences had sold the idea of permanent life at sea: cabins and suites to own, rent, or rent-to-own, priced as high as US$440,000 aboard a refitted 1993 cruise ship once known as the MS Braemar. The Odyssey left Belfast in autumn 2024 for a planned trip of 3.5 years and 425 ports. It did not get far enough.
The company says the monthly fuel cost per cabin, once about US$1,800, has risen to an estimated US$6,000 to US$8,000 in parts of Asia. Fuel was the final blow. According to Cruise Industry News, residents had already been asked for US$360,000 toward fuel, a figure the company has not confirmed.
Villa Vie courted remote workers and digital nomads with a simple premise. If work could be done from anywhere, perhaps home could be anywhere, even in the middle of the ocean. Covid taught millions that the office, the commute, and the fixed address were more negotiable than we once believed, and Villa Vie sold that lesson with a view of the sea. The business also assumed that the world would remain affordable.
H. G. Wells wrote in 1945: ‘Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature’s inexorable imperative.’ He wrote it near the end of his life, convinced that the human mind could not keep pace with the volatile world it had built.
Look at what ordinary people were asked to change after March 2020. We learned to buy groceries, medicine, and appliances online. We consulted doctors through screens. Kitchen tables became offices; laptops became classrooms; phones became banks.
Many of those changes stuck, and most were improvised by ordinary people, you and me, responding one decision at a time to an emergency.
Now households are being asked to adapt again. Fuel is a number on a credit card receipt. It is also embedded in the price of rice, a Grab delivery, an Angkas ride, and the cost of running a small factory that makes polvoron or peanut butter. When oil prices spike, those costs move too. Every family must rework its budget and habits at the same time.
Humans have always adapted. But past shocks often arrived with more warning and unfolded over years. Those of us who remember the oil crises of the 1970s recall waiting in line for gas, rationing, and recession. It was painful and annoying, but the world was less tightly connected. Supply chains were shorter, businesses had more margin for error, and a disruption in one place took time to reach another.
Today just-in-time inventories, global shipping, digital payments, and thin margins allow a shock to travel and land everywhere at once.
The pandemic demanded dozens of changes within weeks. Households had six years to settle into the new routines. A war in the Middle East began in late February, and those routines had to be rebuilt around the price of fuel. We are no longer adapting once. We are adapting continuously across work, transport, food, energy, and family life. I doubt any previous generation was asked to do that so quickly.
The Philippines enters this shock with thin buffers and an exposure it built for itself. The Department of Energy puts the Middle East direct and indirect share of the country’s total petroleum imports at 98 percent, a concentration that took decades of purchasing decisions to create. A weaker peso makes every dollar-priced barrel more expensive, and a peso setting record lows week after week hurts more. Households can shorten a commute or shrink a market basket. Only Malacañang can change where the country buys its fuel and how much it stores.
And there is a trap in all of this. Each adaptation we make is a bet on how the world looks today, not how it will look tomorrow. Villa Vie adapted to the Work-From-Home world and was finished off by the next shock. The online retailer who built a delivery network on cheap fuel, the remote worker who moved somewhere with no public transport, and the firm that abandoned its offices for a leaner footprint all made sensible choices. Any of those choices can become fragile when the assumption beneath them shifts.
Wells called adaptation an imperative. He never said how often nature would ask us to adapt or perish.
Twice in six years is the current answer.
E-mail me at mangun@gmail.com. Follow me on Twitter @mangunonmarkets. PSE stock-market information and technical analysis provided by AAA Southeast Equities Inc.