The polycrisis is the knot of crises facing humanity today, all intensifying and complicating one another.
But it’s not just that. Our internal experience of these crises is itself a real crisis. Living with the deeply troubling challenges of our world, with the growing possibility that civilization as we know it will collapse within our lifetime, elicits anxiety, despair, and existential dread within so many of us.
The climate crisis alone is enough to do this. In a 2021 Lancet Planetary Health study of 10,000 young people aged 16–25 across ten countries, 75% said ‘the future is frightening,’ and 56% said they believe ‘humanity is doomed.’ The full polycrisis presumably weighs heavier still.
This is not just an intellectual understanding of what might come to pass someday. This is a visceral experience of devastation, injustice, and suffering in the world right now.
You feel it when you open your phone at night and see nothing but corruption, war, suffering, and climate chaos. You feel it when you see another image of a glacier melting into oblivion or an old-growth forest burning away in wildfire season. You feel it when you have to grimace through yet another senseless school shooting. You feel it when you read about the famine in Sudan alongside a story of the world’s first trillionaire.
Our existential crises become yet another factor intensifying and complicating our situation. They overwhelm and paralyze us. They erode our belief in humanity. They erode our belief that there’s anything meaningful we can do about it as individuals.
And therefore, they erode our actual capacity to do anything about it. And therefore, the tangible problems out in the world intensify, and our existential crises within us deepen.
The polycrisis is not only happening out in the world. It is what is happening within you, right now.
This is an excerpt from my upcoming book The Antihero’s Journey: From Burnout to Real Contribution in Polycrisis Times. To read other excerpts, go here.
