What is the Metacrisis?

The metacrisis is …

the deeper crisis beneath the many crises of our time. At its heart is a culture-wide crisis of meaning and connection. We are disconnected from one another and from the living world that sustains, guides, and surrounds us. Disconnected from a sense of belonging and a sense of purpose, and from the shared traditions, rituals and practices that have long helped human beings learn and practice how to live together upon this sacred earth.

These ruptures show up in widespread loneliness, anxiety, despair, addiction, and other forms of mental distress.

They also help produce and sustain the larger systemic failures that each one of us must now face: ecological breakdown, extreme inequality, political dysfunction, technological risk, social fragmentation, and the erosion of our shared ability to understand what is happening and to respond wisely.

The metacrisis is not simply the collection of all these problems. It names the deeper conditions that connect them, intensify them, and keep producing them.

Many people use the term polycrisis to describe our moment. It is a useful term, but to me it still suggests a collection of separate crises that are happening all at once. Metacrisis points to something deeper: it is the crisis beneath the crises. It is the underlying breakdown in meaning, connection, culture, and systems that helps generate all of these crises in the first place.

Metacrisis does not only the storm we are living through, but the deeper conditions from which that storm emerges. Conditions that will likely challenge, shape, and mature us for generations to come.

My proposal is that our only option is to face it and turn towards it. That we are future ancestors, we are ancestors in training. That our work is to mature and grow into the people that must face and contend with the reality of our day. 

I live with the trust and the faith that we already have the wisdom of the ages. That we still live with the keepers of the old stories and the old songs. That we are gifted with the creative life force that brings all of life into being and that we can be creative in finding our way through this mess.

This is NOT the first apocalypse. And we are the living evidence that humanity finds a way through.