The Big Picture
The Metacrisisalso: meta-crisis, meta crisis
No single coiner. Popularized in this sense by Daniel Schmachtenberger, alongside Jonathan Rowson and Zak Stein.
The crisis underneath all the other crises. Climate breakdown, AI risk, pandemics, and political dysfunction are not separate problems; they keep being produced by the same underlying dynamics in how humans compete, coordinate, and deploy technology. So the metacrisis is the whole interconnected set of catastrophic risks plus the shared root causes that keep generating them. Schmachtenberger's sobering math: to make it through we have to avoid every catastrophic outcome, while failing only requires one.
Why it matters: If the diagnosis is right, solving crises one at a time is a losing game. The real work is redesigning the systems that keep producing them.
It is not just that the house has many fires. The wiring keeps starting them, and firefighting one room at a time never fixes the wiring.
See also: The Polycrisis · Generator Functions of Existential Risk · The Third Attractor
Coined by French thinker Edgar Morin in the 1990s, popularized for the 2020s by historian Adam Tooze, and given a rigorous definition by the Cascade Institute
What happens when several big crises (climate, energy, war, debt, public health) collide at the same time and start feeding each other, so the combined mess is worse than any single crisis on its own. The point is not just that many things are going wrong at once, but that they are tangled together and amplify one another. Polycrisis names the pileup of symptoms; metacrisis points at the disease underneath.
Why it matters: It explains why the present moment feels uniquely overwhelming and why fixing problems one at a time keeps failing. Treating crises as separate misses the way they compound.
Like several fires burning in one building at once, where each fire feeds air and heat to the others, so the smoke is thicker than any single blaze could ever make.
See also: Permacrisis · The Metacrisis
Popularized by Collins Dictionary, which named it Word of the Year 2022.
Permacrisis is an extended stretch of instability and insecurity where one emergency rolls straight into the next and things never really settle back to normal. It captures the exhausting sense that crisis has become the permanent background condition rather than a temporary interruption. Collins Dictionary named it Word of the Year in 2022.
Why it matters: It puts a name to burnout at the scale of a whole society and helps people see that the churn is structural, not just their imagination.
Like living in a house where one emergency ends just as the next one begins, so the phrase back to normal quietly stops meaning anything.
See also: The Polycrisis · The Metacrisis
A long lineage in ecological writing; Hagens made it his standard frame, and his University of Minnesota course Reality 101 was built around it
Hagens' umbrella term for the whole tangle: energy depletion, ecological overshoot, debt-based finance, and Stone Age brains running modern institutions, all interlocking. He deliberately says predicament rather than problem, because problems have solutions while predicaments only have responses. It is his closest synonym for what others call the metacrisis or polycrisis, told through an energy-first lens.
Why it matters: It is the direct bridge from Hagens' vocabulary to the word metacrisis, and it sets honest expectations: the goal is wise response, not a single fix.
Aging is not a problem you solve, it is a predicament you respond to well or badly. Hagens says the same about a species overshooting its energy budget.
See also: The Great Simplification · Bend Not Break · Supernormal Stimuli
Coined and popularized by author Ronald Wright in his 2004 book A Short History of Progress.
A progress trap is an innovation that solves a problem and looks like clear progress, but when scaled up leads to a bigger disaster nobody saw coming. The invention works at first, so we keep pushing it, and the trap only springs once we are fully committed. Ronald Wright used it to explain why past civilizations undid themselves through their own cleverness.
Why it matters: It complicates the story that technology always saves us, and warns that today's smart fixes can become tomorrow's catastrophes at scale.
A trap whose jaws open slowly and invitingly with real, tasty bait, then snap shut fast once you reach all the way in.
See also: Collapse · The Limits to Growth · Overshoot-and-Collapse
Written by Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William Behrens for the Club of Rome in 1972.
The Limits to Growth was a 1972 report that used an early computer model called World3 to simulate how population, industry, food, resource use, and pollution interact on a finite planet. Its business-as-usual runs kept ending in overshoot and decline sometime in the 21st century, but the authors showed that a deliberate transition could avoid that. Decades of tracking suggest the standard run has been uncomfortably close to reality.
Why it matters: It was one of the first data-driven warnings that infinite growth on a finite planet ends badly, and it still frames debates about our trajectory.
Like a flight simulator for civilization, run in 1972, that kept crashing whenever growth ignored the fuel gauge.
See also: Overshoot-and-Collapse · Ecological Overshoot · The Great Acceleration · Degrowth
A core archetype in system dynamics, associated with Jay Forrester and Donella Meadows and central to the Limits to Growth work.
Overshoot-and-collapse is a systems pattern where growth blows past a system's limits, and because of delays in feedback, the damage stays hidden until it forces a sharp correction or crash. The system keeps expanding after it is already unsustainable, so the eventual fall is steeper than if it had leveled off. It appears in ecosystems, businesses, and civilizations alike.
Why it matters: It explains why problems can look fine right up until they suddenly are not, and why delayed signals make overshoot so dangerous.
Like flooring the accelerator toward a cliff you cannot see yet, because there is a delay before the brakes respond.
See also: Carrying Capacity · The Limits to Growth · Ecological Overshoot · Tipping Points
Collapsealso: societal collapse
The modern study was shaped by Joseph Tainter (The Collapse of Complex Societies, 1988) and popularized for general readers by Jared Diamond (Collapse, 2005).
Societal collapse is the relatively rapid loss of a society's complexity: its government, economy, population, and institutions unravel over years or decades rather than centuries. Historians study why past civilizations fell, from environmental damage to overreach to inequality, and what patterns repeat. The word can mean a sharp crash or a slower, stair-step decline.
Why it matters: It offers hard lessons from history about the warning signs of decline and whether we can spot and avoid them in time.
Like a Jenga tower: each block you pull looks survivable, right up until the whole structure comes down at once.
See also: The Progress Trap · Overshoot-and-Collapse · Deep Adaptation · The Limits to Growth
Coined by sustainability professor Jem Bendell in a 2018 paper that went viral.
Deep adaptation is a framework for facing the possibility that severe climate disruption, and even societal breakdown, may already be unavoidable, and asking how to respond with less harm and more compassion. Rather than only trying to prevent collapse, it prepares emotionally and practically for disruption. It is organized around four questions known as the four Rs: resilience, relinquishment, restoration, and reconciliation.
Why it matters: It gives people a way to process fear and grief about the future without freezing, though its bleak premise remains hotly debated.
Instead of only trying to stop the storm, you also pack the life rafts and decide together what is most worth saving.
See also: Collapse · Solastalgia · Regeneration
Daniel Schmachtenberger
An attractor is a state a system naturally slides toward. Schmachtenberger argues civilization currently has two: catastrophe, meaning breakdown through war, ecological collapse, or cascading failures, and dystopia, meaning ever-tighter surveillance and authoritarian control imposed to prevent the breakdown. The third attractor is a civilization wise and coordinated enough to avoid both, and his unsettling claim is that it does not exist yet. It has to be deliberately designed.
Why it matters: It gives newcomers the whole strategic picture in one image: the goal is not winning the current game but changing where the game defaults to.
A rock, a hard place, and a third door that is not there yet. We have to build the door while the walls close in.
See also: The Metacrisis · Coordination Failure · Social Technology
Nate Hagens and Daniel Schmachtenberger, as the title of their 2022 podcast series
Hagens' shorthand for the goal: the energy descent is coming either way, so societies can bend, meaning adapt early, flexibly, and on purpose, or break, meaning stay rigid until crisis snaps things. It comes from his five-part conversation series with Daniel Schmachtenberger mapping the macro risks of the coming decades and the categories of sane response. Bending is a managed downshift that protects what matters most.
Why it matters: It converts the scary material into agency: the future is not binary between business as usual and collapse, and preparation changes which path we get.
In a storm the reeds bend and survive while the rigid oak snaps. The trick is choosing to be a reed before the storm arrives.
See also: The Great Simplification · Wide-Boundary Thinking · The Maximum Power Principle
Energy & Ecology
Nate Hagens and DJ White, whose free systems textbook is literally titled Reality Blind; Hagens popularized the term through his podcast and film
Our culture's inability to see that energy, not money, is what actually powers everything we do. Fossil energy has been so cheap and abundant for two centuries that it became invisible, and mainstream economics counts capital and labor while leaving energy out of its models entirely. Hagens' core stat: one barrel of oil does roughly five years' worth of human physical labor, yet we price it like any other commodity.
Why it matters: If you cannot see energy, every plan you make about the economy, climate, or the future rests on a missing foundation. Removing the blinders is Hagens' step one.
Fossil energy is like water to a fish. It surrounds and powers everything, so we never notice it until it starts to drain away.
See also: Energy Slaves · The Carbon Pulse · GDP-Energy Coupling · The Great Simplification
Buckminster Fuller coined the term; Hagens updated the arithmetic and made it central to his energy story
The invisible workforce of machines and fuel doing labor humans would otherwise do by muscle. Hagens' numbers: the world burns about 100 billion barrels of oil equivalent a year, which works out to roughly 400 to 500 billion human workers' worth of effort supporting about 5 billion actual human workers. Your car, furnace, and washing machine are all crews of tireless helpers you never see.
Why it matters: It converts abstract energy units into something visceral. Losing cheap energy means losing the servants, not just paying more at the pump.
Every American lives like an aristocrat with hundreds of invisible servants, except the servants are barrels of oil, and the estate is drawing down its savings.
See also: Energy Blindness · Ancient Sunlight · GDP-Energy Coupling
Thom Hartmann popularized the phrase with his book The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight; the battery framing is how Hagens tells it
Fossil fuels are stored sunshine: ancient marine plankton and plants that captured solar energy, then were buried and compressed for millions of years into a dense energy battery. Hagens frames the modern era as draining that battery on the order of a million times faster than it charged. The wealth explosion of the last 150 years was underwritten by this inheritance, not by human cleverness alone.
Why it matters: It makes the one-time nature of fossil energy intuitive. Batteries drain, and this one cannot be recharged on any human timescale.
Hagens' own line: we are turning billions of barrels of ancient sunlight into microliters of dopamine.
See also: The Carbon Pulse · Energy Slaves · Supernormal Stimuli
Popularized by Nate Hagens; geologists use similar language for past carbon-release events, which he explicitly compares ours to
Hagens' name for the fossil fuel era viewed at geologic timescale: a one-time, few-century burn of hydrocarbons that took hundreds of millions of years to form. He cites research that we are consuming oil on the order of a million times faster than it formed. Everything we call normal, from global supply chains to smartphones, sits inside this brief spike, and the pulse ends whether we plan for it or not.
Why it matters: It reframes the last 200 years as an anomaly rather than a baseline, which changes what you expect from the next 50.
On a timeline of Earth's whole history, the fossil fuel age is a single camera flash going off in a very long night.
See also: Ancient Sunlight · Energy Blindness · The Great Simplification
Developed by ecologist Charles A. S. Hall, often called the father of EROI.
EROI measures how much energy you get back for every unit of energy you spend to obtain it, written as a ratio like 20 to 1. Early oil gushed out at extremely high ratios; harder-to-reach energy sources return far less. When a society's overall EROI falls too low, less energy is left over to run everything else, from hospitals to art, which squeezes the whole economy.
Why it matters: It shows that not all energy is equal and that falling energy quality, not just quantity, can quietly constrain civilization, including the shift to renewables.
It takes money to make money: EROI is how many barrels you get back for every barrel you spend drilling, and when that number drops, everyone has less to live on.
See also: The Limits to Growth · Overshoot-and-Collapse · Ecological Overshoot
A finding from ecological economics and systems researchers Hagens cites, including Carey King and Art Berman; Hagens made it a talking point
Global GDP and energy use move together, with roughly a 99 percent correlation, a stat Hagens repeats constantly. Money is a claim on energy and materials, so more economic activity means more energy burned. Claims that rich countries have decoupled growth from energy mostly reflect offshoring energy-intensive industry to Asia, and efficiency gains historically get spent on more growth rather than less consumption.
Why it matters: It is the crux of why Hagens thinks green growth plans underdeliver: shrink energy and the economy shrinks with it, which is why he expects a simplification rather than a seamless swap.
GDP is the speedometer, energy is the engine. You cannot keep accelerating while promising to burn less fuel.
See also: Energy Blindness · The Mordor Economy · The Metabolism of Civilization
The Superorganismalso: the human superorganism, the economic superorganism
The word comes from biology, where it describes ant colonies and beehives; Hagens applied it to the global economy, most formally in his 2020 paper Economics for the Future: Beyond the Superorganism
Hagens' explanation for why the world feels out of anyone's control: humanity as a whole behaves like one giant energy-seeking organism. Billions of individually reasonable choices, aggregated by markets and growth-based finance, produce a global system that eats energy, grows, and protects its own growth, with nobody actually steering. It is not a conspiracy and not evil, just an emergent creature made of all of us.
Why it matters: It answers the newcomer question 'why don't we just stop?' The problem is not bad people, it is system-level dynamics, so responses have to be system-level too.
Like an ant colony that builds and forages with no ant in charge, the global economy does things no single human chose, at a scale no single human can stop.
See also: The Maximum Power Principle · The Metabolism of Civilization · The Great Simplification · GDP-Energy Coupling
Builds on Geoffrey West's scaling research and the social metabolism literature; Hagens made it a recurring frame
The global economy works like an organism's metabolism: it ingests energy and materials, does work, and excretes waste and heat. Hagens' animated film calls global society a metabolic heat engine, and he draws on physicist Geoffrey West's scaling laws showing that cities and economies follow energy rules much like animals do. One striking version: the average American runs on around 200,000 calories a day of total energy once transport, heating, food systems, and supply chains are counted, versus 2,000 calories of food.
Why it matters: If the economy is a metabolism, you cannot starve it of energy and expect it to behave the same, which is why Hagens talks about managed downshift instead of painless substitution.
Civilization is an animal that must keep eating energy to stay alive, and it is currently a very large animal with a very fast metabolism.
See also: The Superorganism · GDP-Energy Coupling · The Maximum Power Principle
Proposed by Alfred Lotka and developed by ecologist Howard T. Odum; Hagens applies it to human economies
An idea from ecology: the systems that survive and dominate are the ones that capture and use energy fastest, not the ones that use it most wisely. Hagens uses it to explain why the superorganism keeps its foot on the accelerator. Companies, countries, and individuals that consume more energy win in the short run, so unilateral restraint tends to lose, and growth becomes self-reinforcing.
Why it matters: It explains the trap: knowing we should slow down is not the same as being able to, because the race dynamics punish whoever slows first.
Like plants in a forest racing upward for sunlight, whoever grabs the energy first sets the rules, even if the whole forest would be better off pacing itself.
See also: The Superorganism · The Metabolism of Civilization · Bend Not Break
Nate Hagens, drawing on the work of Art Berman and Carey King
Hagens' image for a late-stage trap on the way to the Great Simplification: as easy oil depletes, more and more of society's energy must be spent just to get energy, while credit and financial tricks hide the true cost. The economy keeps GDP up by scorching more land and burning through lower-quality resources for less net benefit. The name is a Lord of the Rings nod: a grim industrial engine grinding on because it cannot stop.
Why it matters: It names the ugly middle path between business as usual and simplification, and explains why headline GDP can look fine while things quietly get harder.
Like a gold mine that starts burning half its gold to power the digging equipment, the effort of extraction begins to eat the prize.
See also: GDP-Energy Coupling · The Carbon Pulse · The Great Simplification
Nate Hagens
Hagens' name for the era he expects in the not-too-distant future, when the credit-fueled, energy-hungry global economy can no longer grow and is forced to get smaller, slower, and more local. It is a downshift rather than an apocalypse: less complexity, shorter supply chains, more things done nearer to home. His whole project is about preparing so the transition is chosen and managed rather than chaotic.
Why it matters: It gives newcomers a non-doom frame for the future: not the end of the world, but the end of a very unusual growth spurt, with real choices about how we land.
A household that has been living large on an inheritance eventually goes back to living on its paycheck. The paycheck is the sunlight and resources Earth provides in real time.
See also: The Carbon Pulse · The Superorganism · Bend Not Break · The Human Predicament
Given its modern ecological meaning by sociologist William R. Catton Jr. in his 1980 book Overshoot.
Ecological overshoot is when humanity takes more from nature each year than the planet can regenerate, and dumps more waste (like carbon dioxide) than it can absorb. For a while you can keep this up by drawing down natural savings such as forests, fish stocks, and stable climate, but the account eventually runs thin. We have been in global overshoot since roughly the 1970s.
Why it matters: It reframes environmental damage as living beyond a budget, which makes the problem concrete and the fix (take less, restore more) obvious.
Like spending your savings faster than your paycheck refills them: for a while you feel rich, then the account runs dry.
See also: Earth Overshoot Day · Carrying Capacity · Planetary Boundaries · Overshoot-and-Collapse
A classic concept from population ecology with 19th-century roots, not tied to a single coiner.
Carrying capacity is the maximum population of a species that a given environment can support over the long run, given its food, water, habitat, and other resources. Populations that shoot above it tend to crash back down as resources run short. Applied to humans, the number is debated, but the principle is that no environment can support unlimited growth.
Why it matters: It is the ecological backbone of overshoot: it defines the ceiling that human demand is now pressing against.
Like how many people can safely fit in a lifeboat before it starts to sink.
See also: Ecological Overshoot · Overshoot-and-Collapse · The Limits to Growth · The Tragedy of the Commons
The concept was devised by Andrew Simms of the UK's New Economics Foundation; the campaign is run with Mathis Wackernagel's Global Footprint Network.
Earth Overshoot Day is the calendar date each year when humanity has used up everything nature can renew in that year; for the rest of the year we run on ecological credit. It is calculated by dividing the planet's yearly biocapacity by humanity's demand. The date has crept earlier over the decades, landing in late July in recent years.
Why it matters: It turns an abstract statistic into a single memorable date, making it easy to grasp that we are living beyond the planet's means and to track whether we are moving the date later.
Like the day your annual salary runs out and you start putting everything for the rest of the year on the credit card.
See also: Ecological Overshoot · Planetary Boundaries
Developed in 2009 by Johan Rockström and a team of 28 scientists at the Stockholm Resilience Centre
Nine environmental limits that together keep Earth in the stable state that let human civilization flourish, covering climate, biodiversity, freshwater, land use, and pollution. Staying inside all nine keeps us in a safe operating space; crossing them raises the risk of sudden or irreversible damage. As of the 2025 Planetary Health Check, seven of the nine have been crossed.
Why it matters: It shows that climate is only one of many limits and gives scientists and policymakers a shared dashboard for how close to the edge we are.
Like guardrails on a mountain road: stay inside them and you are safe, cross them and you risk going over the edge.
See also: Ecological Overshoot · The Great Acceleration · Doughnut Economics · Tipping Points
Brought into mainstream climate science by Tim Lenton and colleagues, who lead the Global Tipping Points reports.
A climate tipping point is a threshold in part of the Earth system where a small extra push triggers a large, self-sustaining, and often irreversible change. Once crossed, feedback loops keep the change going even if we stop pushing, so the shift can be abrupt and hard to undo. Examples include the dieback of the Amazon rainforest, collapse of major ice sheets, and shutdown of Atlantic ocean circulation.
Why it matters: It explains why climate risk is not smooth and gradual, and why crossing thresholds could lock in damage no policy can reverse.
Like leaning back in a chair: nothing happens until one degree past the balance point, then you go over and cannot pull yourself back.
See also: Planetary Boundaries · Overshoot-and-Collapse · Hyperobjects
The term emerged from a 2005 Dahlem Conference; the definitive graphs were produced by Will Steffen and colleagues.
The Great Acceleration is the explosive jump in human activity and environmental impact since about 1950, when graphs of population, GDP, water use, fertilizer, carbon dioxide, and dozens of other measures all bend sharply upward at once. It is often used to date the start of the Anthropocene, the era in which humans became a planet-shaping force. The synchronized surge across so many charts is the striking part.
Why it matters: It reveals that our environmental problems are not scattered accidents but one connected burst of growth, which explains why they arrived together.
Like a whole wall of hockey-stick charts where almost everything humans do shoots straight up right after 1950.
See also: Planetary Boundaries · The Limits to Growth · Ecological Overshoot
Regenerative agriculture traces to Robert Rodale; the broader movement was framed for a wide audience by Paul Hawken (Regeneration, 2021).
Regeneration is the aim of leaving natural and social systems healthier than you found them, rather than merely doing less damage. Where sustainability tries to break even, regeneration tries to give back more than it takes, restoring soil, water, biodiversity, and community. It shows up most in regenerative agriculture but extends to design, business, and whole economies.
Why it matters: It raises the bar beyond sustainability and points to living systems that heal, which is more hopeful and more demanding than just holding steady.
Like a garden that gives back more than you take, so the ground is richer each season instead of slowly worn out.
See also: Doughnut Economics · Degrowth · Deep Adaptation
Games & Incentives
Popularized by ecologist Garrett Hardin in a 1968 essay (building on an earlier idea from William Forster Lloyd).
The tragedy of the commons describes how a shared resource gets destroyed when each individual, acting in their own rational self-interest, takes a little more, until collectively they exhaust it for everyone. No single person means to ruin it, but the sum of everyone grabbing their share does. It is used to explain overfishing, pollution, and climate change.
Why it matters: It shows why unmanaged shared resources tend to collapse and why cooperation, rules, or ownership are needed to protect what we all depend on.
A shared pasture where every herder adds one more cow for personal gain, until the grass is gone and all the herds starve.
See also: Carrying Capacity · Overshoot-and-Collapse · Wetiko
Scott Alexander, in the 2014 essay Meditations on Moloch; made central to civilizational analysis by Daniel Schmachtenberger.
A situation where many players each do something harmful because if they hold back, a competitor will do it anyway and win. Every individual choice is locally rational, and the collective result is bad for everyone, including the winners. Nuclear buildups, overfishing, doomscrolling algorithms, and the AI race all fit the pattern. For Schmachtenberger this is the single most important concept for understanding why smart people keep producing outcomes nobody wants.
Why it matters: It explains why naming villains fails. The trap, not the players, is the problem, so the fix has to change the game.
Everyone stands up at a stadium to see better. Soon the whole crowd is standing, nobody sees any better, and everyone's legs hurt. Sitting back down alone just means you see nothing.
See also: Moloch · Coordination Failure · Arms Races & Races to the Bottom
Imagery from Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl, turned into a systems metaphor by Scott Alexander in 2014, popularized further by Liv Boeree.
A nickname for the impersonal force that all the multipolar traps add up to: the logic of the game itself, which pushes decent people to sacrifice what they value in order to stay competitive. There is no villain to arrest; Moloch is the tournament bracket, not any player in it. Liv Boeree, who has done the most to popularize the idea with Schmachtenberger as a frequent guest, describes it as the god of unhealthy, negative-sum competition.
Why it matters: Giving the dynamic a name makes it discussable. Once you see Moloch, you stop blaming individuals and start asking how to change incentives.
Borrowing Scott Alexander's framing: a god of child sacrifice that demands you throw what you love most into the fire for a competitive edge that soon evaporates.
See also: The Multipolar Trap · Arms Races & Races to the Bottom · Perverse Incentives
Long-standing terms from geopolitics and economics; used by Schmachtenberger as the signature moves of multipolar traps.
Two flavors of the same trap. In an arms race everyone spends more and more to stay ahead, ending up in roughly the same relative position but with far more risk in the world. In a race to the bottom competitors shave off safety, quality, wages, or ethics to win, dragging the standard down for everyone. Schmachtenberger's point: any actor who unilaterally opts out loses to whoever does not, which is why good intentions alone never stop the race.
Why it matters: This is the exact dynamic now playing out in frontier AI development, which is why the vocabulary suddenly matters to everyone.
Two corner shops cutting prices below cost until both go broke, each afraid to stop first.
See also: The Multipolar Trap · Moloch · Exponential Technology
Daniel Schmachtenberger's signature phrasing, building on the economics of rival goods and game theory.
Win-lose games built into our systems: my gain requires your loss, whether the prize is market share, attention, territory, or status. Schmachtenberger's core claim is that rivalrous games cause harm in proportion to the power of the players, so rivalry multiplied by exponential technology eventually self-terminates. His prescription is to redesign systems so success no longer requires someone else's failure, what he calls anti-rivalrous or win-win design.
Why it matters: It relocates the problem from human nature to game design, which is fixable in a way that human nature is not.
Musical chairs. The game guarantees fights over seats no matter how kind the players are, because the rules removed a chair.
See also: Generator Functions of Existential Risk · The Multipolar Trap · Externalities
Standard game theory and economics term; central to Schmachtenberger's framing of the metacrisis.
When everyone would be better off acting together, but nobody can trust everyone else to act, so nothing changes. Schmachtenberger argues this is the key driver of the metacrisis: humanity mostly does not lack solutions to climate, AI safety, or ocean collapse, it lacks the ability to agree to adopt them when defecting is profitable. Multipolar traps are coordination failures with teeth.
Why it matters: It reframes our biggest problems as trust-and-incentive design problems rather than technology problems.
A group project where every member privately wants to start early, each assumes the others will slack, and everyone ends up cramming the night before.
See also: The Multipolar Trap · Social Technology · The Third Attractor
Common tech-world term (Peter Diamandis and Singularity University popularized it); Schmachtenberger's contribution is the multiplication argument.
Technology whose power compounds rather than grows steadily: computing, AI, biotech, networked media. Schmachtenberger's point is not that exponential tech is evil but that it multiplies whatever games we are already playing. Ancient empires playing win-lose games with swords could wreck a region; the same games played with exponential tools put the whole biosphere and species in play. Decentralized exponential tech also means catastrophic capability keeps spreading to smaller and smaller actors.
Why it matters: It explains the deadline. We have run rivalrous games for millennia, but exponential tools mean this is the first century where the games can end the players.
Fold a sheet of paper 42 times and the stack reaches the moon. Doubling does not feel dramatic until suddenly it is, and our tools now double while our institutions crawl.
See also: Generator Functions of Existential Risk · The Wisdom Gap · The Third Attractor
Daniel Schmachtenberger
The small set of underlying patterns that keep manufacturing catastrophic risks, no matter which specific crisis is in the news. Schmachtenberger names two big ones: rivalrous win-lose dynamics multiplied by exponential technology, and complicated human-built systems that depend on, and steadily degrade, the complex natural systems underneath them. Solve one symptom without touching the generator and it simply produces the next crisis.
Why it matters: This is the core of his whole argument: work at the level of root causes or stay permanently in whack-a-mole mode.
A bug in the source code. Every crash on screen is a new crisis, and patching crashes one at a time never fixes the code that produces them.
See also: Rivalrous Dynamics · Exponential Technology · The Metacrisis
Old sociology term revived by Daniel Schmachtenberger and The Consilience Project.
Not just apps. Law, money, voting systems, religions, and norms are technologies too: tools for coordinating large numbers of humans. Schmachtenberger argues our physical technology has gone exponential while our social technology is centuries old, and that closing the gap means deliberately designing new institutions rather than waiting for them to evolve. The related Consilience argument is that no technology is neutral: tools reshape the values, habits, and minds of the people who use them, so design choices are always value choices.
Why it matters: If coordination failure is the core problem, then upgraded social technology, not more gadgets, is the core solution.
Society runs on software as much as hardware. A constitution is code for humans, and most of ours has not been refactored in two hundred years.
See also: Coordination Failure · The Third Attractor · The Wisdom Gap
Coined by Jim Rutt and Jordan Hall (formerly Greenhall) in conversations more than a decade ago.
Game B is the name for an imagined new way of organizing society that would replace our current system, called Game A. Game A is the roughly 10,000-year-old operating system of competition, growth, and profit that its critics say is now self-terminating. Game B is a proposed alternative built on cooperation, ecological health, and human flourishing, often organized in small self-governing communities.
Why it matters: It gives a hopeful, if speculative, label to the search for a next civilization, and a community actively experimenting toward it.
Like migrating off a buggy old operating system that keeps crashing to one designed from scratch for cooperation.
See also: The Metacrisis · Regeneration · The Meaning Crisis
Economics
Classical economics (the Pigou tradition); pushed to civilizational scale by Schmachtenberger.
Real costs pushed onto people outside the transaction: pollution, addiction, topsoil loss, attention damage. It is a textbook economics term, but Schmachtenberger radicalizes it: because nature and future generations have no balance sheet, externalizing costs is systematically profitable, which means total harm scales with the economy itself. One of his core design requirements for a viable civilization is a system that internalizes all of its externalities.
Why it matters: Almost every headline crisis, from climate to teen mental health, is an externality of something profitable. Seeing that pattern once changes how you read the news.
The bar tab the party keeps sending to a stranger who was never invited. Eventually the stranger is the biosphere, and the tab comes due for everyone.
See also: Perverse Incentives · The Naive Progress Narrative · Generator Functions of Existential Risk
Standard economics term; a load-bearing concept across all of Schmachtenberger's work.
Rewards that pull behavior in the opposite direction of the stated goal. Media paid for attention manufactures outrage, healthcare paid per treatment profits from ongoing illness, and industries paid to manage problems have a quiet stake in keeping them. Schmachtenberger's version of the argument: with incentives like these, bad outcomes do not require bad people, the system produces them reliably from good people.
Why it matters: It moves the conversation from blaming individuals to auditing reward structures, which is where change is actually possible.
The famous cobra effect: colonial Delhi paid bounties for dead cobras, so people bred cobras.
See also: Externalities · Rivalrous Dynamics · Moloch
Named for economist William Stanley Jevons, who described it in 1865.
The Jevons paradox is the counterintuitive finding that making the use of a resource more efficient often increases the total amount consumed, not less. When a technology gets more efficient it becomes cheaper to use, so people use much more of it, and the savings get swamped. It first showed up with coal-powered steam engines and now comes up with everything from LED lighting to AI.
Why it matters: It warns that efficiency alone will not solve resource and climate problems, and can even backfire without limits on total use.
Make cars twice as fuel-efficient and people drive twice as far, so the fuel saved gets burned anyway.
See also: Degrowth · Ecological Overshoot
The concept traces to economist Herbert Simon (1971); popularized in the tech era by Tristan Harris and legal scholar Tim Wu.
The attention economy is the reality that in a world flooded with information, human attention becomes the scarce and valuable resource, so companies compete fiercely to capture and hold it. Many free apps and platforms make money by keeping you looking, which pushes them to design for compulsion rather than your wellbeing. Your focus, in effect, is the product being sold to advertisers.
Why it matters: It explains why our information environment feels addictive and polarizing, and why that harms mental health and shared reality.
Like a slot machine in your pocket, engineered to keep you pulling the lever, because every glance is sold to advertisers.
See also: Enshittification · Wetiko · The Meaning Crisis
Coined by author and activist Cory Doctorow in 2022 to 2023; named the American Dialect Society's 2023 Word of the Year.
Enshittification is the predictable way online platforms decay in three stages: first they treat users well to attract them, then they abuse users to please business customers, then they claw value back from those business customers to enrich themselves, until the platform is barely usable. Because users get locked in, the platform can keep degrading the experience without losing everyone. Doctorow uses it to explain why so many apps and sites feel worse over time.
Why it matters: It names a pattern everyone feels but few could describe, and points at the lock-in and lack of competition that let it happen.
Like a restaurant that wows you with free bread, shrinks the portions once you are a regular, then charges for the water too, until nothing good is left.
See also: The Attention Economy · The Tragedy of the Commons
Created by Oxford economist Kate Raworth, first sketched in 2012 and expanded in her 2017 book Doughnut Economics.
Doughnut economics is a model of a good economy shaped like a doughnut, with two rings. The inner ring is a social foundation nobody should fall below (food, water, housing, healthcare); the outer ring is an ecological ceiling we should not push past. The safe and fair place to live is the ring in between, and the goal is to meet everyone's needs without wrecking the planet.
Why it matters: It offers a simple picture of an economy aimed at wellbeing rather than endless growth, and cities like Amsterdam have used it for real planning.
A doughnut where the hole is people going without essentials and the outer edge is trashing the planet; the ring of dough is the space where humanity can thrive.
See also: Degrowth · Planetary Boundaries · Regeneration
Degrowthalso: post-growth
Rooted in the French decroissance tradition (Andre Gorz, Serge Latouche); popularized in English by anthropologist Jason Hickel.
Degrowth is the idea that rich countries should deliberately shrink wasteful and unnecessary production and consumption, rather than chasing ever-higher GDP, so that people can live well within ecological limits. It argues that beyond a certain point more stuff stops improving lives and starts damaging the planet. Post-growth is the broader, softer cousin: designing prosperity that no longer depends on constant growth.
Why it matters: It challenges the core assumption that growth is always good, and asks whether green growth can really cut emissions fast enough on its own.
Not a crash diet forced on you, but choosing to own less junk so you actually have room to live better.
See also: Doughnut Economics · Regeneration · Ecological Overshoot · The Limits to Growth
Mind & Meaning
Term from organizational theorist Karl Weick; Schmachtenberger and Rebel Wisdom made it the watchword of this whole scene.
The process of building a picture of reality accurate enough to act well on. Schmachtenberger's claim is that our collective sensemaking is breaking down exactly when our choices matter most, because nearly all the information reaching us is optimized to persuade us or capture our attention rather than inform us. Good individual sensemaking means tracking who benefits from you believing something; good collective sensemaking requires institutions people can actually trust.
Why it matters: A society that cannot see clearly cannot steer. Every other item in this lexicon depends on enough people making sense of the world together.
Shared map-making. If every driver's GPS shows different roads, it does not matter how good the cars are.
See also: The Wisdom Gap · Coordination Failure
Phrase popularized by Daniel Schmachtenberger, especially through the War on Sensemaking films.
Treat the information environment like a watershed: everyone drinks from it, and ours is polluted. Engagement-driven algorithms, propaganda from every side, and outrage economics have degraded the shared pool of facts a society needs to function. Schmachtenberger calls this crisis upstream of all the others, because a public that cannot agree on what is real cannot coordinate on climate, AI, or anything else. The Consilience Project was founded specifically to work on this.
Why it matters: It explains why fixing discourse is not a nice-to-have. Epistemic cleanup is infrastructure for every other fix.
You cannot be healthy drinking daily from a toxic river, no matter how strong your immune system is. Same for minds and information.
See also: Sensemaking · Perverse Incentives · The Wisdom Gap
Dutch biologist Niko Tinbergen coined supernormal stimuli; Hagens welded it to the energy story
Exaggerated artificial versions of natural rewards that trigger our brains harder than anything in the environment we evolved for. Junk food, porn, slot machines, and infinite scroll are all engineered past ancestral baselines. In Hagens' story this is the behavioral engine of the superorganism: an economy powered by ancient sunlight learns to manufacture ever-stronger dopamine hooks, so we consume more while feeling no more satisfied.
Why it matters: It explains why more energy and stuff has not made us happier, and why the growth machine is so hard to switch off from the demand side.
Hagens' signature line: we are turning billions of barrels of ancient sunlight into microliters of dopamine.
See also: The Superorganism · Ancient Sunlight · The Human Predicament
Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Technology.
The widening gap between how complex and powerful our world is and our collective ability to make sense of it and respond well. Persuasive technology widens it from both ends at once: it makes problems more complex while shrinking our attention and fragmenting shared understanding. Schmachtenberger's version of the same idea is a race between the power we wield and the wisdom to wield it, with power currently winning.
Why it matters: It compresses the whole metacrisis into one sentence a newcomer can repeat at dinner, which is why Harris uses it in front of Congress.
E.O. Wilson's point, often echoed by Harris: we are running god-like technology on stone-age emotions and medieval institutions.
See also: Exponential Technology · Sensemaking · Social Technology
Framing developed by Daniel Schmachtenberger and The Consilience Project team.
The belief that new technology plus markets automatically adds up to better lives. The Consilience Project's flagship essay argues most celebrated innovations solved a problem in one place while quietly creating uncounted harms somewhere else: leaded gasoline fixed engine knock and lowered a generation's IQ, synthetic fertilizer ended famines and poisoned watersheds. The position is not anti-progress; it calls for progress mature enough to count its own costs before scaling.
Why it matters: It is the antidote to both doomerism and blind techno-optimism, the two lazy postures newcomers usually get offered.
Calling the surgery a success while ignoring the infection it caused.
See also: Externalities · Exponential Technology · The Wisdom Gap
Nate Hagens; it is his standing house style, and his news commentary series is literally called Wide Boundary News
Narrow boundary thinking judges an idea by its immediate, first-order effect: this fuel is green, this policy creates jobs. Wide boundary thinking zooms out in space and time and keeps asking Hagens' favorite question, 'and then what?', until the second and third order consequences show up. Corn ethanol, EV scaling, and AI data centers all look different once the boundary widens to include materials, land, and energy demand.
Why it matters: It is the most portable tool in the whole lexicon: anyone can start asking 'and then what?' about headlines and proposed solutions today.
Narrow boundary is checking one move ahead in chess. Wide boundary is asking what the board looks like three moves after your brilliant capture.
See also: Energy Blindness · Bend Not Break · The Great Simplification
Coined by philosopher Timothy Morton (around 2008, expanded in his 2013 book Hyperobjects).
A hyperobject is something so massively spread out in time and space that you can never see the whole of it at once, only local slices. Climate change is the classic example: you feel today's weather but never touch the entire planet-wide, centuries-long phenomenon directly. Other examples include all the plastic ever made or all the plutonium ever produced.
Why it matters: It helps explain why huge threats like climate change are so hard to think about and act on: our minds are not built to hold something that big.
Like feeling a single raindrop and never the whole storm; you touch a piece, but the thing itself is too vast to grasp at once.
See also: Tipping Points · Solastalgia · The Great Acceleration
Coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht around 2003 to 2005.
Solastalgia is the distress and grief people feel when their home environment is damaged or transformed around them while they are still living in it. Unlike nostalgia, which is longing for a place you have left, solastalgia is homesickness for a place you never left because the place itself has changed. It captures the emotional toll of mining, development, and climate change on the landscapes people love.
Why it matters: It names a growing form of environmental grief and links mental health directly to the health of the places we live.
Homesickness for a place you never left, because the place itself changed around you.
See also: Deep Adaptation · Hyperobjects · The Meaning Crisis
Popularized by cognitive scientist John Vervaeke through his lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.
The meaning crisis is the widespread modern sense of disconnection and purposelessness that arises as older sources of meaning, such as religion, community, and shared stories, lose their grip without clear replacements. John Vervaeke argues this hollowing-out sits beneath rising problems in mental health, politics, and our response to environmental breakdown. It is less about individual sadness and more about a cultural loss of frameworks for what matters.
Why it matters: It suggests that the outer crises have an inner counterpart, and that rebuilding shared meaning may be part of any real response.
Like a phone that still turns on but no longer connects to any network: the person works, but the links to self, others, and world have dropped.
See also: Game B · Wetiko · Solastalgia · The Metacrisis
An Indigenous (Algonquin) concept, brought into modern discourse by scholar Jack D. Forbes (Columbus and Other Cannibals) and popularized by Alnoor Ladha and Martin Kirk.
Wetiko is an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit or mind-sickness driven by greed, excess, and consuming the life of others for one's own gain. Contemporary writers use it as a metaphor for a mental virus behind extractive capitalism and ecological destruction: a way of thinking that treats devouring others as normal and rational. The idea reframes the metacrisis as partly a disease of the mind and culture.
Why it matters: It offers a non-Western lens on why our systems keep consuming past all reason, locating the root in a shared psychological and cultural pattern.
Like a hunger that feeds on others to survive and can never be satisfied, spreading from mind to mind.
See also: The Attention Economy · The Tragedy of the Commons · The Meaning Crisis
