The reference desk
Polycrisis is the term researchers use for what happens when crises in multiple global systems, climate, energy, food, finance, and geopolitics, become causally entangled: they interact, cascade, and produce more harm together than they would separately. Metacrisis, the term used by thinkers like Daniel Schmachtenberger and Jonathan Rowson, names what sits underneath that entanglement: the values, incentives, and institutional logics of modern culture that keep generating the crises. Those drivers include economies that must grow to stay solvent, competition that punishes whoever shows restraint first, a civilization running down its one-time store of fossil energy, and a breakdown in shared sensemaking. The relationship between the two is the one between symptoms and illness: the polycrisis is what shows up, and the metacrisis is why it keeps showing up, which is why the crises resist being solved one at a time. The word is also written meta-crisis or meta crisis.
The word comes from a specific line of thinking. Systems thinkers, most visibly Daniel Schmachtenberger and Nate Hagens, argue that treating each crisis separately fails because the causes sit one layer down: in how we compete, in what we measure as progress, and in the fossil energy that powers all of it.
This page has four parts. The Fronts describes the twelve main crises and how each one feeds the others. A Couple Places to Start is a set of videos you can move through in order, each one building on the last. The Library lists the podcasts worth subscribing to and the books worth reading. The Questions section answers the things people most often search for. By the end you should be able to follow any conversation about the metacrisis, and explain the core ideas to someone else in plain language. The glossary defines all 76 terms used along the way.
| Polycrisis | Metacrisis |
|---|---|
| Many separate crises, in climate, finance, health, and geopolitics, entangled so each makes the others worse. | The deeper pattern beneath those crises: the worldviews, values, and incentives that keep generating them. |
| Lives at the level of systems: economies, ecosystems, supply chains, and how failures cascade between them. | Lives at the level beneath the systems: how we see, value, choose, and compete. |
| Asks: how are these crises entangled, and where can we intervene before failures cascade? | Asks: why do we keep producing crises, and what in us and our culture would have to change? |
| Fixing it means complexity-informed policy: mapping the entanglements, watching for early warning signals, intervening at high-leverage points. | Fixing it means transforming root conditions: new values, institutions, and ways of living, toward a third attractor. |
| Sees climate change as one crisis colliding with food, finance, migration, and political crises. | Sees climate change as the predictable output of systems that reward dumping costs onto the commons. |
| The symptoms: what shows up across the world's systems. | The illness: why the symptoms keep showing up. |
As Life Itself's white paper puts it: "Just as symptoms signal an underlying illness, polycrisis points to metacrisis."
The Fronts
The polycrisis is at least twelve crises running at once. They are interconnected and interdependent, which means they have to be addressed simultaneously: progress on one front is undone if the others keep worsening. Select a front to read how it works and what it feeds.
For Earth to stay in the stable state that agriculture and civilization developed in, nine planetary boundaries need to hold: climate change, biodiversity loss, land-system change, freshwater use, ocean acidification, nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, novel chemicals, air pollution, and the ozone layer. Seven of the nine have now been crossed. Past certain tipping points, systems like ice sheets and rainforests shift into self-sustaining change that no longer responds to human course corrections. A destabilized biosphere shrinks harvests, dries water supplies, and pushes migration, which loads the food, demographic, and conflict fronts. It is driven in turn by an energy system that still runs mostly on fossil fuels and by economies that must grow to keep their debts payable.
Modern food, transport, medicine, and wages all run on dense energy, and about 86 percent of the world's supply still comes from fossil fuels. Those fuels are a one-time inheritance, and the cheapest deposits are already burned. Efficiency does not close the gap on its own, because making energy cheaper to use tends to increase total consumption rather than reduce it, a pattern called the Jevons paradox. Because everything else runs on energy, a squeeze here raises food prices, strains indebted economies, and sharpens competition between nations, while the burning itself drives the climate front.
Artificial intelligence is the most powerful set of tools humans have built, and it is being deployed at full speed because any company or country that slows down expects to lose to one that does not. The heads of the leading AI labs have themselves signed statements ranking the risk alongside pandemics and nuclear war. AI multiplies the other fronts: it makes disinformation cheaper to mass-produce, lowers the skill needed to design dangerous pathogens, accelerates financial trading beyond human oversight, and concentrates wealth. It is the clearest live example of a multipolar trap, where every actor's safest individual move worsens the shared outcome.
Coordinated action on any large problem requires enough people agreeing on basic facts. The platforms most people now learn from earn money from attention, and divisive, emotionally charged content holds attention best, so shared factual ground keeps eroding. Risk surveys consistently rank misinformation among the top global threats of the coming years. This front corrodes democratic institutions, makes isolated people easier to radicalize, and blocks the cooperation that climate policy, pandemic response, and AI governance depend on. It is amplified in turn by AI, which industrializes the production of persuasive falsehood, and by the attention economy that rewards it.
The financial system is built on the assumption that tomorrow's economy will be larger than today's. Public debt worldwide is approaching the size of the entire global economy, the highest level since the late 1940s, before counting households and corporations. Money is a claim on future energy and materials, so if energy and ecology stop supporting growth, a growing stack of claims points at a shrinking pool of real things. Because finance is hyperconnected, stress in one market spreads worldwide in days, and indebted governments cut exactly the budgets, from pandemic preparedness to climate adaptation, that the other fronts require.
Great-power rivalry is returning while the treaties that once restrained it expire. Roughly twelve thousand nuclear warheads exist, arsenals are being modernized rather than reduced, and expert assessments now put the risk of catastrophe higher than at any point since the atomic age began. War burns enormous amounts of energy, breaks food and fertilizer exports, redirects public budgets from climate and health to weapons, and destroys the trust that cooperation on every other front needs. It is inflamed in turn by resource competition, economic stress, and the polarized politics other fronts keep producing.
The last pandemic caused roughly fifteen million more deaths than official counts recorded, and it was moderate by historical standards. The tools for engineered pandemics keep getting cheaper, and AI keeps lowering the expertise required, while preparedness budgets shrink. A serious outbreak stresses everything at once: supply chains snap, debt jumps, institutional trust drops, and isolation deepens the loneliness front. The risk is raised further by degraded information ecosystems, where false claims outrun public-health responses.
The global food system feeds eight billion people through a handful of staple crops, a few exporting regions, and long just-in-time supply chains, which makes it efficient and fragile at the same time. Groundwater is falling in most of the world's monitored aquifers, and the declines are accelerating. Heat, drought, and soil loss from the climate front cut harvests, energy prices set fertilizer prices, and war closes export routes. When food fails, the effects cascade faster than on any other front: price spikes, unrest, and migration arrive within months and land on the political and demographic fronts.
Birth rates are falling nearly everywhere, more than half of all countries are now below replacement level, and world population is projected to peak later this century and then decline. Wealthy societies are aging fastest, which shrinks workforces just as pensions and debts sized for permanent growth come due, tightening the financial front. Young populations keep growing in the regions where climate stress is most severe, which guarantees migration pressure and the polarized politics that follow it. Demographic change is slow, but its pressure on every other front compounds each decade.
Wealth keeps concentrating, with the largest fortunes growing several times faster than the economies beneath them. History points to a dangerous combination called elite overproduction: living standards stall for the majority while societies produce more ambitious, credentialed people than there are elite positions, leaving frustrated would-be leaders to turn against the system. Concentrated wealth buys political influence, which blocks reform on energy, climate, and finance. The resentment it generates feeds polarization, weakens institutions, and supplies ready audiences for the information front.
Democracies now mostly erode from within, a pattern researchers call democratic backsliding: elected leaders weaken courts, capture media, and tilt elections while keeping democratic appearances. Nearly three-quarters of humanity currently lives under autocratic rule, and dozens of countries, including long-established democracies, are moving in that direction. Weakened institutions cannot regulate AI, hold nuclear restraint, deliver climate policy, or manage pandemics, so this front multiplies every other one. It is fed by inequality, by broken information ecosystems, and by the distrust each new crisis leaves behind.
Loneliness has become a measurable health crisis, sometimes called the loneliness epidemic: roughly one in six people worldwide reports being lonely, and social isolation raises mortality on a scale comparable to smoking. Time with friends keeps falling as screen time rises, in part because the attention economy profits from keeping people online and apart. Isolated people are easier to radicalize, harder to organize, and quicker to distrust institutions, which feeds the information and political fronts. Every coordinated response to every other front depends on communities with enough trust to act together.
A Couple Places to Start
1 of 8
In , Nate Hagens explains why the global economy behaves like a single organism that no one steers. Billions of individually reasonable decisions, aggregated through markets and growth-based finance, produce a system that seeks energy, grows, and resists every attempt to slow it: the superorganism.
2 of 8
is a 33-minute animated film that lays out Hagens's full argument. It covers how a one-time inheritance of fossil energy became the foundation of modern life, how money works as a claim on future energy and materials, and why the coming decades likely bend toward an economy scaled back to what real energy flows can support.
3 of 8
Johan Rockström co-developed the planetary boundaries framework, and in this he reports the current status of the nine Earth systems that keep the planet stable for civilization. He explains what a tipping point is and why systems like ice sheets and rainforests can shift abruptly and then stay shifted.
4 of 8
In this , former professional poker player Liv Boeree explains the game theory of destructive competition. She uses the name Moloch, from Scott Alexander's essay, for situations where each player sacrifices something they value because a rival will win if they do not.
5 of 8
is the March 2023 briefing Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin gave to technology and policy leaders. They describe social media as first contact with a misaligned AI, and generative AI as second contact, running the same race dynamics with higher stakes.
6 of 8
John Vervaeke opens his fifty-episode series by connecting rising loneliness, anxiety, and nihilism to the long history of how humans make meaning. A culture that cannot make sense of the world, he argues, cannot respond to it wisely.
7 of 8
In this from Stockholm Impact Week 2023, Daniel Schmachtenberger defines the metacrisis. Climate, AI risk, institutional decay, and the meaning crisis are symptoms produced by shared generator functions, chiefly rivalrous dynamics multiplied by exponential technology.
8 of 8
In this Rebel Wisdom , Schmachtenberger lays out civilization's two default destinations, chaotic breakdown or technology-enabled authoritarian control, and describes what a third attractor would have to solve across power, technology, ethics, and social infrastructure.
The Library
Nate Hagens
Weekly long-form interviews with ecologists, energy experts, economists, and systems thinkers about the decades ahead. The central show of this whole space, paired with Frankly, Hagens's shorter solo episodes.
Center for Humane Technology
Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin on how powerful technology shapes minds and societies, from persuasive design to the AI race, with regular episodes on what humane technology would look like.
Rachel Donald
An independent journalist interviews scientists, whistleblowers, and politicians across every corner of the polycrisis. Free to everyone and funded by its listeners.
Liv Boeree
A former poker champion on game theory in the real world: Moloch dynamics, arms races, and how to redesign competitions so winning does not require destruction.
Post Carbon Institute
Three colleagues talk through energy decline, overshoot, and runaway capitalism with more humor than the subject usually allows.
Joshua Michael Schrei
Approaches the same crises through myth, ritual, and story, with production that sounds closer to theater than to an interview show.
Douglas Rushkoff
Weekly conversations arguing that being human is a team sport, focused on reclaiming autonomy from the systems we built.
Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac, Paul Dickinson
Climate conversations hosted by the team that brokered the Paris Agreement, holding anger and hope at the same time.
Shareable
Documentary episodes about how communities self-organize after disasters, from hurricanes to fires, and what actually helps.
Peter Joseph
Peter Joseph's podcast examines the structural roots of ecological and social crisis, arguing that market economics itself generates the instability we see. Recent episodes walk module by module through his proposed alternative, a systems-level framework he calls Integral, including ideas like an open access design commons for non-market production. The show runs as a numbered educational series produced by Gentle Machine Productions.
Steven Bartlett
Entrepreneur Steven Bartlett hosts long-form interviews with founders, scientists, authors, and other public figures, from neuroscientists and Harvard professors to former CIA officers. The conversations dig into business, psychology, health, and personal development, aiming to surface the unfiltered lessons behind each guest's success. It ranks among the most popular interview podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.
Yuval Noah Harari
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
The big-history account of how shared stories like money, nations, and gods let strangers cooperate at scale. Useful background for every other book on this list.
Kate Raworth
Redraws the goal of economics as meeting everyone's basic needs without crossing planetary limits. The friendliest serious economics book in print.
Jason Hickel
Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
The case that endless growth is the root problem and that planned degrowth in rich countries is repair rather than austerity.
Vaclav Smil
The physical basics modern life runs on: energy, steel, cement, ammonia, and plastics, and why transitions move slower than headlines suggest.
David Wallace-Wells
What warming actually does to food, water, cities, and politics, laid out without softening. Honest about why half measures fail.
Robin Wall Kimmerer
A Potawatomi botanist pairs Indigenous knowledge with plant science to model a reciprocal relationship with the living world.
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira
Argues that a way of living is ending and that the work is to let it pass with maturity instead of denial or panic. Demanding and widely loved in this community.
Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone
A workbook for facing the state of the world without numbing out. Treats hope as a practice rather than a mood.
Nate Hagens and DJ White
A free online book on the biases and blind spots that keep humans from seeing energy, risk, and the long term clearly.
Nate Hagens and DJ White
The Bottlenecks of the 21st Century
Free essay-length treatments of every major constraint between here and a livable future, from minerals to money to attention.
Johann Hari
Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again
Hari investigates why attention spans are collapsing, drawing on interviews with scientists and Silicon Valley insiders. He argues that the crisis is not a personal failing but the product of external forces, above all an attention economy built to capture and monetize focus, compounded by stress, poor sleep, and constant task switching. The book closes with both individual tactics and collective changes needed to reclaim deep thinking.
Jonathan Haidt
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
Haidt documents the sharp rise in teen anxiety, depression, and self-harm that began around 2012 across many countries at once. He attributes it to the shift from a play-based childhood to a phone-based one, as smartphones and social media displaced free play, independence, and face-to-face life. He proposes concrete norms in response, including no smartphones before high school, no social media before sixteen, and phone-free schools.
Ray Dalio
Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail
Dalio studies the last 500 years of rising and declining powers, including the Dutch, British, and American eras, and extracts a recurring big cycle of debt buildup, money printing, internal conflict, and the emergence of rival powers. He applies the pattern to the present moment of high debt, wide wealth gaps, and the rise of China. The book offers principles for reading where a country sits in the cycle and for navigating what comes next.
Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
The two MIT economists, later awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize, survey a thousand years of technological change to show that new technology only produces shared prosperity when social and political forces push it that way. From medieval agriculture through the Industrial Revolution to modern AI, they find that the gains default to narrow elites who control how technology is designed and deployed. They argue for countervailing power, from labor organizing to public policy, to redirect innovation toward broad benefit.
Luke Kemp
Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse
Kemp, a Cambridge researcher on existential risk, conducts a deep history of societal collapse from early cities like Cahokia to empires such as Rome, Egypt, and China. He argues that rising inequality and concentrated power hollow out these Goliaths from within before an external shock brings them down, and that collapse often improved life for ordinary people. Today, he warns, a globally interconnected and heavily armed civilization would not fail so gently, which makes understanding the pattern urgent.
Jeffrey Winters
The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracy
Winters, the Northwestern political scientist known for his 2011 book Oligarchy, examines how the ultra-rich dominate democracies, hoard political power, and maintain inequality. He argues that democracy's failure to address extreme wealth concentration is by design, with oligarchs buying influence across the political spectrum to defend their fortunes. The book, published by Simon and Schuster in May 2026, also charts what confronting oligarchic power could look like.
Lindsay Branham
Heartwood: The Wisdom and Healing Kinship of Trees
Branham, an Emmy-nominated filmmaker with a Cambridge PhD in environmental psychology, recounts a period of chronic illness during California's wildfire seasons and the healing that unfolded through her relationship with a family of trees in Colorado's Roaring Fork Valley. The book blends memoir, environmental psychology, and ecology into an argument for restoring kinship with the living world. Publication confirmed: Hachette, March 2026.
Jeremy Lent
Ecocivilization: Making a World that Works for All
Lent investigates the underlying causes of civilization's existential crisis and argues that a fundamentally different world system is both desirable and feasible. He lays out an ecological civilization grounded in the design principles of ecosystems, built on justice, mutuality, diversity, and symbiosis rather than extraction and wealth accumulation. The book works through how the economy, agriculture, housing, and infrastructure could be redesigned as a coherent whole, drawing on communities already practicing these principles. Publication confirmed: Melville House, May 2026.
Eden Medina
Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende's Chile
Medina tells the history of Project Cybersyn, Chile's attempt under Salvador Allende to manage a socialist economy in real time with a cybernetic computer system designed with British theorist Stafford Beer. Neither the peaceful socialist project nor the system survived the 1973 military coup. The book uses this twin experiment to draw enduring lessons about how political visions shape technology and how technology shapes politics.
Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce
Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World
Bhargava and Luce distill seven strategies for transformative social change, from base-building and disruptive movements to electoral and inside-outside approaches. The book grounds each strategy in interviews with leading organizers and in case studies of campaigns that won, including the Fight for 15, the Working Families Party, and Make the Road New York. It is written as a working strategy manual for a new generation of activists.
E. Glen Weyl, Audrey Tang, and the ⿻ Community
Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy
Weyl, a political economist, and Tang, Taiwan's first digital minister, argue that technology can strengthen democracy rather than tear it apart, charting a path between techno-libertarianism and centralized AI governance. The book draws heavily on Taiwan's digital democracy experiments and lays out collaborative tools for governing across difference. It was written in the open by a global community and is copyright-free, readable in full at plurality.net, and also sold in print.
Samantha Sweetwater
True Human: Reimagining Ourselves at the End of Our World
Sweetwater speaks to ecological collapse, economic overshoot, existential technology, and spiritual disorientation as the raw edges of the present moment. She weaves storytelling with cultural history, deep ecology, systemic insight, and spirituality to frame this moment as a catalyst for personal and collective transformation. Publication confirmed, and the book is available in paperback and ebook from major retailers.
Questions, Answered Plainly
The metacrisis is the crisis underneath the other crises: the shared patterns of competition, incentives, and energy use. Those patterns keep producing climate breakdown, AI risk, and political dysfunction faster than we can fix them. Patch one crisis. The machinery makes the next.
Polycrisis is the pileup: many crises hitting at once, making each other worse. Metacrisis is one layer down: how we compete, coordinate, and decide what counts as progress.
Philosophers Nicholas Hedlund and Sean Esbjörn-Hargens coined it around 2015. Daniel Schmachtenberger, Jonathan Rowson, and Zak Stein made it famous from the late 2010s on, mostly through Schmachtenberger's interviews.
Three pieces: Nate Hagens' Superorganism video (15 minutes), his animated film The Great Simplification (32 minutes), and Daniel Schmachtenberger's talk An Introduction to the Metacrisis (1 hour). Then read three glossary entries: metacrisis, superorganism, multipolar trap. One evening, and you can hold your own.
A multipolar trap is when every player does the harmful thing, because holding back means losing to whoever does it anyway. Each choice is rational. The sum is disaster. Arms races, overfishing, and the AI race all follow this shape.
Moloch is a nickname for the force behind multipolar traps: the logic of competition itself. It pushes decent people to sacrifice what they value just to stay in the game. Scott Alexander named it in his 2014 essay Meditations on Moloch, borrowing an ancient god from Allen Ginsberg's Howl.
The Great Simplification is Nate Hagens' name for the era when the economy can't grow on cheap fossil energy anymore. Life turns smaller, slower, and more local. Not an apocalypse. A downshift we can meet prepared or unprepared.
Energy blindness is explaining wealth with money, markets, and talent while ignoring the fossil energy doing the actual work. One barrel of oil does about four and a half years of human labor.
No. Climate change is one symptom, the loudest one. The metacrisis is the pattern that produces it, along with overshoot, AI risk, inequality, and institutional breakdown. Solve climate alone, and the same machinery makes the next crisis.
See it clearly. Then find your people. Consumption tweaks matter less than a community that learns and responds together. That's why we host salons and action labs in New York. Wherever you live: gather humans, not just information.
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