What is a Polycrisis and How to Overcome It

A polycrisis is a profound feeling of fear and helplessness due to economic, environmental, and technological (AI) uncertainties. Uncertainty in just one of these areas is enough to destabilize anyone, but when all three converge it can feel completely overwhelming. One of the ways we deal with this actually makes things worse. Seeking more information quickly turns into doom scrolling. Watching more news and accumulating more information that supports our fears is not healthy. Our “What if” thinking generally hyper focuses on the worst outcome. As we gain more bad news, we fuel our doomsday fears and validate our worst case scenario. Sadly, in today’s world, finding trusted sources of balanced information is becoming harder and harder. With that said, we do need to become better at vetting our sources and sourcing facts without emotion so that we can better understand reality. Even our most trusted news source needs to be vetted for bias. If we are getting our news from the internet or even government news sources, then we must be aware that the primary motivation is clicks and views.

When studied, the world is informed that bad news gets clicked on, read, and shared 30 times more than positive news. This is a big driver of how news stories and posts are created. We need to question the purpose of the source. Does this source truly want to inform me or is its primary goal engagement? Is the news that it is reporting balanced, objective, and fair? Does it share more than one point of view? AI is a great example of this. If you search news about AI taking over jobs, you can find lists of jobs that AI has taken over or will take over. One at the top of every list for jobs AI has taken over is copy editing. I personally know the owner of an editing company, and while they do use AI, they have not laid off a single person. They still need a human in the loop. We need to ask ourselves what first-hand knowledge we have of anyone losing their job because of AI. I am not denying that it is happening; I am merely sharing that it is not happening at the rate reported. Many people laid off on the first wave of AI job takeovers have been rehired. AI is not going anywhere, but there is time to pivot to a job that is not under threat from AI.

If the fear of AI is more existential, then look at realistic timelines for when AI will have the type of roles you fear. Right now, AI does not actually “think”, meaning it is not able to act in the way that drives most existential fears. We can do the same process when it comes to climate change. There are people in the world working to solve or reverse some of the damage to the climate and are making great strides. Balancing what we know about climate change with what is known about climate recovery is essential to having a balanced understanding of both. Also doing what you can to limit your negative impact on the climate is empowering and reduces feelings of helplessness. When it comes to the economy, most people are more impacted by microeconomics than global economics. Microeconomics focuses on the behavior of individuals and firms in localized areas. Local trends are more likely to impact you personally than country-wide, regional, or global behaviors. Large-scale economic trends tend to not directly impact the individual. Industry changes in our local area or country tend to have more of an impact. If we balance our focus between good and bad news as well as local and global news, we can craft a more realistic picture of the future and avoid falling into a state of polycrisis.