The Age of Polycrisis

This is the Year We’re Supposed to Pretend Everything’s Back to Normal. But Is It?

Image Credit: Marcio Jose Sanchez

Is it just me, or there’s a distinctly…strange…vibe…in the air at the beginning of this new year? I didn’t know quite what to call it, until my lovely wife summed it up concisely. “We’re all,” she said, matter-of-factly, “pretending that everything’s going back to normal.” Ahhh. She was, I thought to myself, right.

The sense of going-back-to-normal in in the air. In a weird way, though. In the sense of forced cheer. A party that you have to go to, maybe, but that you’re secretly dreading. Friends you want to break up with, but you smile and nod along anyways, for the time being. We’re pretending that things are going back to normal, a whole lot of us. Meanwhile, plenty of us are being dragged along, kicking and screaming, “no, things aren’t remotely back to normal!” But we’re being yanked along, by a riptide. The social current of now is feigning normality.

Do you sense it a bit? If you don’t, well…what do I mean by all that? The question is what don’t I mean? But we’ll come to that.

Let’s begin with the economy. There it is, and we’re told reassuring things like “inflation’s coming down!” Or ‘the job market’s booming!” Meanwhile, layoffs are sweeping the economy yet again, rippling outward from tech, an early warning sign kind of sector, to industry, towards finance, and more. And while inflation is coming down, that doesn’t really mean a whole lot — sure, it’s going to fall from the astronomical highs it hit earlier, above 10%, to maybe just below them, 8%, perhaps 7% for a while. But it’s not going away going away. It’s not remotely going back to the way it was, as in decades of relative price stability, the post-war normal, more or less — and so prices creeping, sometimes skyrocketing, steadily upwards, which is what steady inflation of maybe 8%, sometimes 10% means, is here to stay. Especially for the stuff that’s basic necessities — food, energy, water, healthcare and so forth. That, of course, is because…

We’re hitting the planet’s boundaries. And yet that’s another thing we’re pretending’s gone back to normal. Take a hard look around, and nobody much — except maybe you, me, and Antonio Guterres are acting like we’re in an existential emergency regarding the future of human civilization. But carbon emissions continue their relentless march upwards, threatening, well, everything, from food, water, air, and medicine, to shelter, to habitability, to democracy itself, which depends on all those things.