Polycrisis, Metacrisis, Systemic Risk: A Definitional Field Guide to the Reality of Everything

This blog post presents a short field guide to the definitions of global catastrophic risk, systemic risk, polycrisis, and metacrisis, arguing that the terms are frequently used interchangeably but that they describe distinct layers of humanity’s predicament. The author organises the definitions as a chain of four questions: what could go badly wrong? (global catastrophic risk); how do failures spread? (systemic risk); how do crises compound? (polycrisis); and why do we keep generating a fragile world? From this final question, the author defines the metacrisis as the layer beyond both crisis and polycrisis — the ultimate, upstream behavioural, institutional, and evolutionary drivers that keep generating and re-generating the whole predicament. The author highlights the practical relevance of this distinction, arguing that naming the space is the difference between fighting symptoms one at a time and acting on the mechanisms that produce them.