We say everything is connected when it comforts us. But what if our crises are connected too?
Angelia Muller
There’s a widespread understanding across disciplines and traditions that everything is connected. In systems theory, ecology, neuroscience, and physics, this is foundational: no system exists in isolation.
At the same time, many people have arrived at the same conclusion through experience; grief, psychedelics, illness, intimacy, or deep presence. The boundaries between self and world are more porous than we were taught.
We talk about everything being connected when it’s comforting—when we’re meditating, hugging, when we are in self transcendence.
But if we were to operate from first principles and propose that connection is real, then it surely doesn’t just show up in harmony. It would show up in dysfunction, too.
Meaning: our crises are not inherently isolated. The climate crisis is connected to the mental health crisis. Economic instability links to relational breakdown, burnout, and cultural disorientation…these aren’t separate problems.
In the Daoist lens, they are symptoms of a system out of rhythm.
Assuming that the problems are actually connected, then the solutions have to be connected too. Healing can’t happen in silos. Systems have to be rewoven, not just patched at the edges.
A Daoist Framework
Daoism suggests that the integrity of a system depends on the quality of its relationships. Not every connection is beneficial. Not every interaction leads to balance. The work is not simply to connect, but to come into right relationship with time, with the body, with others, with technology, with change itself.
Today’s crises are not isolated problems, but expressions of misaligned relationships. What we’re calling a “crisis” may actually be a reminder: that the way we’ve been relating-economically, ecologically, politically, personally-has moved out of rhythm with life.
When we move out of rhythm with the whole, symptoms appear in many places at once. What looks like multiple breakdowns may actually be different expressions of the same imbalance. If we take interconnection seriously, not as an abstract idea, but as a guiding principle, then these crises begin to reveal themselves not as isolated emergencies, but as signs of disconnection with the larger pattern of life.
The pattern beneath all crisis is disconnection.
Disconnection from ecosystems, from each other, from inner coherence, from time, from meaning. When people are disconnected from their own nervous systems, they become more reactive. When communities are disconnected, trust erodes. When economies are disconnected from ecological limits, collapse becomes inevitable.
Disconnection breeds fragmentation, and fragmentation makes repair almost impossible because no one is looking at the whole.
Ming Zhu of the Systems Flourishing Foundation has referred to this as a "polycrisis"—an entangled set of crises that stem from a breakdown in relational integrity with the self. Riane Eisler speaks to the need for cultural transformation toward partnership systems, rather than domination systems. And thinkers like Vanessa Andreotti have illuminated how decolonial and systems literacies are required to truly understand and navigate these layered breakdowns.
From that root, many downstream crises emerge. Here are five that feel most real to me; not just because of their content, but because of the pattern they share: fragmentation, overwhelm, and a severing from life.
By attempting to name what has gone out of tune, and what might come back into coherence-not through control, but through relationship.
1. The Meta-Crisis: The Crisis of Disconnection
At the root of many modern crises is a breakdown in fundamental forms of connection-between humans and the natural world, between individuals and their own bodies, between communities, and within the self.
This disconnection isn’t abstract; it shows up in measurable ways: declining biodiversity, rising rates of anxiety and isolation, social fragmentation, and loss of meaning.
It’s not simply that people feel disoriented. In many cases, we’ve lost a functional sense of attunement- an ability to perceive and respond appropriately to internal signals, relational dynamics, and environmental cues. Without that baseline of connection-physiological, relational, ecological-our systems lose coherence. Fragmentation becomes the norm, and our capacity to respond to complex challenges diminishes.
This is a loss of harmony with the Dao: the natural way of things. Disconnection is not a moral failing but a signal that we are no longer living in accordance with deeper rhythms.
2. The Ecological Crisis
The climate crisis is often framed as a technical or engineering challenge, but it can also be understood as a form of relational breakdown. The Earth’s systems are not simply warming-they are becoming increasingly volatile and difficult to predict.
What’s unfolding is the unraveling of long-evolved interdependencies: microbial, fungal, atmospheric, ecological. Many of these relationships are not fully understood, and some lack adequate scientific language. Yet they form the foundation of planetary stability. As human activity continues to disrupt these interwoven systems-through extraction, pollution, and biodiversity loss-we are not just altering the climate; we are destabilizing the web of life that sustains us.
From a Daoist lens, this reflects a fundamental violation of balance. The Earth is not a resource to dominate, but a living system to harmonize with. When we act without regard for interdependence, we create imbalance-and imbalance eventually expresses itself as instability.
3. Technological Crisis of Acceleration
We are introducing powerful, disruptive technologies into society faster than we can collectively process their implications. Artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and digital economies are evolving at a pace that outstrips our systems of governance, ethics, and cultural adaptation, creating a growing gap between what we can build and what we are prepared to integrate.
This is not a critique of technology itself. Acceleration isn’t inherently bad. But the current trajectory lacks the corresponding development of frameworks-social, ethical, psychological-that can hold these shifts with depth and care.
Overstimulation: People are now exposed to more content, stimuli, and decision points in a single day than previous generations encountered in weeks. This overwhelms the nervous system, impairs attention, and contributes to chronic stress and cognitive fatigue.
Ethical confusion: Technologies like AI and gene editing are raising foundational questions about agency, authorship, and responsibility. Existing ethical frameworks are outdated or insufficient, and there is little shared consensus on what constitutes responsible use-even among experts.
Loss of shared meaning: Personalization algorithms on digital platforms have created informational silos. People inhabit increasingly divergent realities, which undermines collective sense-making and erodes social trust-particularly when engagement, not truth, drives what is seen.
Unresolved alignment problem: We still haven’t solved the fundamental issue of aligning advanced technologies, especially AI with human values and social well-being. Without this, the risk of scaled harm remains high: biased algorithms, destabilized labor markets, synthetic biological misuse, and systems we don’t fully understand acting in ways we can’t predict.
In Daoist terms, this is technology without ritual, innovation without rhythm. When growth moves faster than integration, the center cannot hold. Without wisdom traditions to absorb the shock, acceleration becomes destabilizing.
4. Crisis of Meaning and Initiation
We are living in a time of cultural disintegration-where shared narratives, values, and meaning-making structures have eroded, and nothing equally coherent has replaced them. There is no longer a common story that helps people locate themselves in the world or understand what life stages-grief, transformation, aging, death-are asking of them.
In many cultures, rites of passage into adulthood, parenthood, loss, or spiritual responsibility have been stripped away or commercialized. Without these frameworks, individuals are left to navigate existential thresholds alone. The result is fragmentation of the psyche, and widespread attempts to self-initiate-through spiritual seeking, breakdown, reinvention, or retreat.
This helps explain why we’re seeing mass spiritual awakenings alongside mass burnout. People are sensing that something deeper is required of them but without the scaffolding of initiation, they are left to improvise, often under conditions of isolation or distress. The system isn’t providing maps for transformation, so people are trying to draw their own in real time.
The demand for meaning hasn’t disappeared. The infrastructure for meaning has. And until that is rebuilt, we will continue to see people either disengage entirely or push themselves to the edge in search of something coherent to belong to.
A Daoist view reminds us that initiation is not about conquering or achieving, but about harmonizing with cycles of change. When these rhythms are forgotten, people suffer not from lack of effort, but from lack of orientation to the Tao of their own becoming.
5. Crisis of Gender and Polarity
The relational field between masculine and feminine energies-across identities, dynamics, and cultures-is in a state of transition. Legacy structures rooted in patriarchy are losing legitimacy, but coherent alternatives have yet to emerge. As a result, many people are left without a stable framework for understanding gendered dynamics, power, intimacy, or partnership.
In the absence of clear cultural templates, responses tend to polarize: some cling to traditional roles, others adopt symbolic or aesthetic versions of archetypes without lived depth. Performance replaces integration. And conversations about gender, embodiment, and polarity become increasingly charged or incoherent.
This is not just a social or ideological issue-it’s also somatic and relational. People are searching for a way to inhabit their full selves in connection with others-without reverting to domination, collapse, or avoidance. But without guidance or grounded models, that search often leads to confusion, mimicry, or burnout.
Daoism holds that true polarity is dynamic, not fixed. Masculine and feminine are not identities to perform, but principles to balance-like yin and yang, in constant motion. When we stop treating polarity as static, we begin to explore it as a living interplay, capable of restoring wholeness rather than reinforcing division.
What Comes After Diagnosis?
If the crises we face are symptoms of disconnection, then the work ahead is not just structural—it’s relational. It’s not about fixing the world from our minds, but sensing into it from within. Feeling for what wants to come back into rhythm.
Daoism doesn’t offer solutions in the conventional sense. It offers orientation.
It asks: Where is there excess? Where is there depletion? What wants to move, but hasn’t been allowed to? What wants to rest, but keeps being forced to perform?
We don’t need a blueprint for the future. We need a way of listening that can hold complexity without collapse. We need to remember how to move with the current, not against it. We need vibe coding. More vibing.
To begin again—individually, collectively, ecologically—we might not need to control more. We might just need to relate differently.
Start small. Pay attention to something you normally rush past: your breath, a tree, a tone in someone’s voice. Instead of reacting, pause. Instead of optimizing, feel. This isn’t about fixing everything. It’s about returning to right relationships, one relationship at a time.
