Young people in Canada are now reporting record levels of unhappiness, a sudden reversal from trends seen just over a decade ago.
A new Canadian Press article points not to a single cause, but to a growing awareness that the world faces of Polycrisis, a web of interconnected crises including climate change, economic inequality, political polarization, disease and more.
Megan Shipman, a research fellow on the Polycrisis team at Cascade Institute, explains in the article that the snowball effect of compounding crises can feel overwhelming, especially for young people facing an uncertain future.
“We don’t [typically] think about these things together," Shipman explains, "but they’re obviously having impacts on one another."
This means that young people are experiencing these multiple crises increasingly a single, ongoing (and possibly incurable) condition.
Many of today's young people have come of age during repeated global disruptions, while being continually exposed to images and information about crisis through social media and digital platforms. As Shipman says in the article, humans have limited capacity to process sustained exposure to negative stimuli, and the long-term consequences of living amid a polycrisis are still poorly understood.
"We know that it hijacks some of our innate biology," she explains. "We evolved in an environment where there wasn't so much stimuli ... and where the most negative or most important stimulus took all of our attention."
At Cascade, Shipman and colleagues map how global systems interact, because understanding those interactions is the first step to slowing, preventing or even reversing crises.
