There is a strand of exhaustion that does not respond to rest. No matter how early you put yourself to bed, no matter how deeply you sleep, you wake up with a deep weariness. No breath-work, no yoga, no radical afternoon naps can lift this heaviness. The air feels thick and life feels claustrophobic even when you’re alone.
This is not a personal failing. This is not because you are uniquely doing something wrong here. This is a result of living in a time of incredible suffering and uncertainty, a time where the media offers access to viewing it all 24/7, and a time with little community and little ritual to hold us through it.
What We Mean When We Say “Polycrisis”
The term polycrisis was popularized by historian Adam Tooze and has since been taken up by the World Economic Forum, climate scientists, and geopolitical analysts. The word sounds clinical — the kind of thing discussed in white papers over bad conference coffee. But what it describes is deeply, viscerally human.
A polycrisis is not merely multiple crises occurring simultaneously. It is the condition in which crises compound each other — where climate breakdown fuels food insecurity, which fuels political instability, which fuels displacement, which fuels the collapse of the social trust you would need to solve the climate breakdown. The feedback loops are not metaphorical. They are structural.
We are living inside a set of interlocking emergencies: ecological collapse, democratic backsliding, the loneliness epidemic, AI-driven epistemic chaos, economic instability, the fraying of institutional legitimacy, genocide and war, the loss of human rights, the long aftermath of pandemic, and so many more. Each one alone would be destabilizing. Together, they constitute something closer to a civilizational unmooring.
What no is talking about, however, is that this is also a grief event of historic proportions.
The Losses That Don’t Make Obituaries
We have practices for grieving people. We have funerals, shivas, wakes, candlelight vigils. We have cemeteries we can visit and anniversaries that mark the movement of time. We bring casseroles. We say I’m so sorry for your loss and often, we really mean it.
We do not know how to grieve a glacier. We do not know how to grieve the level of uncertainty we live with today, the extinction of another species we never met, the slow-motion collapse of a future we assumed we were owed. We do not know how to grieve the version of democracy we were taught to believe in, or the sense that institutions can be trusted, or a future our kids and grow, learn, and thrive in.
These are ambiguous losses — a term coined by family therapist Pauline Boss to describe grief that has no clear object, no body, no funeral, no social permission to mourn. Ambiguous loss is notoriously difficult to process because the culture offers no script, no practices, no place for it. There is no bereavement leave for the loss of ecological stability. There is no casserole for the death of a livable future. There is also no actual closure, something that a physical death offers.
And so we metabolize it in other ways: as anxiety, as numbness, as doom-scrolling, as rage, as escape through addiction, as a steady flatness that settles over everything. As the exhaustion that doesn’t respond to rest.
Why Grief Without Ritual Becomes Pathology
Every culture in human history has understood something that modern secular Western society has largely forgotten: grief requires a container.
Grief is not a problem to be solved or a feeling to be pushed through. It is a process — biological, psychological, spiritual, social — that requires time, witness, and expression. Without ritual, grief does not disappear. It waits and it metabolizes into the body, into relationship, into politics, into patterns of control and violence.
Grief requires our participation. It asks for our attention, our intention, and a structure trustworthy enough for it to land, be held, be known for sometime. When that structure is absent, when there is no ritualized space to bring our heartbreak, grief (and all the emotions associated with it) go underground.
This is the wisdom of the Dagara people. The wisdom that Sobonfu Some brought to the United States because the elders in her community understood something we had lost. They understood the polycrisis to be a direct symptom of modern western people having forgotten how to grieve.
We are living in a civilization doing enormous amounts of underground grieving.
Unprocessed collective grief has a political expression. It looks like nihilism. It looks like the appeal of authoritarian simplicity when complexity has become unbearable. It looks like the strange aggression of people who are, underneath, terrified. It looks like the dissociation of a generation raised on doom-scrolling devices. It looks like the way we have begun to treat each without care, without empathy, without the curiosity and commitment to understanding people who have different views than we do. It looks like isolation and loneliness. It looks war, extraction, and increasingly outrageous grabs for power and control.
What Ritual Does That Therapy Cannot
Let me be clear: I love therapy! This work can be incredibly powerful in supporting ourselves to take more accountability in our lives and ultimately have more agency. Medication, when needed, is incredibly valuable. Individual psychological support can make massive changes in our lives for the better. Grief ritual is a completely different medicine… a complimentary one… but a unique one.
Therapy is one person speaking to another in a private room. Ritual is communal by nature. Communal in connection to our human family and beyond human family. It acknowledges our interconnectedness to the Earth, to the ancestors, to guides and spirits that support us. Grief rituals build experiences of belonging that establish a trust between people that we rarely feel in modern day. It reminds us that some losses are not individual, they are felt and grieved by all of us. The polycrisis is not your personal problem. It belongs to all of us. And losses that belong to all of us require grieving that belongs to all of us.
Ritual also speaks the language of the body in a way that talk often cannot. It uses movement, breath, beauty, song, stone, fire, water, and silence. Ancient traditions understood that the body needs to process what the mind cannot fully comprehend. Lamentation traditions — keening in Irish culture, crying songs in Aboriginal communities, the wailing walls and grief processions of countless peoples — were not primitive superstitions. They were sophisticated technologies for doing exactly what we are failing to do now: moving grief through the communal body so that it does not continue to calcify into greater desctruction.
What might this look like in a secular, pluralistic context? It is already happening. Death cafes where strangers gather to speak openly about mortality. Climate grief circles using practices inspired by Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects. Ecopsychology retreats. Grief tending practices drawing on Sobonfu Some and Francis Weller’s work.Artists making lamentation public — murals, processions, songs for the dead forests.
None of this is sufficient. But all of it is pointing toward something necessary.
The Radical Intimacy of Bearing Witness
At the center of any grief ritual is an act that sounds simple and is, in practice, extraordinarily rare: someone stays.
In the era of the polycrisis, one of our deepest collective wounds is the sense that reality is too much to face — that if we looked directly at what is being lost, we would be annihilated by it. And so we look away. We produce, we distract, we perform busyness, we stay in the shallows of small talk.
Grief ritual asks us to stay. To sit with what is true. To say out loud, with others what has been lost, what we are actively losing.
This is, in a culture of managed positivity and productivity theater, a genuinely radical act. It refuses the false choices between despair and denial. It insists that we can look at the magnitude of what we are losing — and not be destroyed by it, but changed by it. Opened by it. Made more capable of love and action, not less.
What We Lose If We Skip This
There is a temptation — especially among activists, builders, and the solutions-oriented — to see grief work as a detour. To feel that we do not have time to mourn when there is so much to do. That grief is a luxury, or worse, a form of giving up.
I personally believe that grief is the way towards a more beautiful, loving, creative future where people feel they belong and they trust each other to stick together through uncertain times.
Grief that is not processed does not stay still. It shapes what we build, what we can imagine, what we are capable of sustaining. Burned-out activists, revolutionary movements that eat their own, communities that cannot maintain solidarity under pressure — these are often grief-failure problems, not always organizational ones (though it can be both). When we have not processed our losses, we act from fear and scarcity (I know this for myself well!). When we commit to doing the work of grief, we often find a fierce, clear, resilient, liberated kind of unshakeable love. That doesn’t mean we don’t stumble, that we don’t struggle, nor that the path is comfortable, but it is the work of change and it is the work of revealing what matters most to us.
You do not grieve what you do not love. And love, properly metabolized, is the most powerful fuel and it’s one that does not run out.
An Invitation
I do not know what your losses are. I do not know which part of the world’s unraveling you carry most heavily — whether it is the climate, the politics, the loneliness, the loss of a future you were promised, or something more intimate woven into all of it.
But I believe you are carrying something. I believe most of us are. And I believe that the strange, collective numbness of this historical moment — the doom-scrolling, the burnout, the low-grade terror that has become the water we swim in — is, underneath all its modern symptoms, an ancient thing.
It is a people in need of ritual. Of witness. Of somewhere to bring their sorrow and have it met. Of belonging through this process.
The polycrisis is real. The losses are real. And one of the most important things we can do right now — not instead of action, but as the ground from which action becomes possible — is to learn, again, how to grieve.
Join us:
This weekend a beautiful grief ritual is happening by a grief tender, mother, and dear friend that I trust deeply in creating and holding this space. Learn more and register here. You can follow her on Substack here: The Grief Witch
This summer I am co-facilitating a women and femmes grief ritual inspired by Sobonfu Some and Joanna Macy (among others). Learn more and register here.
Ongoing I co-host a monthly Wailing Ceremony on the second Tuesdays of the month. Learn more and register here.
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This is powerfully written! I felt a deep sigh in my body of understanding- this is this exhaustion. Thank you for your wisdom