Maps & Meaning in the Metacrisis
Where Multi-Level Sensemaking Bleeds Into Living Meaning
Throughout my journey as a creator of men’s initiatives, I’ve been wrestling with the tension between inner work and outer world, striving towards a variety of space and spirit that allows these domains to be brought into alignment.
I’ve watched how the predicament of global crisis creates a calibration problem for men between their expansive perception of the crises of the world and their personal agency and orientation. Through podcasts, substacks and books we’re provided with an unprecedented understanding of the world. However, if we don’t find an address of these problems in our own lives we have no way to ground or channel that energy. How do we find a hero’s journey in the context of metacrisis?
I remember a friend of mine years ago who was deeply animated by communities and podcasts sensemaking the metacrisis but had no idea how to land it or respond to it. His job seemed quotidian, his new ideas hadn’t translated into a deepened engagement in his locality. Through sharing space with him again and again, I began to realise where the real thrust of this men’s work needed to go. To bridge the incredible wisdom in the web into an active re-orientation in our personal realities. I’ve journeyed for many years into the exploration of this bridging with collaborators in the liminal web like
trying to calibrate the digital-global-liminal and the earthy, local, practical.This calibration is something that I believe can only be done on a direct communal basis, in dialogue and over time. Yet when we can find a path to understanding our engagement in family, community and our own creative work as our most powerful response then we can begin to channel some of that metacrisis charge into our lives. Our personal, local agency becomes our address of the world as we find it. Whether gazing into the eyes of our child, sitting in prayer or building our creative kingdom, this right alignment can saturate our efforts with true meaningfulness.
In many ways, this core problem in men’s work reflects a core opportunity in the metacrisis: to find an alive alignment between our inner call and purpose and the big-picture. The collective breakdown is now apparent, our own personal transformations and rebirths are already at hand. But how can this personal journey help to bring about the potential of a cultural, social, and structural Second Renaissance?
In pursuit of addressing these questions, we staged a Month of the Metacrisis, and within it a session on mapping the metacrisis. It was an edge for me as facilitator, as I offered a completely experimental workshop, trusting that our resonant men would appreciate its relevance.
I brought forward a four-level insight process to help us think in a multi-level way about the multi-dimensionality of the metacrisis. I gleaned support for designing this in dialogue with
of Life Itself and the Second Renaissance Forum. I then refined the idea by myself and in dialogue with Grok AI.We began by collectively honing in on a given element of the metacrisis to focus on (such as the climate crisis; epistemic/sensemaking crisis; AI; existential risk ), then broke out into groups and each devised a working definition of the crisis before exploring our theme ‘The Meaning Crisis’ through these 4 levels of analysis:
Symptomatic: Identifying the immediate manifestations, challenges, and threats.
Systemic: Considering structural drivers, systems, and incentives that contribute.
Interconnective: Identifying other crises that support and intersect with this one.
Paradigmatic: Contemplating what underlying worldviews, mythos, ontologies, and consciousness underlie it?
The session, although compact, went well and offered a small step toward introducing more of the multi-layered thinking that I believe we need as men in order to create a culture of deeper sensemaking. Key to this was the call to sensemake collaboratively, working toward a higher synthesis together.
In reflecting on the exercise together, it occurred that this multi-level mapping could be usefully be brought to bear on ourselves — bringing the metacrisis home.
For example, clarifying what shows up for me symptomatically may be the first step to come out of confusion and into integrity of communication about where I am in my own journey or personal crisis. Many men are still impoverished in their capacity to communicate their relational experience with transparency and precision. For many reasons, this leaves them less connected with other people, and less capable of relating to the metacrisis in a resourceful way.
However, if we sink deeper into what’s showing up in our own experience — discovering where we’re out of integrity; out of health; out of purpose; and out of aliveness — we soon find that our problems are also systemic. Beyond a certain level of building personal integrity, we’ll rub up against systems, organisational cultures, jobs and structural incentives that serve to keep us out of integrity. For this reason, personal work is insufficient. We have to take a wider view.
To address systematic dis-integrity, we need systems in integrity. The builders of the future need to, step-by-step, build and move into new containers, places, businesses, and organizations that support our evolution, that create real value and empower us to gradually exit systemic bondage. The scope of that project is a large one, since as we achieve the miracle of creating work, community and income that feels in integrity, we are then confronted with being embedded in massive, highly inert systems: Debt and attention-based economies, an extractive financial system, ‘surveillance capitalist’ structures which monitor and monetise our every move. These big systems are incredibly difficult to transcend and require a much higher threshold of collective action.
The collective action required for systemic liberation demands that we form alliances which afford a high-fidelity flow of energy, insight, and resources across different fields and communities. If the polycrises and metacrisis are interconnected, it follows that going beyond them requires interconnected fields of aligned and agentic movers. Men’s work is one potent context that can foster connections across fields, and there are many more. The key recognition for me in this is that we can build trust and friendship through a dynamic combination of showing up for sacred inner work together and building together — coming to know each other more deeply and integrate more parts of ourselves through both.
The depth to which we can participate in this work together and meaningfully realise its potential for transformation is paradigmatic. In other words, it’s not simply a matter of plugging more data points in our current way of being and model of the world: It’s about a transformation in our perception of reality. The matrix of paradigms and beliefs that underlie our day-to-day life significantly shapes what is possible within it.
Men’s work is paradigmatic because you cannot transform the self without going beyond it. Equally, you cannot go beyond the self without letting go and coming into relationship with deeper realities. No amount of systemic mapping or understanding the problem is sufficient to the task of paradigmatic transformation. This is the work of religion (as consistent sacred communal orientation), philosophy (as the cultivation and love of wisdom), and initiation (embarking on and facilitating transformative journeys). As argued in the work of Zak Stein and Marc Gafni, the metacrisis is at its depth paradigmatic. It’s about our fundamental relationship to value and our participation in a story of reality.
As such, there is no meaningful mapping of the metacrisis without getting down to the meaning in the metacrisis. Without the most fiery, quivering, alive sense of meaning, maps alone are insufficient to the task. For it is with very lifeblood of our meaning that we illuminate new maps of possibility.
—Jacob Kishere
