Hi - first post here so I hope this in the right spot! I know there have been ongoing conversations amongst this group to “diagnose” the metacrisis, so wanted to throw this out there in case it adds any fresh angles. If you prefer a video/ or substack post that’s where they originated 
Is the pending global collapse just humanity’s unhealed attachment wound with nature?
What if the root of basically all modern ills is this: our ancestors—and thus us—carry an unhealed attachment wound with nature? If that’s true, I actually think it’s great news. Because it explains why society feels so divided: we still believe that trauma means someone is at fault—that someone is bad. And so we turn hurt into blame.
That conditionality shows up in every system we build. No matter our morals, intentions, or “sides,” we recreate the same structure: connection becomes compliance. You have to perform to belong. We turn each other into resources instead of relationships, and put up walls instead of being vulnerable. Most of us end up not living as our true selves, but performing a version of belonging that’s uncomfortable at best and downright miserable at worst. (And those who “rise” in these systems—including perpetrators—are simply the ones most able to tolerate the dissonance.)
You can see this everywhere:
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Capitalism says you must work to live, but work consumes your life.
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Politics says you’re one of us, but misstep or point out inconsistencies and you’ll be attacked.
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Religion and spirituality say the universe or god is love, but you must work hard for transcendence. If you can’t, you’ll never find it.
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Patriarchy and the nuclear family say they will protect and provide, but only if you stay small, obedient, and grateful.
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**Colonialism—and even some activism—**say they will save or liberate you, but only if you change completely or believe exactly as they do.
That creates a double bind: no matter what you choose, you lose. To belong, you must sacrifice part of your truth. If you don’t, you risk exile or abandonment. The system demands you deny part of yourself just to fit in, just to be loved. And yet—we are a relational species. We need connection.
But here’s the absurd, mortifying, and beautiful thing: attachment wounds are natural, and they’re also fixable. Healing doesn’t start with retribution. It starts with empathy—beginning with yourself where you didn’t receive it; then, I think, for your loved ones and ancestors; and maybe lastly for those who hurt you. And it starts with being true to yourself.
Whatever harm you’ve experienced, it isn’t personal when you zoom out. There aren’t inherently good or evil people. There are good and bad actions—things that cause harm and things that don’t. But there’s no inherent moral superiority of one being over another. Only natural results of prior conditions. I know this because I lived it. For a long time, I blamed my parents for the trauma I carried. But as I healed, I started to see that they weren’t trying to hurt me. In fact, they probably couldn’t even see that they were doing it. They were caught in their own wiring, their own wounds, their own cultural blinders—which collided spectacularly with what I needed given my wiring.
My trauma was its own strange swirl of ancestral histories, wiring mismatches, untreated illness, trauma, unique adaptations, and honestly, a lot of pure chance. And now, strangely, every gift I have to undo these wounds also comes from what my ancestors gave me. That realization took the wind out of the blame game. People are still responsible for harm, yes—but it isn’t really anyone’s fault in the sense of them being a “bad person.” We all carry the key to heal within ourselves.
As I go further back, I’m trying to practice compassion and love even for those who did horrific things. My ancestors include white enslavers. I really think they convinced themselves they were doing the right thing—but I also think their abhorrent actions must have caused real guilt that lived in their bodies and separated them from their own selves and bodies. Because they couldn’t metabolize that contradiction, they buried it. Instead, they created layer upon layer of external justification, until the justifications themselves hardened into systems. They codified the wound into law, culture, religion.
The deeper problem wasn’t that they were inherently monsters. The problem was that they mistook following rules for goodness itself—and in doing so, became monsters even while trying to be “right” or “good;” in fact, because they were trying to be right or good, I’d argue. Once goodness equals rule-following, you need ever more complex rules to sustain the mirage.
If you go back even further, I think this is where it all began. Humans originally lived in animist relationship: the world was alive—trees, rivers, animals, ancestors, all of it kin. There was still pain, loss, and death. But everything was reciprocal. Imperfect, but relational. Then came the randomness of climate and nature: a drought, a flood, a meteor strike. Morally neutral, but catastrophic. Suddenly, in some places, the land stopped giving back. Some level of this could be absorbed—but beyond a threshold, individuals and communities couldn’t metabolize the rupture. It pushed them beyond capacity.
So we went into trauma responses: fight, flight, freeze, fawn. Out of fear, we turned to control. We built conditions into relationships. We created rules, hierarchies, classes, religions. We sacrificed parts of ourselves—and sometimes literal human beings—in an attempt to control the uncontrollable. We obeyed to be blessed, disobeyed and we were cursed. At the root of it all, we demoted the earth and each other from living partners to dead resources. Every system since has been a replay of that wound.
But here’s the hopeful part: if that’s the problem, the solution is actually simple. The foundation is love and empathy. Everything else flows from that. And the first place to start is yourself: loving who you actually are, not the fake version created to appease society’s standards. You don’t have to do it perfectly. Just a little is enough to start shifting things.
To be clear, saying there’s a “solution” doesn’t mean ending pain or avoiding destruction—it means saving what’s possible by mending what’s fractured in our relationships, through love and empathy in action, as an going process rather than a place we ever arrive. But the wildest part? It returns you to wholeness. It returns you to yourself—and to others.