World of woes: How the global polycrisis is shaping Canada’s youth

TORONTO — Amir Faraji has been journaling to stave off despair.

It helps him turn a nebulous sort of hopelessness, which he attributes to the state of the world, into something tangible: words on a page.

For nearly half his life, the 26-year-old Toronto resident has been an observer of tragedy. Police brutality, climate change and human rights violations unfold on his phone screen. And it all seems to be getting worse.

“I could never imagine 10 years ago that I could watch children die on my Instagram,” he said.

“How can anybody watch these things and go about their day normally?”

He’s not alone in feeling this way.

The World Happiness Report suggests young people have become Canada’s unhappiest age group, a complete reversal of long-standing trends. As recently as 2011, those under 30 were the happiest demographic in Canada.

Reasons for their woes may be disparate, but a growing field of research posits that the world is once again in a polycrisis.

It’s a group of interconnected ongoing crises that all affect one another: the climate crisis affects the public health crisis affects the wealth disparity crisis.

For Faraji, he journals about all he sees wrong with the world.

He reflects on Israel’s offensive on Gaza, now held at bay by a ceasefire, and a video he saw last year of a Palestinian mother carrying her dead child’s body. He writes about the structural barriers to success here at home, like the lack of political will to lower the cost of housing because so many Canadians have treated real estate as their primary investment.

“I reached a point where I’m like, ‘It’s really not all my fault,'” Faraji said. “Everybody could be doing something to improve their lives, but these issues are much bigger than just one person can solve.”

In some ways, that’s a comfort. But the feeling of powerlessness is depressing in its own right, he said.

That’s part of what sets this time apart, said Mack Penner, a 32-year-old historian and post-doctoral researcher at the University of Calgary.

In generations past, there were clear resistance movements to the status quo.

He points to the rapid rise of the far right in recent years and draws comparisons to Europe in the 1930s. Back then, he said, there was a strong political movement countering fascism: socialism.

“Nowadays, I think that sense of ideological clash is much less well-developed. You know, there’s sort of an ascendant fascism and then just some muddy unclear something on the other side.”

As recently as 15 years ago, he said, the Occupy Wall Street movement may have bolstered young people’s sense of optimism.

“If you were unhappy with the state of things — maybe you were unhappy about particular things like economic inequality — it at least appeared as though there was a political movement to which you could sort of tie your hopes. Nowadays, I’m not sure that’s true,” Penner said.

This rudderless political moment comes after years of disruption for young adults, who came of age during the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, Penner taught a class called Capitalism in Crisis and asked students to raise their hand if “crisis” is the “defining intellectual, ideological, political experience” of their lives.

“The hands just shot up. Basically everybody in the room is like, ‘Yep, I’m a crisis person. That’s the world that I live in. That’s what I’ve been shaped by.'”

Penner is a few years older than the oldest members of Gen Z, and he said his relationship to crisis was different from how his 22-year-old students feel now. He was in high school during the financial crisis of 2008 and came of age during the Eurozone crisis.

“I felt in some ways insulated from these big geopolitical or geoeconomic developments. I was aware of them — maybe especially aware of the consequences, economic inequality probably being foremost among them,” he said.

Megan Shipman, 36, said that could be because it’s harder to untangle the web of crises today.

Shipman is a fellow at the Cascade Institute, a “think-and-do tank” based out of Royal Roads University in Victoria, and part of a team that’s mapping out the polycrisis.

From the climate to the economy, they’ve identified nine global systems affected by different stresses, including ideological polarization, demographic divergence and economic inequality.

“We don’t think about these things together, but they’re obviously having impacts on one another. And so we’re trying to figure out exactly what those are,” she said.

“We’re not going to be able to fix anything until we can really understand how they work.”

Polycrises have always existed, Shipman said. An oft-cited example is the Black Death, a bubonic plague pandemic that killed as much as half the population in 14th century Europe, upending the economy and disrupting social structures.

“There’s been so many times that the globe has been in crisis, but we think that currently things are so uniquely connected in ways that make it more vulnerable to collapse,” she said.

Imagine if the bubonic plague had spread on airplanes, rather than by ship. If food production had been as centralized then as it is today. If an illness with a similar mortality rate hit during wildfire season, and firefighters weren’t able to cut back the blazes that threaten our infrastructure annually.

The other thing that sets the current polycrisis apart is the availability of information, said Shipman, who has a PhD in neuroscience.

“We know that it hijacks some of our innate biology. 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,” she said.

Now, there’s never-ending access to the worst things happening in the world.

“We don’t know exactly what that’s going to do to us,” Shipman said. “But we have limited cognitive capacity to engage with all the things we have to deal with.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 17, 2025.

Nicole Thompson, The Canadian Press