Oftentimes when my partner and I are on a long drive, or walking the dog in the evening, or at a restaurant waiting for our meals to arrive, one of us will bring up whatever drama is playing through in our heads.

“I have a conundrum,” someone will say. This is usually met with some variation of “oh no” before the other person reluctantly agrees to hear it. Both of us brace for it. It is jarring, though, when the issue presented as a conundrum doesn’t seem all that complicated to the receiver. This has happened frequently enough that we have developed a clearly delineated vocabulary for talking through issues. One can come to the conversation with either a pickle (minor), a conundrum (low-medium), a dilemma (medium-high) or a crisis (sound the alarm). More often than not, most problems, once fully laid out, turn out to be pickles.

We do like to be clear on the level of problem before introducing it, though, as this determines the conversation that follows. So far, neither of us has presented the other with a crisis — perhaps we catch these issues before they hatch, or perhaps, without an algorithm to feed and eyeballs to please, crisis simply seems an unnecessary term to employ.

I’m not a fan of the word crisis. To my mind (and please, write to me if you disagree), it is a word that implies acuteness, short-term-ness, as coming from elsewhere. A crisis sounds like something dropped down by the gods, thrust upon you when least expected, totally outside of your control. But crises rarely appear overnight, and rarely can we claim to have had no hand in making them. Most of the crises we’re now dealing with as a society (climate, housing, geopolitics, polarisation, far-right extremism, inequality) have been brewing for decades, and were the result of policies chosen and decisions made — they did not simply appear one day. Even the ones that seem to come out of nowhere were really there all along. Just ask the epidemiologists what they were talking about in 2019 — they knew the next epidemic was only one mutation away. Crises are also rarely solved overnight (something I don’t need to tell you, as people working on climate change).

My other frustration with the word crisis is that it creates a sense of urgency and impending doom that can only be sustained for so long. We’ve been hearing about the climate crisis for decades now, and even though most of us, finally, accept the science, it’s hard to get particularly worked up about it on a daily basis, because most of us haven’t seen it materially affect our lives. I worry that if we label emerging problems as ‘crises’ and then don’t reach a resolution quickly, or if a significant portion of the population feels as though they have not been affected, we will continue shouting in the void while the rest of the world tunes out.

The real problem with the term ‘crisis’ is that it is an acute word (implying an overnight onset and demanding an immediate response) for chronic problems. It implies both urgency and helplessness simultaneously.

But this is not, in fact, what the word means.

I was surprised to learn that the word crisis comes from the Greek krisis, meaning decision. Now there’s a word I can get behind. A crisis is the consequences of past failures, but it is also the decision point: now something needs to be done; things need to change. I like this framing of crises as decision points: they are where past failures meet future visions — where the past is rectified and the future is created.

To decide is active, not passive. It requires taking responsibility, even when the decision must be made in the face of circumstances beyond one’s control. The decision point is where external circumstances come face to face with your response. Even if the circumstances are out of your control, your response is always within your control.

So used correctly, then, the word crisis might be seen almost as a beacon of hope: an opportunity to take back control, shoulder responsibility, and make a decision.

My point here is that we should be careful when and how we employ the term crisis. It’s not that major issues like housing and climate change are really pickles rather than crises. Certainly, they deserve the gravity the term commands. But when everything is labelled a crisis, and we're already living in an era of polycrisis, how much more can we really absorb?

In many cases, we would be more effective to zoom in on the elements of broader crises that do more closely resemble dilemmas or conundrums; say, the role of carbon credits in corporate decarbonization strategies, or how to transition coal-dependent communities.

We should always remember what the term crisis actually means: it is not something to lament but rather a point at which to make a decision. When we write about a crisis, if we choose to call it that, we must remain strongly centered on the choices at hand and the next steps to take.

We should also be wary of predictions ("in exactly three years, this will reach crisis point" and so on). Unfulfilled prophecies, however well-intentioned, erode credibility. The more we forecast and miss, the less people trust us when it matters.

This has been the issue that has plagued climate change for decades. When people like AOC say “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,” no matter how out of context, people start to get tired. The more we predict doomsday scenarios that don’t come, the less credible we become as communicators, and, frankly, the more tired and anxious and resigned we make our fellow human beings.

We’re all feeling it now with the AI headlines. Who’s sick of it already? We keep hearing simultaneously that AI is dangerous because it’ll run the planet, but also, it will solve all our problems. So far it has done neither of these things and just served to make us all more tired and more anxious.

AI and climate change have a lot in common here. If we want to get people to care in a way that doesn’t further exhaust or confuse them, we would be far better off focusing not on speculative future scenarios, but on the here and now. Highlight the negative effects already occurring in specific areas for specific populations, rather than an enormous global catastrophe. Turn a crisis into a dilemma — one small and tangible enough to feel changeable.

‘Crisis’ is typical of clickbait hype, but we would be far more effective communicators if we avoided the word and instead brought the conversation back down to earth.

📚 Book: Designing Your Life + accompanying 🎙️Podcast: How to Design Your Life in 1 Hour

If you’re in a bit of a life planning mood like I am, I can’t recommend this book and these two authors enough. I first heard them on the podcast episode above, was totally convinced, and went ahead and bought every one of their books. Their philosophy of careers very much aligns with my preferred Cal Newport approach of ‘get good at something and the passion will come’, but this book offers an even more practical framework for thinking about the many possible lives you could have, and designing small steps towards one (or all) of them.

🎙️ Podcast: Stewart Brand, Silicon Valley’s Favorite Prophet, on Life’s Most Important Principle

I’d never heard of this Stewart Brand before, but his philosophy on maintenance (the subject of his latest book) is something I’ve been thinking about for a very long time. I used to struggle with the idea that the simple daily tasks of cooking a meal, washing the dishes, sweeping the floor, were all simply a waste of time because they did not build to anything bigger — they simply maintained. And yet to maintain in this way is so uniquely human, just as to build dams is uniquely beaver-ish and to fly south for the winter is uniquely bird-ish (although humans have caught onto that one too). This was an odd but charming conversation; a little blip of calm in a world that feels whipped into a frenzy.