Waking Up in the Polycrisis

Waking Up in the Polycrisis is a fiercely compassionate, radically honest guidebook for young people coming of age in an era of cascading global crises. Climate breakdown, political extremism, mental health collapse, economic precarity, AI acceleration—these forces don’t arrive one at a time. They collide, compound, and converge. This is the polycrisis, and this book meets it head-on.

Rather than offering false hope or empty platitudes, Waking Up in the Polycrisis invites readers into a brave orientation process. With language that is sharp, poetic, and emotionally grounded, it offers frameworks for navigating complex realities—through grief, rage, confusion, imagination, and back again. Each chapter explores a stage of awakening with narrative essays, metaphor-rich reflections, and embodied co-regulation cues for nervous system support.

This is not a survival manual in the traditional sense—it’s a nervous system map, a cultural compass, and an invitation to reclaim attention and agency. Grounded in systems thinking, trauma-informed care, civic ethics, and youth-centered design, the book is as spiritually resonant as it is politically alert.

Structured as a spectrum of emotional and developmental experiences, the book offers a full-body orientation for what it means to grow up inside the polycrisis—and to find meaning without bypass or despair.

Waking Up in the Polycrisis was written by Aram & the Algorithms—a collaborative experiment in authorship between human systems designer Aram Saroyan Armstrong and generative AI. This collective identity acknowledges the emerging relationship between human discernment and synthetic intelligence, and models a form of transparent, responsible co-creation.

This book is ideal for use in youth circles, high school and college classrooms, mutual aid groups, intergenerational learning environments, and independent study. It will resonate with readers drawn to The Body Keeps the Score, Braiding Sweetgrass, How to Do Nothing, and The Dawn of Everything.

Rather than numbing readers to the scale of the crisis, this book honors their intuition: You are not broken. The world is. And your presence here matters more than you know.