I'm writing this with the windows shut. The sky outside has that strange orange-gray cast that once felt like an anomaly and now feels like a season. Somewhere, a fire is burning that I'll never see, and its smoke has found its way into my lungs anyway, whether I asked for the connection or not.

Turn on the news, and you'll see a war that drags on, a democracy that feels like it's being held together with tape, and more people than I can count who are quietly, exhaustingly stretched by the financial and emotional cost of just getting through a month. It's tempting to put these issues into separate categories like climate, politics, or economics, each with its own experts, villains, and solutions. I understand the temptation. It's easier to handle that way.

I don't think it's true, though. I think we're seeing one wound that appears in four places.

The Comfort of Separate Crises

There's a real relief in believing our problems are unrelated. If the smoke in my lungs, the war on the news, and my neighbor's second job are unconnected, then each one is somebody else's department. I can worry about my corner and trust that other, more qualified people are handling theirs. Separateness, as a way of seeing the world, is efficient. It can provide the illusion of control. It's also, I've come to believe, false, and not in some abstract philosophical sense. It's false in a way that actively keeps us from understanding what's happening to us.

Here's what I want to suggest: connectedness isn't just a nice idea, a value we could choose to hold or not. It's a basic fact about how the world works, about what's real: an ontological fact, not merely an ethical or emotional one. Relation isn't something added on top of separate things that already exist on their own. Relation makes a self a self in the first place, linking us to others, to a body, and to a planet in ways that come before and are more basic than separateness.

If that's true, a culture built on the idea that we are all separate, self-contained, and in competition isn't making four different mistakes. It's making one mistake, and we're watching it play out on several stages at once: a climate treated as external to us rather than woven through us; a war waged as if the people on the other side were not people; voters; voters treated as a pile of anonymous individuals rather than a people who belong to one another; and an economy run as if it were only about taking value from others instead of working together.

The Real Enemy Isn't Each Other

I want to be careful here, because this is where arguments like this often go off track. It would be easy to turn "we've forgotten connectedness" into another us-versus-them dynamic, blaming the other political side, the other generation, or the people who don't see it the way I do. That's not my point, and it's actually the opposite of what I mean.

The philosopher Martin Buber drew a distinction that I think names exactly what's gone wrong. "All real living is meeting," he wrote, and he says the real boundary, "though certainly swaying and swinging," lies "between Thou and It, between the present and the object." To meet someone as a Thou is to be met by a full, irreducible presence. To hold them as an It is to deal with an object, something to be experienced and used. Buber is clear that we need this: "without It man cannot live. But he who lives with It alone is not a man." The trouble, as I see it, starts when It is all there is, and a person becomes, in practice, a means: a thing to be managed or extracted from.

Most of us don't wake up choosing to "It" the people around us. Here I go a step beyond Buber: we're formed by a system that Its people as a matter of design: a system that treats workers as labor costs, citizens as data points, and neighbors as competitors for scarce resources. In such a system, our value as human persons becomes quantified. And a system that Its people long enough teaches them to "It" each other back. Over time, we can become objects to ourselves as well.

As I see it, that system also leaves many people feeling ashamed, losing status, and feeling unseen. Research on shame helps explain what can happen next. The psychologist June Tangney, building on Helen Lewis's clinical work, describes how shame can turn into "a hostile, humiliated fury," redirected "toward others who may be held in part responsible for the shame feeling." Grievance, resentment, and the urge to find an enemy in those who are different are one common form that turn takes. These reactions aren't the only possible ones, and they don't happen automatically, but they aren't just random flaws either. They are responses that a system built on separateness, hierarchy, and control keeps offering.

So when I say the crises are connected, I don't mean "we're all to blame." I mean the adversary is the economic, social, political, and cultural arrangement that keeps insisting we're separate when we're not, and that profits from our believing it.

We should also admit that this problem isn't limited to just one type of institution. It's easy to blame corporations, government, or whichever group we dislike most, but the same pattern appears in business, politics, community life, and religion. In each case, the focus is on keeping power and control over others, no matter what language is used to dress it up.

A company that sees workers as replaceable, a government that manages citizens instead of serving them, a social system that decides who belongs, and a religious group that trades genuine encounter with the sacred for control over who's in and who's out: these aren't four different failures. They're the same failure, wearing different institutional clothes. As I read it, power-over is what an "It"-relation looks like when it's built into a structure and handed down over time. That's why just changing who's in charge doesn't fix it. If the system stays the same, the results stay the same.

This is also why we don't have to give in to cynicism. Seeing power-over as the common pattern doesn't mean every institution is hopeless. Instead, it gives us a clear question to ask: does this arrangement treat people as persons, met in their full presence, or does it hold them as means, useful only insofar as they're productive enough, not so different that they make us feel uncomfortable, and controllable? This question goes beyond the usual left/right, secular/religious, and public/private lines that keep us fighting each other instead of the pattern itself.

My Take

None of the four crises I named at the start will be solved by treating any of them as an isolated technical problem, because they really aren't separate. That doesn't mean the technical solutions don't matter. They do. But if we add technical fixes without questioning our belief in separateness, we often just create more of the same problems, even if it looks like progress (although it is time we ask ourselves, "Progress toward what end?"). The actual work in front of us is stranger and harder than any single policy: it's remembering and then acting on the fact that we were never as separate as the system needs us to believe.

I don't have a step-by-step plan for this. But I do believe understanding the real problem matters. If we keep treating smoke, war, democracy, and daily struggles as separate issues, we'll keep making things worse for each other. A diagnosis alone doesn't heal anything. But it's where any real healing starts.

Go Deeper

  • I and Thou by Martin Buber: the foundational text on relation as more basic than the separate self; dense but short, and worth sitting with slowly.
  • The Web of Life by Fritjof Capra: "a new scientific understanding of living systems," as its subtitle puts it, and a way into interdependence from the side of biology rather than philosophy.
  • The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker — Becker's account of how human beings organize their lives around the denial of death; whether separateness is one of the forms that denial takes is my question, not his.

References

Buber, Martin. I and Thou. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. 2nd ed. New York: Scribner Classics, 2000.

Tangney, June Price. "Constructive and Destructive Aspects of Shame and Guilt." In Constructive and Destructive Behavior: Implications for Family, School, and Society, edited by Arthur C. Bohart and Deborah J. Stipek, 127–45. American Psychological Association, 2001.

Revised October 2026: Buber's distinction is now given in his own words, and the passage on grievance was corrected and now draws on research on shame.

This is the first piece in a short series working through what it would mean to take connectedness seriously, not as a mood, but as a fact about what's real. The next piece goes further into the philosophy underneath it.