A Guide for the 'Dis'heartened
Useful words to navigate our human predicament
When you look out into the world are you among the dismayed?
When you look inward are you discombobulated?
Thoughtful and caring people are distracted, distanced and discouraged. The tragedy is that we need thoughtful, caring people stepping into the challenges facing communities, nations and the world. We need people with a clear-eyed focus on diagnosing problems, tackling solution space and designing paths forward that reduce ignorance and error, suffering, waste and injustice.
Before we get to the antidote, and we will, let’s get granular on all the ways humans are being ‘dis’ed.
Disaster: Sudden catastrophes like floods, fires, and hurricanes often come to mind initially. Pandemics, industrial accidents, and structural failures are also major disasters.
Disputes: Researchers in Sweden have recorded that 2025 saw the highest number of conflicts since WWII.1
Disinformation: The intentional spreading of false and misleading information to create chaos. As opposed to misinformation where the spreader is perhaps making an honest mistake. Social media is a playground for bad actors spreading disinformation.
Distrust: Trust is a judgment that whatever or whomever is relied on will perform as expected and won’t fail. We’re having a hard time these days figuring out what is actually trustworthy. Politicians especially are playing fast and loose with the truth. Some experts say we are experiencing an epidemic of political lying.2
Disorder: Disorder is when something doesn’t work as it is supposed to function and it can result in a great deal of insecurity. When major systems are disrupted there can be unpredictable unintended consequences in the long-run.
Dispossession: Whether due to conflict or climate change people are being forced to flee whether temporarily or permanently. In some cases it goes further. Dispossession is the systemic stripping of property and other legal rights. It is an extension of the exploitation of human beings and their agency.
Disparity: The world just acquired its first trillionaire. In 2025, the top 0.1% of the population earned as much income as the entire bottom 50%.3 But disparity isn’t just about money, it is also about resources and power. Forces of oppression take advantage of those vulnerable to exploitation and undermine their ability to survive and thrive.
Dissatisfaction: Mental health is linked to overall life satisfaction. A 2026 report shows that rates of depression and anxiety among Canadians is stabilizing but their ability to manage and bounce back has declined. 4
If you’ll allow me one ‘dys’, let’s talk about the result of all this: dysfunction. A core function of living is having capacities to see and manage threats and opportunities in the environment. We call this Adaptive Positioning. All life is adapting, but the human species is unique in that it has a deep cultural pool of resources to innovate from. We can learn from the best of the worst of human history and create new ways of living that better address the challenges of our time.
Our biggest existential threats are happening at a geopolitical and planetary scale. We can’t all directly act on this scale but we have agency to influence it. We should be highly concerned about how our leaders see and manage these threats.
How are they developing their capacities for understanding the situation and learning what could or should be done about it? What is their sense of caring and responsibility that they bring to the challenge? What and who is influencing their priorities – is it greed and power or is it sustaining humanity and life?
So why can’t we hold our leaders to account? There are a number of factors, some having to do with our own behavioural wiring and some that are more systemic. They are interrelated and need some untangling. Here is a range of the reactions to grappling with our human predicament.
Distressed: Many people in the world are too stressed about keeping food on the table to be able to pay attention to larger issues. This is understandable given the levels of disparity and rising cost of living.
Disinterested: For many people they are genuinely not interested. Perhaps they are more focused on their specialized expertise. That could be a great thing if they are contributing to the flourishing of human beings, like growing regenerative food but it could also be harmful if their specialty is financial con artistry.
Disoriented: Beyond just feeling lost, some people are orienting themselves to some very strange things these days. People want a story that explains what is going on and there are a lot of stories that are unhelpful. Conspiracy theories for example, tend to have a thread of truth that trick people into trusting them but end up leading them far astray. In other ways, some people are orienting themselves in very narrow ways, focusing only on themselves or their family. Some are orienting themselves to the nation in potentially dangerous ways. This is the root of nationalism.
Dissimulation: This the act of hiding, masking, or camouflaging one’s true feelings. It is staying shallow and having a lack of authenticity. Think of Neil Postman’s concept of ‘amusing ourselves to death’. Dissimulation can be linked to a surface level obsession with beauty or celebrity.
Dismissive: Treating the thoughts and ideas of others as unimportant. Exacerbated by algorithms, we tend to only listen to ideas that reinforce our beliefs. It takes effort to understand other’s thinking but this is where we can break down polarization.
Disturbed: What we are seeing in the world is truly horrific and this is an appropriate response. Through the majority of human history we rarely saw life-threatening images. Now we see them tens or hundreds of times a day through smart phones, entertainment and newsfeeds.
Disillusioned: The root of cynicism, this is the feeling of disappointment that something didn’t turn out as good as you thought it would.
Disempowered: Power is the ability to make change happen. In many ways, it feels like efforts to make wise judgements, think independently, and build skills for life challenges are being undermined.
Disengagement: The feelings can compile and disconnect us. We detach from involvement in the world and, at worst, disconnect from reality. We avoid stepping into the challenges of life.
Dispirited: People can experience a loss of meaning. They may ask questions like “what is it all for?” Humans need a sense of how their lives fit in the bigger picture. Staying connected to what it means to be alive and human is vital.
These are all understandable responses but they should not be places to dwell. They each have the potential to stop learning and action. To move past them, there are two vital ‘dis’es that we should be cultivating to keep us from being too sucked into the patterns above and to empower ourselves and our own communities to make positive change.
Discovery: One of the most important things we can do is to pay attention to the voice that says “We can do better.” Whether it’s an article you come across, a colleague in a meeting, or a voice in the back of your head. But knowing we can do better is a long way from actually doing better but it is the necessary kernel from which change actually happens. Figuring out what to do takes more discovery. This includes assessing what we think is happening, what could or should be done and how we can prepare ourselves to respond. The breadth and depth with which each of these steps is explored indicates the quality of the judgement and promisingness of the action that will come from it.
Discipline: This is foundational for the development of good judgement. To move forward as a society we need individuals striving to understand their powers and capacities and how they are fitting against life challenges. Do we have the skills to truly address what we are facing? If not, how would we go about developing them? Disciplined inquiry helps us to identify flaws in thinking and action and better prepare ourselves to deal with the situation. There are forces that seek to undermine those capacities but, in any situation, we can choose to use our agency and prepare ourselves and those around us to better meet what lies ahead. What capacities do we need to build? The list above gives us the answers. We need to cultivate their opposite. In the face of disconnection we need connection. In the face of disinformation we need to be informed. In the face of disempowerment, we need empowerment.
Human Learning Ecology is the discipline of studying the complex ecology of influences that tell us what to think, value, prioritize, believe and do. By looking at a wide range of human achievement and failure, we can discover the underlying causes of adaptive and maladaptive development in individuals, organizations, societies, and cultures.
In this discipline, etymology (the study of the origin and evolution of words) is a rich source to uncover human meaning making. Let’s jump back to the word ‘disaster’ which has latin roots meaning ill-starred. The word seemed to originate in the 16th century when people blamed the stars for ill fortune. It was a time when humans were more likely to believe that disaster was by fate or in the hands of the gods and there was nothing we could do about it. Today, we don’t carry that same meaning of the word. For the most part, we know the reasons why disasters occur. We know that we can use foresight to prepare for or even prevent disaster. And there’s a whole body of knowledge around disaster response.
Looking at these ‘dis’es, what stands out to you most? What does that tell you about the world and how well prepared we are for the challenges ahead?
Shawn Davies, Therése Pettersson, Magnus Öberg, Organized violence 1989–2025, and violent political protests, Journal of Peace Research, 2026;, xjag046, https://doi.org/10.1093/jopres/xjag046
Bill Adair, Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy, Atria Books, 2024.
Global Economic Inequality, World Inequality Report, 2026. https://wir2026.wid.world/insight/global-economic-inequity/
Understanding the Mental Health of Canadians, Mental Health Research Canada, 2026. https://www.mhrc.ca/findings-of-poll-28