The urgently needed social habitat in which we can be, think and act social is disappearing and being destroyed. As it disappears, it becomes harder and harder for us to respond to crises any other way than how we do right now.

All of us, from stay-at-home parents to globe-trotting CEOs, are being, thinking and doing from an increasingly simplified, disconnected awareness of society as a whole.

As a result:

• The world keeps reeling from one immediate crisis to the next one, because we fail to retain the necessary wisdom from the last one to prevent the next one. Pandemics are one global threat that we know with absolute certainty will come, and come again. Nature never gives up. But so many resource-rich communities have been caught completely unprepared for the inevitable. Or look at the charred remains of Paris' Notre Dame Cathedral. There was never enough money for preventative maintenance - until the roof burned down, and then big-money donors flooded in with offers to help rebuild.
• Leaders are lost - and sometimes don't even know it. At times, it seems that the big, bold initiatives - like the WEF's "1 Trillion Trees" - show leaders doing the only thing they know how to do, rather than learning how to do what they do not (i.e., directing top-down, technocratic, industrial-scale solutions to mop up the consequences, instead of participating in economic and cultural shifts required to stop generating the problem).
• "Society" isn't as real as it should be to us. In this moment of unprecedented individual autonomy, self-identity and freedom to choose, an increasing number of people feel alienated, isolated and powerless. "Society" should be the level at which a sense of connectedness and belonging and security and cooperation as part of the whole exists as a real thing in our lives. For a lot of us, it seems to be missing.

How can we save and restore our social habitat?