We are currently undergoing a mass extinction. Popularly called as the sixth extinction, it is the fastest extinction cycle so far, and a greater number of species are disappearing faster than ever. One million of the world’s estimated 8 million plant and animal species are threatened with extinction. (IPBES) So, here is how a period of extinction is calculated: so far, there have been 5 extinction cycles that the planet has witnessed - The first two, during the Ordovician and Devonian periods, primarily devastated marine life through sudden ice ages and toxic, oxygen-starved oceans. The third and largest event, the Permian "Great Dying," nearly ended all life when massive volcanic eruptions choked the atmosphere and acidified the seas, a pattern of extreme volcanic warming that repeated during the fourth event in the Triassic period. The fifth and most famous extinction occurred during the Cretaceous period when a massive asteroid struck Earth, blocking out the sun and wiping out the dinosaurs. Each of these events fundamentally altered the course of evolution by clearing out dominant species and allowing entirely new forms of life to take over. In terms of years, the five extinction cycles are divided into distinct milestones spanning the last 500 million years, occurring at irregular intervals spaced roughly 50 to 140 million years apart. The actual "crisis phase“, the duration of the active killing varied drastically depending on the trigger, lasting from just a few thousand years during the sudden Cretaceous asteroid impact to nearly two million years during the prolonged Permian volcanic eruptions. This roughly meant that one species per million species died every year during the big 5 extinctions. In the sixth extinction, the rate has surged to 100 to 1,000 species per million species every year. For example, instead of waiting a millennium to see a single species disappear from a group of one million, scientists are now witnessing up to 10 distinct species vanish from that same group every single year.

The cause of such a fast rate of extinction is obvious – it's human intervention, or rather HIPPO – Habitat destruction, Invasive Species, Population Growth, Pollution and Overexploitation. Another fuel to the extinction fire is the burning of fossil fuels, which in turn is warming the planet and acidifying oceans.

Every extinction before this one had no author. The asteroid that ended the Cretaceous did not choose to fall. The volcanic eruptions that triggered the Permian "Great Dying" were not driven by appetite or indifference. They were events blind, geological, indifferent to consequence.

The sixth extinction is different. It has a cause that can be seen in the mirror. Every habitat razed, every ocean acidified, every species pushed past the point of recovery has happened not through cosmic accident but through the accumulated weight of human choices, most of them small, most of them ordinary, most of them made without a second thought. That is what makes this extinction psychologically unlike any other. You cannot grieve an asteroid. You cannot negotiate with a volcano. But this you did.

And here is the thing about being the first species in half a billion years of life on earth to cause its own mass extinction: it requires a very particular kind of not-looking. A sustained, collective, almost industrious avoidance of the full weight of what is happening. The outer destruction and the inner silence are not separate crises. They may be the same one. There is another very grave threat of extinction afoot – the idea of the ‘self’.

Witnessing what feels like the end of things does something to the psyche. Especially when the scale of the problem exceeds individual reaction. Climate grief researchers termed it as ‘Solastalgia’, defining it as the distress caused by environmental change in one’s own environment. This feeling cannot be called grief exactly, but more of an identity crisis. When the world that formed you begins to unmake itself, the self that was shaped by that world starts to feel untethered.

This happens beneath the surface, and it begins with the daunting realisation: if a species that survived three hundred million years of planetary upheaval can vanish in a decade, what does that say about the things I have built my life around? The self begins to feel provisional. The conscious mind is occupied elsewhere with deadlines, with opinions, with the daily work of being a person in the world. It registers the extinction crisis as information: a statistic, a documentary, a headline that produces a feeling and then recedes. What it cannot register is the slow cumulative weight of knowing that the world is being unmade and that you are, in any meaningful sense, unable to stop it.

The unconscious mind does not distinguish between a threat to the body and a threat to meaning. It responds to both with the same ancient machinery, with the tightening, the vigilance, the low-grade mobilisation that was designed for predators and famines, now running continuously in the background with nowhere to discharge. And so it simply holds it unresolved, unprocessed, unnamed. We are not consciously afraid. We are something more vaguely unmoored, quietly restless, carrying a weight we did not consciously pick up and cannot consciously put down. The question who am I, really arrives not as philosophy but as a physical sensation, a faint nausea, a groundlessness, as though something beneath the self has been quietly shifting without anyone noticing.

Not only does this result in a huge loss of the self, but it also impacts our heritage, culture and the communal ecosystem. It empties the stories of the land and severs a sense of belonging. For generations, the villagers of Zanzibar built their understanding of the spirit world around the leopard. The animal moved through their folklore, their fables, and their relationship with what lay beyond the visible. When the Zanzibar leopard was declared effectively extinct, it ruined their understanding of a higher world, a way to make sense of themselves in the only way they knew how. Similarly, in Nashik, the Great Indian Bustard was woven into the ecological memory of the region, into the knowledge held by people who had watched and named and lived alongside it for centuries. In Mauritius, the dodo's disappearance left an emblem of absence, a symbol that stands in for a living relationship that no longer exists. Across the Arabian Peninsula, the Asiatic cheetah's vanishing severed a thread running through ancient art, royal tradition, and desert folklore that no museum can restore.

These losses led to communities having to redefine themselves. It led to losses in folklore, fables and a connection to the land that can never be the same. The folklore built around a species was never just decoration; it was how a community understood its place in the order of things. It answered, without being asked, the questions that every human being eventually arrives at: what world am I part of, and what does it ask of me? When the animal disappears, the question remains, but the answer is gone.

We respond to this by searching for anchors, overwhelmed by this upheaval. These anchors become our solace – a way to give meaning to those questions with too many difficult answers. The sixth extinction is not only reducing life forms but also reducing the diversity of ecosystems. Everything has become simpler yet more fragile. Now, a few aggressive generalists are crowding out everything subtle or complex. This pattern is mirrored in our inner world; our inner ecosystem is losing its texture. We have such less capacity to handle silence, ambiguity and the ability to feel a myriad of emotions without going into a crisis. There is a void, but it’s not being filled with richness; rather, it has become more rigid. When the self feels groundless, it reaches for the largest, loudest, most solid-feeling container available.

These containers can be an all-encompassing vacuum that sucks in whatever helps us feel less ephemeral in this world, a sense of belonging and a feeling that we matter. Researchers studying nationalism have found precisely this: that in times of crisis and anxiety, individuals are predisposed to powerful identification with groups, the nation, the tribe, the flag, not out of genuine belonging but as a psychological coping mechanism, a shield against uncertainty.

umm this is nice but feels a bit too disconnected from the rest of the paragraph - and also can The world has evolved to give us some temporary respite from having to fix this groundlessness. We have found temporary anchors in the form of work that expands to fill every hour, consumption that mistakes novelty for nourishment, and screens that offer the sensation of connection while quietly replacing it. We are, on average, on our phones over four hours a day,  not because we are weak but because the alternative, an unoccupied mind in an uncertain world, has begun to feel genuinely unbearable. None of this is our fault; this is just how we are conditioned to live now.

There are some subtle anchors as well, wherein people feel as if they are in control. When self-enquiry looks like self-optimisation with tracking their sleep, stress and productivity with a devotion masked as care, but is just another form of escape. Wellness culture has become less about meeting the self but more about managing it.

But there is a shift visible these days. People are rediscovering old traditions and practices. In Japan, shinrin-yoku or forest bathing draws on centuries of Shinto and Buddhist reverence for nature, the understanding that trees and rivers and mountains are not backdrop but presence. In India, a new generation is rediscovering Ayurveda as a roadmap, a 5,000-year-old system that understood the self as inseparable from the natural world it inhabits. Across Africa, there is a resurgent interest in Ubuntu,  a philosophy of interconnectedness and shared humanity, in herbalists and spiritual healers reclaiming their roles as community caretakers. These are not trends. They are retrievals people reaching back past the noise toward something that knew, long before the sixth extinction had a name, that the health of the inner world and the outer one could not be separated.

Since 2020, time spent meditating has increased by 2,900% worldwide. People arrive at stillness through stress and anxiety and then find something else waiting there. Something that no anchor can supply and no flag can manufacture. The recognition, quiet and arriving without announcement, that none of this is a coincidence. That every life is held by something larger than what it can name. That the question who am I — the very question the extinction of the self has made so difficult to sit with is not a source of nausea but of belonging.

This is where the inner and outer extinction part ways. The coral reefs may still be bleaching. The species counts may still be falling. But a civilisation that has recovered even a fraction of its inner life responds to crisis differently, not with panic, not with flags, but with the kind of rootedness that makes genuine care possible. You cannot protect what you are not in a relationship with. And you cannot be in a relationship with the world outside if you have lost all relationship with the world within.

The Sixth Mass Extinction is not just happening around us. It is happening inside us. And the question is not whether we can stop it. The question is whether we are willing to go still enough to notice.

References

• Gregory, M. (2022, August 8). How climate change is driving extinction and culture loss | atmos. https://atmos.earth
• Khodke, K. (2021, March 7). Vanishing species from my hometown | https://kalyanikhodke.medium.com
• Jacobs, T. (2019, February 7). White nationalism is driven by a perceived loss of status. https://psmag.com
• IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) — one million of the world's estimated 8 million species are threatened with extinction
• Glenn Albrecht, Solastalgia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change, Australasian Psychiatry, 2007 — original coining of the term. Published in SAGE Journals: https://journals.sagepub.com
• Simply Psychology, Solastalgia: The Psychological Distress of Watching Your Home Environment Change, April 2026 — https://www.simplypsychology.com
• PMC/Journal of Chinese Political Science, Is Nationalism Rising in Times of the COVID-19 Pandemic?, 2020 — group affiliation and ideological validation as anxiety responses: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
• Pacific Standard, Nationalism Is a Psychological Coping Response, 2019 — Political Psychology research on national superiority as coping mechanism: https://psmag.com
• Global Wellness Institute via Fitbit data -2,900% https://choosemuse.com
• Davies et al. / NCHS peer-reviewed data — 18.3% of US adults meditating in 2022, up from 7.5% in 2002: https://getstillmind.com
• World Population Review Newsletter, The Ancient Rituals Making a Modern Comeback, September 2025 — shinrin-yoku, Ayurveda, Ubuntu: https://worldpopulationreview.com
• The silence after species vanish. Bangalore Mirror. https://bangaloremirror.indiatimes.com

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