When everything's a crisis, is anything really a crisis?

This Duncan Garner article in the National Business Review (gated) made me laugh, because it raised a point I have made many times (albeit, not on my blog):

The word crisis used to mean something. 

Now it seems everything is in a crisis. The latest crisis came just before our Matariki long weekend – a power shortage crisis. Maybe the Matariki stars will be our only form of light as now this country can't guarantee much at all, the latest being power.  

Why and how did this happen? And where's the accountability? The Minister overseeing this problem a year ago should walk the plank for failing to deliver a year later. That would be genuine accountability wouldn't it? 

So what's happening right now? Is it just us or is everything melting down? Look around – isn't everything a crisis or in crisis? 

There's the housing crisis, affordability crisis, cost of living crisis, mental health crisis, climate change crisis, health crisis, nursing shortage crisis, suicide crisis, water crisis, youth crisis, elderly abuse crisis, building supply crisis, Gib crisis. Did I mention the consumer confidence crisis? 

The obesity crisis? 

The manufacturing crisis?

Garner also missed the inequality crisis, the child poverty crisis, the supply chain crisis, the global data privacy crisis, and the Christmas toy crisis. And a few minutes on any search engine would no doubt turn up a dozen or more other crises.

Now, by definition, a crisis is: "a time of intense difficulty or danger". That may be true of most of the crises listed above (ok, maybe not the Christmas toy crisis, unless disappointed children and parents get really upset). However, the problem is that once you start to label everything as a crisis, the word starts to lose all meaning. In the good old days, a crisis really meant something. We had to act immediately, or face impending doom. Now, it just means things like a shortage of flowers on Valentine's Day. Yawn.

The problem here is that people's attention is scarce. People are not going to worry about the "pet adoption issue", or the "pet adoption problem", or even the "per adoption predicament". If you want rational people's attention, then it has to be a pet adoption crisis, or the perceived benefits of them paying attention won't outweigh the costs, and your issue will be lost in the general hubbub of people's social media feeds. However, if the incentive is to call everything a crisis, then there is no way for people to filter the really serious crises out from the noise, and they will stop paying attention.

Maybe, like Stephen Hickson's suggestion for a woolly words trading scheme, we need a more-specific crisis trading scheme, which caps the use of the word 'crisis'? We need this policy now, because we are in the middle of a crisis crisis.