There is a growing sense of ‘crisis’ in the dark-matter particle community, which arises from the absence of evidence for the most popular candidates for dark-matter particles—such as weakly interacting massive particles, axions and sterile neutrinos—despite the enormous effort that has gone into searching for these particles. Here we discuss what we have learned about the nature of dark matter from past experiments and the implications for planned dark-matter searches in the next decade. We argue that diversifying the experimental effort and incorporating astronomical surveys and gravitational-wave observations is our best hope of making progress on the dark-matter problem.