In India, many woke up last week and headed to news portals and to Instagram to see if the US had begun to “obliterate” Iran.
There was a slim chance it had. Still, it was something of a relief to see the feed look as it usually does: clips from stand-up acts and podcasts, ads for niche products. There was also the ever-present news of violence and death: in Gaza, Israel, Lebanon, Manipur. Mixed in with influencer ragebait about the problems of being too pretty. News of ships still stranded. A coming Super El Nino. An upcoming blockbuster. “Buy my face cream”.
As one gets on with the day, after a morning like this, a pit remains in the stomach. Life hums along as normal, but one can’t escape the feeling that it shouldn’t; that something is very wrong, and it isn’t going to be put right.
The word for that sensation is hyper-normalisation.
“What you are feeling is the disconnect between seeing that systems are failing, that things aren’t working… and yet the institutions and the people in power just are ignoring it and pretending everything is going to go on the way that it has,” Rahaf Harfoush, a Syrian-Canadian digital anthropologist (studying the relationship between humans and digital-era technology), author and TED speaker, said in a post on Instagram last March.
In the field of anthropology, hyper-normalisation is related to normalisation, which occurs when something new — think, the iPhone, stilettoes, gay marriage — slowly becomes familiar and mundane.
It isn’t desensitisation, which occurs through repeated exposure to distressing information (though that is part of it). It isn’t shifting baseline syndrome, a concept borrowed from ecology, which describes how each generation inherits a “degraded” world and accepts it as normal because that is all they know.
Hyper-normalisation is the shared knowledge that things are broken, combined with a perceived collective inability to act on that knowledge. In other words, we know this is bad, but can no longer envision an alternative world.
FIGHT THE FEED
The term “hyper-normalisation” was coined by Russian-American anthropologist Alexei Yurchak in 2005, to describe life in the final years of the Soviet Union.
For about two decades before the collapse of USSR, in 1991, as the economy stagnated, centralised systems weakened and the superstructure slowly fell apart, institutions and people went on as they always had, because an alternative did not seem possible.
Recent triggers for this feeling include the pandemic, ongoing wars and the genocide in Gaza, supply-chain disruptions, and a US in which citizens are shot dead in the streets and the President threatens to obliterate one country and buy or annex others. We also live amid faltering democracies, mounting support for extremist and divisive politics, global bodies that appear helpless in the face of it all, and a growing list of what used to be once-in-a-lifetime climate disasters.
We keep calm and carry on because what else is there to do?
The answer: Resist.
Living in hyper-normal times can cause a sense of “learned helplessness”. We stop questioning and simply focus on coping. This may take the form of self-soothing activities, which is part of the reason the self-care industries and entertainment tend to show remarkable resilience in hard times.
Realising that hyper-normalisation isn’t a good response, just an instinctive one, can help fight it off.
“It’s difficult to act when you’re uncertain if you’re perceiving reality clearly, but once you know the truth, you can channel that clarity into meaningful action and, ideally, drive positive change,” as Harfoush has said.
A person in such a situation really has two choices, adds life coach Chetna Chakravarthy. “They can accept the status quo as the new normal and start living within that reality, but then that sense of living amid uncertainty, being stuck and helpless, grows.” Conditions such as anxiety and burnout may follow. “The other path is to fight the status quo and figure out how to make the world better for oneself. The second route is far better.”
To get started, Chakravarthy recommends a few simple steps. Imagine better alternatives to small, everyday decisions (perhaps one could fly less and reduce carbon footprint; generate compost and biogas in order to be less dependent; learn a new skill or hone an existing one).
Be intentional with choices. This would follow from the previous steps, giving everyday activities greater meaning.
Focus on purposeful interaction. Building meaningful community is, and always has been, vital.
Reduce passive consumption, particularly of content designed to numb.
Get involved, even if only at the neighbourhood level. Help those less fortunate, join an environmental-action plan, vote and encourage others to do so.
Becoming more politically active, rather than less, is a powerful antidote to the apocalyptic thinking that hyper-normalisation can foster. “You have to start understanding the system you inhabit,” Chakravarthy says. “Start infusing intention and meaning into the role you play within that system, and give this aspect of life the importance it deserves.”
In a world lulled by the idea that someone else will do it, the first vital change is to shed that notion. After that, as Arundhati Roy once put it: “Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. On a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing.”
