Draft Four: Hypernormalization is ruining us

On breaking free from our feeds.

A confession: I was terrified to sit down and write this letter.

For no reason other than realizing I’m missing a convenient external catalyst to prompt my writing, like I had over the past months, where I used a conference, travel and the Romanian elections as anchors. Without a catalyst, my fear whispers, it’ll be obvious my mind is a mess.

The noise of overlapping news, feelings, tasks, thoughts, needs, dreams, highs and lows is unbearable. It’s like trying to think while running from an incoming storm through crater-packed streets, holding a boxes of fragile glassware, while listening to a meditation podcast urging you to acknowledge everything, but still gently let it pass you by.

You know what I mean: Gaza, Iran, Ukraine, Trump, femicides, climate crisis, recessions. But also the Club World Cup, summer music festivals, overtourism in Europe, damned cost of living. Add the vacations (if you can afford them), time with your partner, staying close to family, getting kids out of school, wondering what taxes will go up, guilt tripping yourself (and maybe others) for not doing enough. Keep splurging on overpriced coffee, the latest Labubus of any commerce, nailing the right take in the Reddit thread, therapy and other self-actualization tasks, plus curating whatever authentic faux esthetic is trending on your Insta. Oh, and don’t forget to check your inbox: 43 important new newsletters came in today alone.

Maybe it’s just me, but all this everything makes me want to crawl under a rock. It also makes me less eager to write and contribute to your noise. When one reads, one wants to feel in the presence of a steady guide, who has mapped out the journey. Who has your back. Who holds a steady flashlight even when the journey gets rocky, or darkness falls.

Hence being terrified: If I’m confused and oppressed by all the noise, what am I offering?

*

As I’ve been struggling with this question, a few lifelines appeared. One was a solid description of what we might all be seeing and feeling, which my friend Vlad Dumitrescu articulated in his latest newsletter, when describing life as reflected through our socials:

“Suffering, propaganda, humor, fear. They all exist side by side, without any hierarchy, without any logical arrangement or warning. One tap and you go from a mother crying in front of a bombed-out building, to a clip of a guy showing you how much protein you should load up on in a day.”

That sounds like my feed: pictures of dozens of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza, an AI class – certification included, videos of drone attacks, the latest football transfers getting a “here we go”, a new fine dining restaurant in Bucharest, the 26^th woman killed in Romania by a man this year alone, some memes about flushing toilets and “peeing because of too much watermelon”, praise of the newly chosen Romanian prime minister, man explaining the difference between a long black and an Americano, woman selling her latest workout.

Then an article in the US edition of The Guardian came to the rescue, and introduced me to the idea of hypernormalization, in short, a sense that “systems are crumbling, but daily life continues”.

“Hypernormalization captures this juxtaposition of the dysfunctional and mundane”, Adrienne Matei writes. The term was coined by a Russian-born American anthropologist who in the 2000s wrote about life in the final decades of the Soviet Union. In Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation Alexei Yurchak used the term to describe the consequence of internalizing the perils of an autocratic system, and conforming to them – in theory. This applies to communist Romania, too, especially to the darker 1980s: everyone knew the system was failing and corrupt and the stories it told about the past and the future were fabricated.

The language was fake and pompous to the point of losing meaning. But few saw an alternative – hence the ideas that this would go on forever –, so they pretended.

To be in the hypernormal is to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society – something documentarian Adam Curtis also argued in a BBC film in 2016. But he broadened the concept to our existing capitalist system: it’s broken, but we’re told there is no alternative. So, in order to be able to function, we sort of accept it and keep going, even though the psychic toll of this cognitive dissonance keeps growing. (Curtis being the contrarian he is, takes on the media, the bankers, the profiteers and propagandists that have a stake in maintaining this status quo.)

Even with its loose definitional boundaries, this concept is helpful. To sum it up, The Guardian quotes Rahaf Harfoush, a Paris-based digital anthropologist who works at the intersection of technology and culture. To Rahaf, hypernormalization is:

“The visceral sense of waking up in an alternate timeline with a deep, bodily knowing that something isn’t right – but having no clear idea how to fix it. It’s reading an article about childhood hunger and genocide, only to scroll down to a carefree listicle highlighting the best-dressed celebrities or a whimsical quiz about: ‘What Pop-Tart are you?’”

As Rahaf says, if you feel something isn’t right, your vibes are not off.

A good metaphor for life today: a flooded and blocked central Bucharest street, after a terrible storm on June 9, 2025.

*

Let’s spell out the dangers of going on like this.

• Emotional withdrawal and avoiding reality. Overwhelmed by dysfunction, people tune out. This might look like binging on self-soothing content or avoiding the news altogether. Taken too far, this leads to self-centeredness, apathy, and maybe even nihilism when it comes to distinguishing fact from fiction.

• Institutional decay and authoritarian drift. As dysfunctional systems persist unchallenged, public institutions are hollowed out. This creates space for unchecked power.

These first two are a good summary of the electoral landscape in Romania over the past year.

This essay by political scientist Mihaela Herbel links hypernormalization with the local reality: the past few years saw political leadership (mostly PSD and PNL) returning to “post-accession hooliganism” (Bulgarian coinage), which means extracting benefits from political appointments and access to funds once part of the EU. It kicked off once the protest movement and technocratic dreams cooled off before the turn of the decade, it accelerated through the pandemic and the last couple few years, and it fueled the rise of independent investigative journalism.

Just look at Recorder’s catalogue of stories: the church is corrupt, the police is corrupt, mayors are corrupt, real estate developers are corrupt. Basically everyone is out to screw you. You could tell how angry citizens felt just by reading through the YouTube comments, although the system continued to act (largely) with impunity, also convinced it might last forever. (This is a sidenote, but a fascinating one: Recorder work sparked anger, which turned into reader-revenue – more than 2 million euros in 2024, which solidified a journalism business model. I don’t think it’s easily replicable, but who knows.)

Because post-pandemic Romanian citizens were faking living a “normal life” within this arrogant and power-hungry left-right political alliance, it came as shock to political leaders when they rejected the mainstream parties. That’s putting it mildly, especially since many did so by also embracing a message of change filled with the falsehoods of a fake prophet who turned up as a voice exactly where people spend most of their time: in their feeds.

Eventually, prophet Călin Georgescu and “naughty son” George Simion lost the presidency to Nicușor Dan, the mayor of Bucharest, but that just highlights a tension between competing citizen worldviews that had one thing in common: both wanted a rejection of the hypernormal political order.

Unfortunately, this order is making a comeback as I write this.

Nicușor Dan has chosen a prime minister (from the mainstream parties) and the grand coalition government will arguably look just like the previous one – mainstream politicians dividing power and influence, probably also rotating in the PM chair. The difference could be that a few years ago they promised to keep us safe from war and the aftereffects of the pandemic, while now they are obliged to promise they’ll save us from the outcomes of the problems they didn’t bother to tackle the last time around.

This is a cynical view, but it’s a possibility and it leads to the next two dangers of continuing our hypernormalized life:

• Resignation and loss of imagination. When problems feel unsolvable, hope collapses. If all we do are eternal rotations of the same individuals, we’ll stop believing change is possible. Alternative visions will be dismissed, mocked, or worse – never voiced.

• Stagnation and over-simplification of complex issues. Faced with collective ennui, leaders and citizens alike avoid nuance. This blocks meaningful solutions to urgent crises, and locks us into a status quo of quick fixes.

This is especially true for economic measures that need to be taken as Romania did record the highest government deficit among EU states in 2024. But the ideas on the table are versions of things that have been tried before. Engaging with complex theories of how it could be different is almost impossible – especially in the deafening arena of social media. You can’t explain progressive taxation in a Facebook post that devolves into name calling. Nor can you have a nuanced conversation if you start with name-calling and the premise of having the only answer.

Which means the risk is that, locally, we’ll hypernormalize straight through a period of pain, austerity and systemic failure at reducing the deficit (but also terrible inequalities and lack of funding for essential services), retreat into cynicism, and meme away our increasing poor quality of life, all while waiting for the rage to boil over in the next elections.

*

If you want to read an extreme version of hypernormalization, look no further than this story that won the 2024 Nebula Award for Short Story: Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole, by Isabel J. Kim.

The story imagines a continuations to Ursula K. Le Guin’s iconic 1973 The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (this links to a PDF). Le Guin’s story is about a utopian city of unimaginable happiness that depends on the suffering of a child kept in a hole. “They all know that it has to be there”, Le Guin writes. “[They] all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children (…) depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.”

For some of the Omelans, this truth becomes too much to take and so “they leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back”.

It’s taken me years to accept that those who walk away aren’t passive; they make a statement, even if they don’t directly rescue the child. Leaving is itself a form of protest, as imperfect as it seems.

But in Kim’s updated version, things turn grim fast. The kid in the hole is killed, and suddenly tragedies happen in paradise. So a new kid is put into the hole, and happiness resumes. Then the second kid is killed, and a third one is tossed in to stave off unhappiness. He gets killed, too, and his body dropped in what is the meant to be the seat of power, where decisions are made.

There comes a point where it looks like the Omelans have to confront their complicity – although they don’t like to be scolded about it, since they are so right about everything. Plus, they are annoyed: the unspoken pact was that if you didn’t like paradise, you left, you didn’t make a fuss about the kid in the hole.

When a citizen who killed one of the kids is apprehended, he lays it all out: “I’m personally doing it because I think we’re all cowards here. We’re all so fucking afraid of the potential of being the one to suffer that we put that damn kid in the hole and the kid suffers forever, and everyone is so fucking afraid of doing something that we pretend that we are living better lives without suffering. It’s disgusting.”

And… nothing changes.

Rather than walking away or reforming, Omelans double down by murdering more kids as they go on with their lives, hypernormalization as living with organized violence (Gaza anyone?). The ending implicates us all. Kim writes, unsparingly:

Occasionally a content creator will walk into Omelas and film a video while standing on one of the balconies of the Nice Houses or while sitting on one of Omelas’ beautiful beaches. They will talk about the history of Omelas in the same way that people talk about the Uyghurs situation in China, the concentration camps of the Third Reich, the comfort women imported from Korea by Japan, the Belgian Congo, the Atlantic Slave Trade in relation to the American South, and the refugees who sink in ships off the coast of Western Europe.

And they (the ones who visit Omelas) say: Thank God we aren’t dealing with that horrid wound in society.

As seen on a wall in Iași, June 2025.

*

But we are.

This is part of the difficulty of this cycle: there are so many wounds that we can’t stop picking at them, and when the pain gets too intense, we numb it through mindless scrolling, then we cool off the shame and anger through a diatribe against a cancel-worthy individual or cause, which makes us feel righteous once more, so we return to the wounds, and on and on and on and on and on.

How do we get out?

The Guardian piece does touch on some ideas: get off the socials and engage in real-world community action, such as volunteering, some form of aid, organizing local groups etc. This sparks connection and a sense of shared purpose. We can, of course, participate in political movements, from signing petitions, to attending Prides, protesting against domestic violence, and many more.

Here in Romania, if the state and the bureaucracy remain captured by political interest groups, the anger and frustration is guaranteed to sweep a revisionist and reactionary wave into power, and it will be a nationalistic and violent one. So we need to keep the systems in check – as journalists, and as citizens –, while also leaning into solutions and constructive discourse. Fueling conflict, and social media posturing don’t cut it – they obviously haven’t made us better.

Maybe the easiest thing to do, with the immediate reward we so often crave, is just having a word like hypernormalization to explain both the context and our own behavior.

Just like brain rot, it’s useful a shorthand to understand both our feelings, and our actions – like impulsively reaching for the phone when bored, or taking it to bed with us, or succumbing to its addictive dopamine triggers for hours.

While having the words is easy, the hardest task is acting on the insight language brings. Because that would mean taking on the Final Boss, our own stimuli-dependent mind.

*

Saturday morning I reached for my yearly read of David Foster Wallace’s This is Water speech. Wallace was a troubled writer, who struggled with major depression, addiction, and suicidal ideation, but was also abusive and violent towards his partners. He died by suicide in 2008, at 46, and this text is of his only commencement address.

I’ve been reading and re-reading it for almost two decades, and it’s always different. For starters, after Wallace’s misogyny became a known fact, I started reading it less like wisdom, and more like wishful thinking. As this essay says, “What does it mean that this artist could not produce in his life the mutually respecting empathy he all but preached in his work (or, most clearly, in his statements about it)?”

This only highlights the difficulty of the task Wallace is pitching to graduates. What resonated most for me in my early readings of This is Water is the call to look at the world outside of ourselves. To stop centering ourselves – although that is the default setting: it’s MY TIME that is wasted in the supermarket checkout lane, it’s MY FEELINGS that are hurt in a work meeting, it’s MY NEEDS that need to be met in relationships. The daunting task of adulthood, Wallace proposes, is stepping outside yourself.

To do that, we need to learn how to think, and learn what to think about.

“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”

This was true 20 years ago when the speech was delivered, but it’s frighteningly more true now. How often do you catch yourself on Instagram forgetting how you got there? How often do you yearn to post something, or comment on something? How often do you push away information that is uncomfortable? How often do you say “I’ll go to the next protest”? How often do you just allow yourself to cruise through the day on autopilot?

Our social media curated reality is a blended shake of death and self-improvement, sprinkled with whatever extra toppings each of us prefers. But it’s not the whole reality, and it’s not the full spectrum of interpretations. It’s simply our current hypernormalized default way of experiencing the present, but it doesn’t have to the future.

And it doesn’t have to be forever.

---

SIDE DISHES:

This was a long one, so if you got this far, thank you for the patience. I urge you to read Kim’s Omelas story, and I can’t promise I won’t return to This is Water in the future. But here are a few others:

1. Short and on point on our current digital “infrastructure of observation” (or self-observation). Poor Gen Z: they wanted their own authenticity, and now it’s become performative: “Vulnerability-as-aesthetic, where what began as a rejection of perfection has become its own form of perfectionism.”

2. This is a beautiful story about a cemetery in Brooklyn.

3. Rose/House by Arkady Martine is a novella-length thriller about architecture, climate crisis, and the AIs we will live with. It’s one of those afternoon reads that makes you go: “What the heck was that?!”

4. Many of us are thinking alongside AI agents – I know I am. But alongside is key here – a recent MIT study has shown that going too far, like outsourcing your thinking writing to chatbots, slows cognitive development.

5. My Life as a Spy, by Katherine Verdery. If you want to nerd out on Romanian society in the 1970s and 80s, read this memoir by an American ethnographer, who was conveniently presumed to be a spy in Communist Romania (and informed on by friends and colleagues). It shows, among other things, that “the social world of Romanian communism, a world in which serendipity, clientelism, incompetence, improvisation, and failures of communication play a much greater role than does the totalitarian autocracy I was raised to expect”.

---