This is Part 4 of the Shifting Grounds series. We’ve felt the ache, catalogued the cracks, and examined the story behind it all. Now we’re asking: if the problems are so obvious, why haven’t the systems changed? And why do so many of us still go along with it? Even if you’re starting here, this post stands alone as an exploration of the brittle nature of our world.
The Strange Persistence of Breakdown
We’re living through a remarkable yet perplexing moment. We’re at the pinnacle of material advance, yet feel starved of meaning. The world we inhabit was once only imagined in science fiction, but now we’re uncertain if it’s heading toward utopia or dystopia.
For those willing to look, we can see the foundation of our story eroding: ecological collapse, political theatre, economic inequality reaching absurd proportions. Yet somehow, life carries on. The grocery stores stay stocked, innovations continue to be churned out, and most of us continue our routines as if chasms aren’t deepening.
This isn’t just collective denial, but something more complex. We have systems that have become too fragile to last but too controlled to fall. We’ve built a world that works brilliantly… as long as nothing goes wrong. And when things do go wrong, we’ve gotten remarkably good at patching the surface while the foundation rots.
This isn’t only about broken systems, it’s also about what’s not acknowledged. There is a psychic cost to living split between what we know and what we’re told to believe.
The Architecture of Fragility
A fragile system can appear perfectly normal on the surface while being one shock away from catastrophe. It’s like a game of Jenga where we’ve been pulling out blocks—meaning, resources, resilience, attention—to reach new heights while leaving the tower teetering.
Increasingly, I see the same pattern: we optimize for efficiency but demand more control. Paradoxically, control makes systems less adaptable—more brittle. The progress we’ve built comes with hidden costs, debts that compile into the future.
Think about it: globalization gave us two-day shipping and hyper-connectivity. But one blocked canal in Egypt can disrupt supply chains worldwide. Centralization made systems efficient but also hard to steer and prone to catastrophic failure. Now, a problem somewhere risks becoming a crisis everywhere. Our challenges have become existential.
We’ve created a self-reinforcing loop: the bigger and more centralized a system becomes, the more control it needs to function, which makes it more fragile, which requires even more control.
We’ve built a machine that can’t stop, and we call that progress.
The Illusion of Control
When crisis hits, and it does regularly, we’ve perfected surface-level fixes: print more money, hold another climate summit, develop more stringent legislation, create another app to solve our connection problems, start another war.
These aren’t really designed to fix the underlying issues. They’re designed to give the illusion that things are under control, that someone is steering the ship, that the adults are in charge.
But beneath the surface, deeper down, is also the collapse of shared meaning. We can no longer agree on basic questions: what’s true, what matters, even what’s real. This isn’t just political polarization. It’s the breakdown of the stories that once held us together.
Without a coherent narrative to make sense of the world, we become unmoored—easy to distract, easy to divide, easy to manage.
Life in Hypernormalisation
This is where things get troubling. We’re living through what scholars call hypernormalisation. The term comes from Russian researcher Alexei Yurchak, who studied the final decades of the Soviet Union, when everyone knew the system was broken but couldn’t imagine alternatives. Their only option was to play along with false narratives.
Filmmaker Adam Curtis expanded on this concept with a documentary by the same name—HyperNormalisation. Throughout, he gives examples of how modern governments create simplified fictions to mask overwhelming complexity. In a runaway world, leaders retreat into “dream worlds” that are ungrounded from reality. But as Curtis notes, “this retreat into a dream world allowed dark and destructive forces to fester and grow outside.”
A clear example comes from Putin’s Russia, as shown in Curtis’s documentary. With the help of Vladislav Surkov, a political technician, Putin engineered a “managed democracy” where politics is a confusing performance designed to distort truth. Surkov even funded fake protests on opposing sides, blurring reality and fiction. This flood of conflicting narratives made people give up trying to understand what’s real, leaving truth irrelevant and widespread apathy in its place.
The system stayed rigged, but few dared to resist.
The Psychology of Pretending
Sound familiar? Look around.
We have elections that change faces but never systems. Corporate interests continue to dominate regardless of who’s in power. Climate summits set lofty goals while each year brings hotter temperatures and more extreme weather. The stock exchange soars while individuals struggle to pay rent. We have a media landscape that appears free but is owned by a handful of conglomerates and shaped by algorithms that prioritize divisive engagement over truth.
This is the performance of normalcy. We’re told things are fine and are expected to go along. Each crisis becomes the “new normal” as we adjust our baseline to accommodate. It’s an Orwellian collective amnesia that makes us accept degraded conditions as inevitable rather than created.
Through my travels, I’ve been to places where rivers run clean, where communities are tight-knit, where work has meaning beyond a paycheque. But these are slowly becoming memories that are being systematically erased.
We’re losing our reference points for what’s possible.
And here’s what makes me uncomfortable: I suspect many of the people making these decisions know exactly what they’re doing. The revolving door between government regulators and the industries they regulate isn’t accidental. The timing of major news stories that conveniently distract from other scandals isn’t coincidental. The way social media algorithms amplify division while burying meaningful discussion isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
I’m not even saying this requires a grand conspiracy. I’m saying there are predictable patterns of behaviour when powerful people want to stay powerful. And sometimes that means keeping the rest of us confused, divided, and focused on everything except the systems that actually matter.
Why We Play Along
Living in a hypernormalised world comes with costs—cognitive dissonance among them. The gap between what we sense is true and what we’re told is true creates internal division. We begin to doubt our own perception. Is the world really broken, or are we?
Many of us self-edit to avoid being labeled as cynics, conspiracy theorists, or troublemakers. We learn our lines and play our roles, even when a deeper part of us screams that something is deeply wrong.
This is a gaslighting of our intuition that has spiritual consequences. When we’re internally fractured, it’s difficult to reach to our depths. Our sense of wonder dims, grief is muted, and we disconnect from inner knowing that could guide us to truth.
The division we see everywhere isn’t just a side effect of this dream world, it’s how the story holds itself together. We argue endlessly about superficial narratives while the underlying systems remain untouched. People become avatars of ideology rather than complex human beings. We become prisoners defending the institutions that keep us chained.
And why does it continue? Because those in power need our belief to function. Because we can’t collectively imagine alternatives. Because familiar lies feel safer than uncertain truths.
Developing Discernment in a Manufactured Confusion
The good news is that, like a bad dream, the spell only holds as long as we believe it’s real. Hypernormalisation only holds as long as we play along. The moment we start seeing it, questioning it, refusing to participate, its power fades.
But navigating this requires developing our internal compass. Here’s what I’ve learned:
Trust your nervous system. Your body often knows before your mind does. Notice what makes you feel contracted, fearful, and agitated instead of expanded and calm.
Diversify your information diet. If all your sources agree, you’re probably in an echo chamber. Seek perspectives that challenge your assumptions.
Follow the incentives. Always ask who benefits from this narrative? What would they gain from me believing this?
Notice what’s not being said. Often the most important information is what’s absent from the conversation. Notice what you’re being told to focus on instead.
Practice holding paradox. Truth is usually complex and contradictory. Be suspicious of simple answers to complex problems.
Ground yourself in direct experience. What do you actually see, feel, and witness versus what you’re told you should experience?
Don’t give up. It’s tempting to become cynical and apathetic in a world that seems too big to change. But things can only get worse when the masses are asleep.
This isn’t about becoming paranoid or cynical. It’s about developing the discernment muscles we need to navigate an information landscape designed to confuse.
Breaking the Spell
Recognition is the first step in breaking the spell. These narratives only maintain their power through collective belief and participation. The emperor’s new clothes disappear the moment someone points out his nakedness.
The fragile system we’re living in reveals its own contradictions. The more brittle it becomes, the more obvious its cracks. What appears to be strength—the need for control, the endless messaging, the performance of normalcy—actually shows us how weak the foundation has become.
What fascinates me is how much energy it takes to maintain the illusion. If the system was truly robust, it wouldn’t need this much propaganda, distraction, and division to keep us from questioning it. A healthy system would invite scrutiny, not punish it.
The Courage to Step Outside
As I write, I feel these influences on me too. In a world where simplified narratives dominate, truly discerning fact from fiction becomes nearly impossible. I feel tempted to perform tidy explanations to make sense of the madness.
But in a world drowning in illusion, the most radical thing we can do is tell our truth, even if it’s messy.
I recognize that having the time and space to develop discernment is itself a privilege. Many people are too busy making ends meet to question the lives they’re handed. But for those of us with this luxury, responsibility follows—to see clearly and to refuse to act from the illusion. When enough people do this, alternatives emerge.
The quiet refusal to act like things are normal when it’s false can be revolutionary. Every person who stops playing the role shines light on the façade. Every conversation that goes beneath the surface, every question that challenges prevailing assumptions, every moment of authentic expression in a world of scripts does more than we realize.
Something new is already being written and created by those who refuse to accept that this brittle, controlled version of reality is the best we can do. There’s a story that doesn’t require us to pretend, or to split ourselves in half that’s waiting for us. We just need the courage to start living it.
Journal prompt: “What would it mean to build for resilience instead of efficiency? What might change if we honoured complexity rather than demanding simplicity? Where in your life do you feel the pressure to pretend, and what happens when you stop?”