The loneliness of hypernormalization: thinking your incoherence is personal, individual, your failure to hold — when actually the incoherence is shared but we've lost the language and trust to name it together. Everyone managing their own wobble in private, which makes the collective wobble worse. What would it look like to stop performing holding... See more

Hypernormalization is collective performed holding. Everyone acting like the thing coheres when we can all see it doesn't. The gap between what's visibly broken and what we're supposed to pretend is working.

"How do we write, create, remember when tools are discontinuous archives replaced every few years?"

The question isn't "how do I hold myself together" but "what are the conditions under which coherence emerges?"

Context accumulates rather than depletes. "As time passes, insight expands, and even more context comes into view." Understanding that deepens rather than uses up. The opposite of consume.

The terror of incoherence. Not as dramatic thing, but as constant low hum underneath everything else. The body that might not hold together. The self that formed in fragments because the context wasn't safe enough for continuous narrative. The organization shifting into something unrecognizable. The culture disassembling. The words that don't land... See more

A reckoning with what it costs to hold things together, and what becomes possible when you stop holding so tight.

"How are you" is a matching question. It expects a matching answer. Fine, good, busy, you know. The social script holds. "Are you okay" is a meeting question. It implies: I see that something might not be holding. I'm willing to be here for the answer. And if you've been doing the work of coherence — constructing it daily out of language and will... See more

Maybe that's why "are you okay" is so destabilizing. Not just because it sees your effort. But because it breaks the contract. It admits that the performance is a performance. And if one person stops pretending, the whole fragile architecture of mutual pretending is exposed.