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.

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.

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.

"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

The pressure to "simplify" or "streamline" or "what's the one key takeaway" is the pressure to consume — to separate into parts that cannot be reunited. It's the demand for the menu instead of the meal. Removing the context removes the meaning. The gestalt isn't decoration around the insight — the gestalt IS the insight. The relationship between... See more

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

Internet as carnival time (Bakhtin): cyclical, regenerative, collective, inversions, acceleration & simultaneity. Classical body: closed, completed, finished. Grotesque body: open, in process.

Exformation (Tor Nørretranders): the hidden background of experience, associations, memories, culture, bodily knowledge that makes meaning possible. "We think we're communicating with words, but we're really communicating our entire worlds." When society loses shared stories, loses shared exformation — words no longer rest on same ground.

Trust as connective tissue — what allows coherence without control. It operates at every scale: Somatic (can I trust my body?), Relational (the warm lifeboat — seeing each other in solidarity), Linguistic (shared language as trust infrastructure, exformation), Institutional (from control to coordination), Temporal ("meet me, don't try to match me"... See more