I think it's definitely hard to be normal.

The people who regularly manage to be normal at this stage of Anthropocene doom make me very nervous. Society is entangled with the principle of normalization, so it's probably not equipped to digest the horrors- not without the overwhelming urge to collectively understate the threats so that we don't individually panic.

Things in this world are genuinely, objectively worse now than they were at the start of this century. We might be forced to keep that truth in the background so that we can function, but there's plenty of psychic damage from the constant, unspoken dread, that adds so much more stress. It's very valid to have a day where the last straw is something that might be have normally been insignificant.

It can feel worse with a certain sort of life stability. A consistent career means there are patterns of work that stay familiar even as the environment outside of work changes. The structured, mundane pattern of a day-to-day job can amplify the background radiation effect of societal instability and ethereal threats.

It's very possible and worthwhile to keep pushing forward, but it might mean more resting and new ways of being passively cautious when receiving information. This seems especially important in familiar spaces, just to compensate for all that extra background radiation. The old rules don't really apply when we're in strange, new and desperate circumstances.


Hey, maybe you had an easier time being normal when the definition of normal wasn't quite so inhumane.