Should you be worrying about the state of the world? That is the question most people ask themselves every day as they watch or read the news. On one hand, everything feels dystopian, with people battling genocide and wars, famine and abject poverty, but on the other, the world functions as usual; children go to school, adults go to work, groceries must be bought and houses must be cleaned. From global politics to the inescapable powers of capitalism, from climate change to unemployment, the list goes on and it is impossible to look away from everything while simultaneously balancing work and daily chores.
What is perhaps adding fuel to the fire is access to infinite information in the palms of our hands. Experts believe that overexposure to unregulated information can complicate how people process world events. For younger people, it has created a high-stress environment with many sharing similar experiences of feeling “triggered” or “overwhelmed”.
However, the discourse around media consumption may be overlooking the actual issue: the systems we live in are no longer working and the recurring feeling that something is not right may be a symptom of a larger problem. The business-as-usual formula is showing cracks as people, especially younger generations, increasingly express discontent towards the status quo.
But if people are unhappy with the status quo, why don’t things change? Besides all that pesky anxiety, living in an era of hyperawareness has pushed people into a state of freeze as they carry on with their daily lives amid systemic collapse. People acknowledge the need for structural change in society, but participate in those same structures every day.
While worrying can take many forms, it is important to look at this human response to the world because it has consequences for society in general.
That collective dissonance has a name — hypernormalisation.
The term, originally coined by Alexei Yurchak to explain what civilians in Soviet Russia were feeling, is currently making the rounds on the internet. In his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, Yurchak described the final days of Soviet Russia, where society was unable to imagine alternatives to the status quo until eventually the system collapsed.
The term was subsequently used in a 2016 documentary by British filmmaker Adam Curtis. He narrated, “The Soviet Union became a society where everyone knew what their leaders said was not real because they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart, but everybody had to play along and pretend that it was real because no one could imagine any alternative. One Soviet writer called it hypernormalisation.
“You were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to see beyond it. The fakeness was hypernormal.” His documentary focused on living in a “post-truth” society where political leaders created fake narratives and counter-culture became ineffective.
“We live in a world where the powerful deceive us. We know they lie, they know we know they lie, they don’t care. We say we care, but we do nothing. And nothing ever changes. It’s normal. Welcome to the post-truth world,” reads the on-screen text in the documentary’s trailer.
Recently a video of digital anthropologist Rahaf Harfoush went viral in which she made use of the term. “What you are feeling is the disconnect between seeing that systems are failing, that things aren’t working… and yet the institutions and the people in power just are ignoring it and pretending everything is going to go on the way that it has,” she explained in the video.
“Hypernormalisation is when everyone knows that the system we’re living in doesn’t really work, but we all go along with it anyway because we can’t imagine what else to do. It’s like we’re participating in a collective illusion,” Rahaf told Images. “It’s become popular now because so many of us are experiencing that same feeling in our digital lives. We know our feeds are full of misinformation, we know our attention is being manipulated, and we know the stories we’re told about progress don’t always line up with reality. “But because these systems are so embedded in how we work, connect, and live, it feels almost impossible to step outside of them.”
She explained that people were drawn to the term because it illustrated the “uneasy sense” that something was not right and that everyone was complicit in “keeping up the illusion”.
Speaking about that dissonance, the anthropologist noted, “Many of us are in a kind of collective freeze; we know something is wrong, but we feel powerless to change it, so we default to maintaining the status quo. That’s where cognitive dissonance comes in: the gap between what we know and how we act.”
She described climate change as an example of this. According to her, despite easily available evidence about unsustainable lifestyles, people continued with “business as usual” because the alternatives felt overwhelming or inaccessible. “We live with that contradiction every day,” she said. This was also observable in people’s relationship with technology, according to Harfoush. People are aware that endless scrolling on their phones undermines their focus and well-being, yet they are locked in due to the design of these platforms and the pressure to stay connected, she explained.
“What I find fascinating as a digital anthropologist is how widespread this state has become. It’s not just individuals struggling; whole organisations, even governments, operate within these contradictions. We’ve normalised the freeze, even when the cracks are showing,” Harfoush said.
Aaron Mulvany, an anthropologist and professor at Habib University in Karachi, described the concept as when everybody in society can see that the structures and systems that are supposed to serve the nation are not functioning, “but they’re unable to imagine a way out of this repetitive cycle of reproduction of the system (and) systems not working“. He likened it to a treadmill we can’t get off.
In a conversation with Images, he maintained that hypernormalisation strictly applied to the conditions of the Soviet Union. “I’m convinced by the argument about the late communist Soviet Union, that’s what was going on. It had been going on for a very long time… I don’t see this part happening (elsewhere) yet right now,” he said.
“Things seem to work. People keep doing their daily business. But one of the other pieces that’s missing is a despair in daily life that there is no way out of this, and what I’m seeing as an American, watching my country from abroad, is that… that despair hasn’t infected the political system yet. You still see people who see a way out… That soul-destroying despair, ‘we can’t see a way out’ — for me doesn’t exist yet.
“It could take hold very quickly,” he warned, adding that since right-wing American political commentator Charlie Kirk was assassinated, something was happening “linguistically” which was “very concerning and could point the way towards the normalisation of hypernormalisation”.
“What is concerning is that I am not seeing the kind of pushback (that was expected), like the legacy media in the US seems to have rolled over and died.”
“There is a large population of the US that feels despair, 100 per cent. I can share that. There is an awful large, probably statistically, almost as large, population that thinks everything is going great. They are on board with this. For them, institutions are working. For them, the government is doing exactly what the government should be doing.”
He noted that in contrast, people on the “other end of the political spectrum do feel despair”. “But the reason that these are not shared in the same massive, nearly universal way that they were in the Soviet Union is because of the fragmentation of media through the rise of social media. We can exist almost entirely in our own little bubbles of reality.
“There are plenty of people, millions, literally millions of people in the US who look at the nation’s institutions and see them working. There are millions more people on the complete opposite spectrum who see institutions and see them failing and they have no idea what to do. These are the people who are thinking in terms of hypernormalisation.”
In Pakistan’s context, this can be observed in what Umair Javed, who teaches Sociology at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, calls the “politics of common sense”.
Explaining Antonio Gramsci’s concept and its subsequent use by Pakistani author Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, Javed described the idea as political structures being “too overwhelming” and the belief that they “cannot necessarily be changed in any meaningful way”. “So we need to make peace with it and to find a way through which we can extract some benefit for ourselves, because… systems of injustice, exploitation, chaos (and) turbulence are not necessarily going to go away anytime soon.”
Terming systemic dysfunction in Pakistan “chaos,” Javed viewed systemic issues as a driver of hypernormalisation. “The way that the state… interacts, people do not necessarily see a way out of the problem and they do not necessarily have a way of finding a solution to these very concrete and political problems… So in some ways, they have no option but to play along with it,” he said.
He added that playing along or the politics of common sense can, in turn, re-enable the state to remain in the existing “unresponsive and, to varying degrees, its failed form”.
Does any of this impact us? The short answer is yes, because hypernormalisation has consequences that go further than our individual lives. While drawing a parallel with the Soviet Union may not be entirely accurate, today’s world carries similarities that cannot be overlooked.
In May, Caroline Hickman, an American psychotherapist and instructor at the University of Bath specialising in climate anxiety, told The Guardian that people who felt the “wrongness of current conditions” might be experiencing depression and anxiety, but those feelings were “quite rational — not a symptom of poor mental health, alarmism or a lack of proper perspective”.
She was quoted as saying, “What we’re really scared of is that the people in power have not got our back and they do not give a s**t about whether we survive or not.”
People around the world have expressed discomfort with ‘business-as-usual’ attitudes in everyday life amid Israel’s devastating bombardment in Gaza following October 7, 2023, which killed well over 67,000 Palestinians. While witnessing the conflict through our screens is far from the mental trauma Palestinians have faced, seeing pictures and watching videos of dead children since the genocide began coupled with consistent inaction against Israel has caused widespread revulsion and evoked mistrust in systems of power.
The purpose of this essay is to discuss whether such feelings are merely a product of witnessing the state of the world or also emerge from the inability to imagine a different kind of world.
Speaking about the struggle to imagine alternative systems, Javed, the teacher at LUMS, said there are no existing political structures “people can engage with that will help them answer these questions and provide a pathway out or at least give them a framework to understand why the world is the way it is”.
He noted that since the 1990s, the world had converged on liberal democracy and international human rights as the preeminent framework for how the world was supposed to be run. “And then you suddenly start to see it… it always was a façade, but you start to see it completely exposed in the aftermath of the genocide in Gaza. So what is the framework beyond this? That’s what everyone is asking for.”
When asked about implications beyond the cognitive level, digital anthropologist Harfoush said hypernormalisation can show up in “very material, tangible ways”. “When we normalise systems that are not serving us, it shapes our policies, our economies, and even the way we design our cities.”
She gave the example of modern work culture, saying, “We all know it’s unsustainable (burnout rates are skyrocketing, mental health is suffering), yet organisations still cling to outdated measures of productivity because we haven’t imagined new models that truly value creativity and wellbeing.
“That’s hypernormalisation at work: the façade of ‘business as usual’ hides the cracks that are already showing up in absenteeism, attrition, and declining innovation,” she said.
“So while hypernormalisation begins in our minds, in the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of contradictions, it absolutely manifests in the physical world, in policies, infrastructures, and lived experiences,” she explained.
According to Jorge Oliveira, a researcher in Australia, hypernormalisation can significantly impact democratic governance and social well-being. In an article titled Hypernormalisation: The Crisis of Post-Truth Society, he wrote, “When systemic dysfunction is normalised, citizens may become complacent, ceasing to question the status quo. This, in turn, enables political leaders to continue exploiting the system without facing genuine accountability.”
He added that when a society sidelines experts and favours simplistic political narratives, important issues such as climate change, healthcare, and economic inequality remain unaddressed, resulting in dire consequences. The article also discusses that that acceptance diminishes the foundation of public trust and the erosion of trust “makes it harder to mobilise collective action for meaningful change”.
In Pakistan’s case, people do not know what to situate their politics on, according to Javed. He argued that people were reacting to politics through mediated consumption in the form of social media content, which was shaping their “political socialisation”.
He explained the emergence of “deeply unsocialised political subject” as people who were only experiencing politics in a narrow, consumption-driven form, which was leading towards “disengaged citizenry” who cannot imagine alternatives or were not invested in making the state or politics more responsive.
Oliveira argued that it was hard to imagine an engaged citizenry because people were “just caught up in meeting their day-to-day subsistence requirements,” adding that they do not have much time for deeper political engagements. “All of the more fundamental issues of politics are basically put on a back burner because people are literally just trying to navigate their daily lives on a regular basis,” he wrote.
The state of the world may be depressing, but there’s always hope for change. The concept of hypernormalisation can be useful because it helps us see the underlying issue and offers an opportunity to step outside the collective illusion towards actionable change.
According to Harfoush, “Once you can label an experience, you can start to work with it more intentionally.” Beyond the psychological relief, she said it also helps us diagnose where systems are failing. “If we realise that an entire industry is running on narratives that no longer match reality, that is a signal for leaders, policymakers, and citizens to intervene. It becomes a tool for critical thinking.
“So the concept is not just descriptive. It can be prescriptive too. It creates space to imagine alternatives and to start asking, ‘If this story no longer serves us, what might a better one look like?’”
When asked what we can do about hypernormalisation, she said the awareness from when people recognise the “gap between the story they are told and what they actually experience” creates “cracks in the façade”.
She spoke about practising small acts of refusal on an individual level by setting boundaries with technology, questioning productivity myths at work or choosing to engage with information more intentionally. “These actions may feel small, but collectively they signal a cultural shift,” she said.
It also means being willing to acknowledge when old narratives no longer serve us and having the courage to imagine alternatives, she said. This can be done by redesigning work to prioritise wellbeing or building new governance models for technology that actually reflect our values.
“So while hypernormalisation might always be part of the human condition, we are not powerless. Every time we choose to confront the contradiction instead of ignoring it, we open up the possibility of change,” Harfoush said.
Mulvany took a rather optimistic approach, saying he believed there are people imagining alternatives, particularly at the grassroots level. Highlighting various systematic issues in Pakistan, such as corruption, power outages and lack of access to clean water, he said, “There are plenty of other people who are imagining other ways the state could be. There’s not a hopelessness (that) ‘this is what we have and this is all we’re ever going to have.’ There are people and there have been since the 70s… who are able to imagine a different kind of Pakistan.”
The professor sees people who imagine alternatives all the time. “Every day, I spend time with students who are excited to make change. I talk with students who have ideas for how their neighbourhood can be changed, and how that change might be applied to the next neighbourhood, which could then be applied to larger systems across Karachi. I see students who are concerned about water issues, solid waste issues, general sanitation, health and epidemiology… about Afghan refugees, about higher education (and) lower education.
“I see students every day who are going out into their communities and trying to make a change. I see it every day,” he said, adding, “There are lots of people in Pakistan who still have hope.”
When Harfoush first posted the Instagram video, she made it “to reassure others that they are not alone” and that “they are not misinterpreting the situation or imagining things,” The Guardian reported. Understanding hypernormalisation “made me feel less isolated,” she told the publication.
While confronting the status quo can be a daunting task, the collective response indicates that we are not on our own. Understanding collective dissonance can help us actively respond to systemic failure and translate discomfort into collective action.
We can stop reproducing the status quo only after we break out of the illusion. Instead of following business-as-usual, we must allow ourselves to imagine and create better systems.
