We Call it Normal, but it's Not

At some point we decided that exhaustion was just what life felt like.

That disconnection was normal. That getting through the day was enough to ask of yourself. That the low-grade hum of dissatisfaction behind everything was just the sound of being an adult.

We gave it different names. Stress. Adulting. The way things are.

But I don't think it's the way things are. I think we just stopped questioning it.

What We've Agreed To

There's a social contract around suffering that nobody shows you explicitly. You absorb it.

You absorb it from the way adults talked about work when you were a child - the sighs, the complaints, the but what can you do of it all. You absorb it from the culture's narrative that meaningful struggle earns eventual rest (retirement, the weekend, the holiday). You absorb it from the general understanding that if you feel worse than okay on most days, you should manage it privately and not inconvenience anyone with it.

This is what we call normal.

It is, I want to argue, profoundly strange.

The Adjustment

We are adapted for a world that no longer exists. The anxiety that helped our ancestors survive - the hypervigilance, the catastrophising, the constant low-level threat-detection - doesn't have the same application in a world where the threats are diffuse and chronic and administrative.

We're running predator-response systems against spreadsheets. Against awkward emails. Against the generalised dread of a future that feels simultaneously out of control and our own fault.

No wonder we're tired.

No wonder it feels like something is wrong even when nothing specific is wrong.

Something is wrong. Just not the kind of thing that has a specific fix.

What I Actually Think

I think we've collectively agreed to a standard of living - not materially, but experientially - that we would not accept if we thought we had a choice.

I think a lot of us have stopped believing we have a choice.

I think the choice, such as it is, is smaller than it sounds and also harder than it sounds: it's the decision to take your own discomfort seriously. Not as pathology. Not as weakness. As information.

Your exhaustion is telling you something. Your disconnection is telling you something. The low-grade hum is telling you something.

The question is what.

And the harder question is: once you know what, what do you do with it.

I Don't Have an Answer

I'm writing this partly because I've been asking these questions myself and I don't have clean answers.

I know that calling it normal doesn't make it fine. I know that getting through the day is not the same as living in it. I know that the adjustments available to most people are small and insufficient and still, somehow, worth making.

I know that noticing is the beginning of something, even if you can't see what.

So: notice.

Notice that you're tired in a way that sleep doesn't fix. Notice the hum. Notice the moments when it goes quiet, and what's different about those moments.

We call it normal.

It doesn't have to stay that way.