A good article from The Guardian:
Systems are crumbling – but daily life continues. The dissonance is real
“In January, the comedian Ashley Bez posted an Instagram video of herself, trying to describe a heavy mood in the air. “How come everything feels all …?” she says, trailing off and grimacing exaggeratedly into the camera.
Digital anthropologist Rahaf Harfoush saw the video, and got it immediately.
“Welcome to the hypernormalization club,” Harfoush said in a response video. “I’m so sorry that you’re here.”
“Hypernormalization” is a heady, $10 word, but it captures the weird, dire atmosphere of the US in 2025.
First articulated in 2005 by scholar Alexei Yurchak to describe the civilian experience in Soviet Russia, hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening.
The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation.
“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, like, ignoring it and pretending everything is going to go on the way that it has,” Harfoush says in her video.
Within 48 hours, Harfoush’s video accrued millions of views. (It currently has slightly fewer than 9m.) It spread in “mom groups, friend chat circles, political subreddits, coupon communities, and even dog-walking groups”, Harfoush tells me, along with variations of: “Oh, so that’s what I’ve been feeling!” and “people tagging their friends with notes like: ‘We were just talking about this!’””
Club Schadenfreude 
makes perfect sense. We are taught that, just like Mum and Dad, the government governs ALL of us, and we have to trust that. It’s hard to let go of that idea, even when it spits in your eye and sets fire to your hair. “but…but…but…” you say, horrified and confused by the fallout. This one is major, and it impacts all of us. That may be the most comforting and terrifying thing of all. We are all in this together, and it’s getting crowded.
However, it would seem that some parts of this are coming unglued, so there may be hope.
One thing we have to remember: when the current president bad mouths previous leaders, this is not a good thing. And there is no freaking need to tear down a former leader to make yourself look good. If anything, it makes you appear childish and mean.
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Ya gotta name it to claim it. I no longer trust my own government. The Federales may be knocking on my door any day now.
The phone rings. It’s my daughter. “Dad, how are you doing?
I say, “I’m fine. I am still at high risk for stroke, got heart disease, and two forms of cancer. But the thing I feel really bad about is my hypernormalization.”
She says, “I get it, Dad. Three norms and hyper.”
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