None of this is normal

(First published in the New Daily on 22 June 2025)

Photo by Roger Bradshaw on Unsplash

If you feel like you are going a little insane at the moment, you’re not alone.

Social media screens show the breakdown – an ad for something you don’t need, a cat video, aid workers talking about the devastation in Gaza and the lack of basic necessities, including infant formula.

Another cat, people screaming in Gaza, an influencer talking about meal replacements, a Palestinian child’s last breath, a satirical headline, an ad for weight loss, Israeli forces firing on and killing Palestinians as they search for ‘aid’.

To pretend this is not having a detrimental impact on the mental health of people is to pretend that this is normal, and everything is just business as usual.

There’s a word for that – ‘Hypernormalisation’.

Russian-born anthropologist Alexei Yurchak came up with the term to describe life in Soviet Russia in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation.

The whoosh-whoosh version is that it explains the phenomenon when everybody knows things are not normal, that society is broken to the benefit of a select few, but everyone just accepts it as normal.

British film maker Adam Curtis explored the concept in his 2016 documentary, named for Yurchak’s work, and how it applied to the West.

I didn’t have the term for it when I was growing up, but I did have my own private education on how it all works.

My father’s family is Lithuanian and growing up I thought every family had meetings about how to smuggle food, medication and money in packages to family overseas. But because no one was ever supposed to talk about it outside the family, we were all just keeping it secret.

I thought it was normal to have people appear at your grandmother’s door after midnight with news they didn’t trust over the phone, and for documents to be buried in lockboxes in the backyard.

That we were all just pretending not to know about certain people, because ‘someone might be listening’.

I learnt about bribing officials in corrupt regimes as a child, as I watched my grandmother and father calculate what the right amount was to include in a ‘food package’ to ensure that some of the tinned beetroot and antibiotics, and goodness knows what else was allowed through.

When I would ask my grandmother about it, she would shrug and tell me “it is what it is” before taking a long drag from her cigarette.

‘It is what it is’ is an excellent survival tool, but it’s also wonderful at disarming change, of stopping anyone from hoping for anything better.

Hypernormalisation is what links the western world’s acceptance of Israel’s act of aggression against Iran (there is no such thing as a ‘pre-emptive strike’ under international law) as a ‘defensive’ move, and it’s genocidal acts against Palestinian civilians as a ‘war on terror’, to the inability to ever have a serious conversation about domestic reforms that would address increased inequality, the fall in living standards and growing poverty.

We are not supposed to ever hope for anything better, because this is all very normal.

It’s normal to watch war crimes and not see your government take a stand.

It’s normal to see the world’s largest super power enable those war crimes, apply increasingly authoritarian tactics on its own population and attempt to shake down allies and it’s normal to see the political and media class respond by screaming for closer ties, even at the expense of their own nation’s sovereignty.

It’s normal to accept catastrophic climate consequences, because it’s normal to disregard the science and continue to approve fossil fuel projects.

It’s very normal to have people living in poverty in one of the world’s wealthiest nations.

It’s very normal to have people priced out of secure homes and it’s very normal to have a tax system that rewards the rich, while not being able to provide basic standards of living for the majority of its population.

It’s normal to hand over our identities and jobs to tech giants and it’s normal not to even try and police how much of us they own. It’s normal to target marginalised communities and instead defend billionaires. It’s very normal to feel anxious and stressed and like you can never get ahead. Have you tried mindfulness? Subscribe for just $19 a month to access the app’s full benefits.

Hypernormalisation is designed to make you feel powerless. It’s designed to make you feel like you can only ever move within the ‘normal’ boundaries which have been prescribed, and so no real change can ever occur.

Hypernormalisation works because it makes it seem like there is no alternative.

But there is always more than one possible future. That there is only ever one path, one response or eternal repetition of what has always been, is just one of the lies that keeps hypernormalisation going.

The Albanese government seems caught in its own hypernormalisation chamber, but we are in a moment where it can forge Australia on a new path.

Jim Chalmers was right to say he would not rule in or out any potential reforms to Australia’s taxation system, because if we are to see any hope of addressing the systemic issues within Australia’s society we need big, bold thinking that does not accept any of this as normal.

But when it comes to our nation’s defence policy and foreign relations, we seem bound by small thinking, stuck in a world that no longer exists if it ever did.

The only thing that shifts hypernormalisation of the unjust, unfair and at times, insane, is to refuse to accept it as the norm.

It is what it is – until it isn’t. Events would suggest we’ve reached that tipping point. Continuing to pretend any of this is normal dooms us all.