If you’ve ever had the unsettling feeling that everything around you is breaking down—politics, climate, healthcare, housing—but your day still consists of ordering a latte, doomscrolling, and watching Wheel of Fortune, congratulations: you’re living in the age of hypernormalisation. It’s the twilight zone where collapse wears a suit and tie, and life lurches forward like everything’s totally fine. Spoiler: it’s not.
What Is Hypernormalisation, Really?
Hypernormalisation is one of those academic-sounding words that perfectly describes something we all experience but struggle to explain. Think of it as the moment when a society becomes so dysfunctional that everyone knows the system doesn’t work—but keeps pretending it does anyway.
The term was originally coined by Soviet scholar Alexei Yurchak in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More. He described the bizarre twilight era of the USSR in the 1980s when the political system had clearly failed. The economy was a joke, corruption was everywhere, nobody believed in the propaganda—and yet the whole country kept up the charade.
People went through the motions because admitting the truth was too scary. The system was “normalised” beyond recognition, and yet everyone acted like it was still functioning—hyper-normalised.
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How Hypernormalisation Helped Sink the Soviet Union
In the USSR’s final years, people lived double lives. Publicly, they nodded along with slogans and rituals. Privately, they rolled their eyes, made jokes, and traded stories about how disconnected leadership had become from reality.
The Communist Party kept making five-year plans and launching grand projects, even as bread lines stretched around the block. Citizens knew it was fake. Leaders knew citizens knew it was fake. But no one could say so without risking arrest or worse.
This fake normalcy became so deeply embedded that when the Soviet Union finally collapsed in 1991, many people weren’t surprised—but they were paralyzed. Years of pretending had trained them to feel powerless, even when reality came crashing in. That paralysis—born of dissonance, denial, and fear—is the dark heart of hypernormalisation.
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Adam Curtis Picks Up the Thread
Fast forward to 2016. British filmmaker Adam Curtis releases a documentary called HyperNormalisation (yes, all one word). His point? That the West—yes, us—is now caught in the same kind of make-believe. Governments, corporations, and media outlets prop up fake realities to keep us calm, distracted, and most of all, not asking questions.
In his words: “Politicians have given up on the real world. They create simple stories instead.” The problem? Those stories no longer match what we see and feel every day. But just like in the Soviet Union, we go along with it—because what else can we do?
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The Guardian: “Systems Are Crumbling – But Daily Life Continues”
A 2023 article in The Guardian summed it up beautifully. The headline: “Systems are crumbling – but daily life continues. The dissonance is real.”
Yes. That.