A few years ago, in 2012, I wrote a post that proved to be one of my more enduringly popular ones, Welcome to the Future Nauseous. In it, I introduced the concept of a manufactured normalcy field. The thesis was simple (and hopefully intuitive): we are always in the grips of uncontrolled evolutionary change unfolding at a nauseating and volatile pace, but we manage to construct a "normalcy field" around our lives to help us create an illusion of stable equilibrium. But when the accumulated stress of unaccommodated change gets to be too much, the normalcy field collapses, and we experience this as anxiety-provoking "weirding" of normalcy.
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When Business As Usual Ends
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A few years ago, in 2012, I wrote a post that proved to be one of my more enduringly popular ones, Welcome to the Future Nauseous. In it, I introduced the concept of a manufactured normalcy field. The thesis was simple (and hopefully intuitive): we are always in the grips of uncontrolled evolutionary change unfolding at a nauseating and volatile pace, but we manage to construct a "normalcy field" around our lives to help us create an illusion of stable equilibrium. But when the accumulated stress of unaccommodated change gets to be too much, the normalcy field collapses, and we experience this as anxiety-provoking "weirding" of normalcy.