When normal is crazy
If you dropped an ordinary person from the Middle Ages into our world, they’d probably think we’re all mad. We stare at glowing rectangles for ten hours a day. We post selfies online to people we’ve never met. We work jobs that make us tired so we can afford things we don’t have time to use. But we don’t think of this as madness. We call it life.
Erich Fromm had a point when he said a society can be sick even if its people look fine. Madness, at the scale of civilizations, doesn’t look like a padded room. It looks like everyone agreeing that the absurd is reasonable.
That’s the strange thing about being human: our definition of “normal” shifts with whatever we repeat. If every conversation has a screen between it, you stop calling it loneliness and start calling it connection.
The danger isn’t that people act insane; it’s that they stop noticing it.
The healthiest people have one thing in common: they notice. They notice how they feel after scrolling for an hour. They notice when a job or relationship makes them smaller. They notice when “progress” feels more like acceleration than direction.
Fromm believed the problem wasn’t capitalism or technology by themselves, but our unexamined obedience to them. We treat the economy as if it’s the weather - something we can only adapt to, not change. But every system was built by people. It can be rebuilt.
Maybe sanity isn’t about fitting into the world. Maybe it’s about building one you’d actually want to fit into.
When people talk about “finding themselves,” they usually mean leaving society for a bit: travel, silence, solitude. It works because it gives you a reference point. You can’t tell the temperature of the air until you step into another climate. Once you’ve lived a few weeks without notifications, you realize how loud the modern world actually is.
The solution isn’t to escape society forever. It’s to remember that society is a tool, not a mirror. You don’t have to become the shape it reflects back at you.
History suggests this is how progress happens: one person, or a small group, quietly deciding not to play by rules that don’t make sense. They see through the shared hallucination. Then others start to see it too.
That’s how sanity spreads: slowly, and one person at a time.
The hardest part of sanity isn’t noticing what’s broken. It’s choosing to act differently once you do.
Most people see through the madness eventually. You realize your schedule makes no sense, your ambitions aren’t really yours, and the game everyone’s playing doesn’t have a prize worth winning. But then you go to work on Monday anyway.
It’s not because you’re weak. It’s because the system rewards participation, not awareness. You can spot the absurdity, but unless you also build an alternative, you’re still stuck inside it.
That’s why the first step to staying sane isn’t rebellion; it’s building small pockets of clarity.
Start by taking back tiny pieces of attention. One quiet hour in the morning without input. A walk without headphones. Writing a page no one will ever see. These moments are like breathing holes in the ice. You can’t rebuild your mind if you never surface.
Once you start doing that, you begin to see what you actually want. And that’s dangerous, because wanting something real means saying no to everything that isn’t. You’ll disappoint people who live by borrowed goals. You’ll stop chasing the things they think matter. But that’s the price of clarity: you trade approval for autonomy.
Fromm said freedom terrifies us because it forces us to take responsibility for meaning. When there’s no script, you have to write your own. That’s the moment most people turn back. They decide madness with masses is safer than sanity alone.
But here’s the secret: sanity compounds. The clearer you see, the clearer you keep seeing. You start noticing which habits make you more alive, which people sharpen your thinking, which work feels like alignment instead of resistance.
Eventually, your life starts to look less like a reaction and more like a signal. And signals attract other signals. You find the others, the ones who noticed too. That’s when society starts to shift, quietly, from the inside out.
You can’t fix an insane world by shouting at it. You fix it by showing there’s another way to live. Sanity spreads through example, not argument.
That’s how new normals begin: one person decides not to pretend anymore.