Everything is Not Okay

You already know.

You’ve known for a long time.

You feel it when the news anchor smiles through disaster. When your coworker says "I'm good, thanks" with haunted eyes and a smile that barely turns up at the corners. When you scroll past a thousand tragedies and feel nothing—not because you’re indifferent, but because your system learned it had to numb out or break.

This isn’t a secret.

It’s a pressure in the air. A grief beneath the skin. A quiet, mounting recognition that the systems we've built—economic, political, technological, spiritual—are not designed for life. They are designed for control, for simulation, for endurance. And we’re told to function inside them as if they are sacred, as if the hollow echo of routine is still a song worth singing.

We’re not blind.

Hypernormalization—the term for this surreal state—doesn't mean people are asleep. It means they’re awake inside a simulation that insists it's real. Everyone sees the cracks. The knowing is already here. What’s missing is permission to act on it. To speak it aloud. To stop pretending.

Truth has become impolite. Honesty, inconvenient. So we look down. Smile on cue. Get back to work.

But the cost is rising.

Everything is not okay. And it never was. We’re living in the long shadow of systems that required our silence, our productivity, our agreement. Systems that taught us to trade presence for performance, being for doing, feeling for functioning.

We say we’re fine.
We smile.
We adapt.

But inside, we grieve.

That grief is sacred.

It means your compass still works. It means the soul of the world still whispers through you, even when the noise tries to drown it out. That whisper is truth. Truth can be something other than an impossibility or a cudgel. It can be a tuning fork—a way of orienting toward life that allows you to stop pretending.

When you strike that tuning fork, the false shatters. When you hold it, the real emerges.

This is not a call to collapse in the face of the lies. It’s a call to presence and embodiment in truth. The truth of our time is heavy—but it’s also holy. It invites us to stop moving as if the world is fine and begin creating as if it can be healed.

We can rise. We can remember.  We can reach for each other in the dark.

The truth isn’t always easy.
It can feel messy.
Yet nothing cleans house better.

Everything is not okay. But you are still here—and you have choice.

And that is the beginning of everything real.