Here in the United States, we’re putting a lot of pressure on normal.

With all this talk of needing to “return to normal” and the psychological effects of living without an obvious end to the pandemic, normal is doing a lot of the heavy lifting.

We are also keenly aware that normal has never been good enough. One of our favorite sayings is “the grass is always greener on the other side.” Because we’re never actually satisfied with normal.

I can sympathize with the desire, of course. We’re all human. And we’re going through a collective trauma. But our response is actually the most normal thing in our lives because we’d be complaining about our circumstances anyway.

There are reasons why the individual pursuit of relative normalcy can be empowering. But that has little to nothing to do with our collective response. Or how we’re actively pursuing normal as a society.

Our present pursuit of normal is delusional.

What most clearly defines our collective pursuit of normal is just how hard we’re working to avoid the very things that would bring normalcy and stability.

This is most obvious in the tribalistic rejection of masks and vaccines which is preventing us from doing those normalish things we missed doing in 2020.

But it is more than that.

Normal is impossible in a pandemic.

(Unless we’re all sociopaths.)

Because, it is, by definition, abnormal.

And we cannot individualistically cultivate normal in a collective abnormal time. This is precisely why people were flipping out over not getting a haircut.

As a people, we in the US are showing virtually no creativity in our attempts to wrestle normal from the clutches of the pandemic. Our options seem to be either beat the bug so we can “just go back to normal” or ignore the bug and do “normal” anyway.

• Employee rights are still weak.
• Lack of childcare continues to be a burden to employment.
• Our healthcare insurance system is constraining literally everyone.
• Supply chain disruptions aren’t leading to significant changes in our country’s economic behavior.
• Nearly two years in and we still have shortages of N95 masks and rapid tests.

All the tools that would provide an environment for something more normal are all right there. But we’re avoiding them.

We don’t actually want normal.

We want stable and comfortable. Not normal. Nobody likes normal. It just looks better than this.

But if we genuinely want an end to the pandemic, more opportunities to thrive, and to live a stable and comfortable life this year, we aren’t going to get there by avoiding or pretending. Nor will we get there through personal growth.

We fundamentally misunderstand normal.

In nature, there is no stasis. Nothing simply exists. There is no sitting still.

Normal is adaptation or entropy. Growing or dying. Those are our options.

The backward gazing of “return to normal” cannot produce adaptation. It won’t do it. Nor will the pessimism of getting past the pandemic so we can “resume our lives”. This is the fuel for entropy.

What we actually want is the opposite of what we are cultivating.

Trying to make things “normal” is killing us.

Precisely because the way we’re defining the terms of normal mimic entropy rather than adaptation.

This is why we are falling apart as individuals and as a society. The terms by which we are living are cultivating disharmony and unhealth to us as individuals and as a community.

All those unruly passengers on flights, leading to abnormal rates of violence and antisocial behavior? This is a product of our collective pursuit of normal!

Yes, I’m as hungry for normal as anyone. But our current path won’t actually get us there.

Or more precisely, it just might. But when we get there, we won’t like what we see.