The Accommodated Life: Passive vs Active Adaptation in a Hypernormal World
Or: How we learn to live with the unacceptable, and call it ‘normal’.
Word of the Day: Hypernormalisation – the state of a society where people continue to live according to rules they know aren’t actually working.
It’s the late 1980s, somewhere in the Soviet Union. You’re a schoolteacher, standing in front of a class reciting doctrine you no longer believe in. Your students don’t believe it either. But no one says anything. You go through the motions. You nod. They nod. Everyone plays along, because not playing is riskier than compliance.
That’s hypernormalisation. A system so obviously broken that its brokenness becomes part of the script.
But it’s not just history. It’s here. It’s now. It’s us.
Soft Collapses and Accommodated Lives
We all accommodate. Every single day. The question is: how?
Passive accommodation is the one we know best. The daily compromises. The friction we swallow. It’s telling yourself the late train is OK. That it’s fine you haven’t seen your friends in weeks. That working 60-hour weeks is just what being a grown-up looks like now.
It’s staying in a relationship because leaving seems harder. It’s giving up on NHS appointments because “that’s just the system.” It’s ignoring the soul-rattle of a job you hate because your LinkedIn looks healthy and the snacks are free.
Passive accommodation is a quiet art. A slow drift. It asks no questions. It changes nothing, and it’s everywhere.
But then, there’s something else.
Rebellion in Disguise
Active accommodation looks the same on the surface – compliance, compromise, maybe even resignation. But underneath, something different is happening.
Think of the civil servant quietly feeding documents to journalists. The doctor who follows NHS protocols by day, but writes blistering essays by night - the protester in a suit. The teacher sneaking banned books into classrooms.
They’re playing the game to stay in it. But they’re also subverting it, bit by bit. It’s slower than revolution. More frustrating than opting out. But in a world like this one – brittle, surveilled, oddly polite in its decay – sometimes the only way to change the rules is to appear to follow them.
Hopeful Scepticism (And Why "Better Is Good" Feels So Hard)
I’m not cynical. I’m not one of those end-times armchair prophets who think everything’s doomed and we should all watch it burn. But I’m not exactly optimistic either.
I live in the half-light. Hopeful scepticism.
It’s the belief that things can get better, tempered by the knowledge that they usually don’t on their own. That power rarely yields. That systems are designed to preserve themselves, not to evolve. And that even small wins require an ungodly amount of effort, luck, and human friction.
But better is still good. Incremental change matters. A policy shift. A single honest headline. A collective refusal to play along. These things ripple.
It just takes longer than we’d like, and it rarely appears heroic. Most of the time, it looks like someone keeping their head down, waiting for the right moment to push.
The Big Life Question
So here it is: what kind of accommodation are you making right now?
Are you numbing out? Quietly folding? Letting the shape of your life be defined by what’s just-about-bearable?
Or are you still pushing, even just a little? Still resisting in your own weird, human way – by laughing when you shouldn’t, by helping someone you weren’t supposed to, by telling the truth when it would be easier not to?
Because we all adapt, we all bend. But bending isn’t always breaking. Sometimes it’s a strategy. Sometimes it’s survival. And sometimes it’s the beginning of something better.
And maybe that’s enough.
PS: If this hit a nerve or made you think differently about how you’re coping, surviving, or gently rebelling, drop a comment. Let’s explore the subtle art of perseverance.