The Normalcy Illusion

Nothing in our world springs fully formed from nothingness. Every aspect of our reality – from the countries on our maps to the values we hold dear – was once just an idea in someone's mind. These ideas were shaped by specific circumstances and needs. But once they took hold, we quickly accepted them as just the way things are, and in time, they congealed into the status quo. We now live among these human creations. So deeply entrenched have they become that we mistake them for the laws of nature. The Normalcy Illusion asks a simple but unsettling question: what if the world you call "normal" is the very thing putting us at risk? Drawing on hidden stories and overlooked evidence, this book reveals the slow-motion crises we've learnt not to see: the lifelong scars of childhood trauma, our quiet addiction to digital life, the erosion of community and elderhood, the disappearance of languages and indigenous worldviews, and an economic order that treats meaning, culture, and even human attention as commodities. From patriarchy and inequality to the worship of technology and "rational" progress, it shows how powerful systems decide whose lives matter, whose pain is ignored, and which futures are thinkable. Our borders, our ideas of success, and even the questions we're allowed to ask are exposed as human inventions—fragile, biased, and open to change. This is not a manifesto of despair but an invitation: to see the cracks in our civilisation's foundations before they give way and to imagine how life might look if we stopped mistaking illusion for inevitability—and began to build a more honest, humane normal from the ground up.