The Threat of Normal
Artwork by Unknown
Lorena works at the front desk of a hostel in Ruzafa, a small neighborhood in the south of Spain. She is the gatekeeper, she watches people arrive burned out from corporate jobs, post-breakup, mid-identity crisis, “finding themselves.” She sees who checks in glowing and who checks in hollow. She has a front-row seat to the nervous breakdown of normal life. So when she met some random guy who loves his job, loves the gym, sleeps well, and casually admitted he’s happy all the time, something in her recoiled. Not because happiness is illegal. But because it felt off.
We live in a world that is objectively overstimulated, extractive, obsessed with productivity over proactivity, algorithmically engineered to agitate the nervous system. If you are even mildly perceptive, you see through things. There is a worldwide background hum of “this is a lot.” So when someone says they are happy all the time and genuinely enjoy the system as-is, it can feel weird. Like we are all swimming in something murky and this person is doing elegant laps, smiling, saying the water is fine. The question isn’t “how dare you be happy.” It’s “what exactly have you adapted to?”
From Lorena’s vantage point behind the desk, adaptation is visible. She sees what the script does to people. The job that looked stable on LinkedIn that quietly eroded someone’s peace. The city that promised opportunity and delivered chronic cortisol. So when a man shows up fully aligned with that same script, loving it, thriving in it, reporting constant happiness, it reads less like enlightenment and more like absorption. Like he has metabolized the straight line so completely that he can no longer register its distortions. And that is scary if you are someone who feels those distortions daily.
But here’s where it gets uncomfortable. Maybe nothing is wrong with him, maybe his nervous system genuinely does not experience the world as corrosive, maybe structure regulates him, maybe lifting weights and doing competent work is enough meaning for his soul. The fear might not be about his pathology. It might be about incompatibility. If your baseline includes critique and his baseline includes contentment, intimacy becomes strange. One of you will always feel like the other is missing something.
There is also ego in this. If someone is perfectly happy inside a system that agitates you, it destabilizes your narrative. Are you too sensitive? Are you romanticizing discomfort as depth? It is easier to call him sketchy than to admit that multiple nervous systems can process the same environment differently. We have this idea that if you’re awake, you must be at least slightly disturbed. So someone who is supremely normal, supremely adjusted, supremely fine, feels like a glitch.
Maybe he just built a life with tight boundaries and low existential ambition. Not everyone is trying to diagnose the ocean. Some people just want a clean lap lane. Lorena’s reaction says less about moral superiority and more about perceptual mismatch. From behind the hostel desk, watching people unravel from “normal,” happiness looks statistically suspicious.
So if someone is supremely normal, what’s wrong with them? I guess they are just revealing that the current system does not scrape against their edges the way it scrapes against yours. And that difference can feel unsafe when your entire worldview is built on the premise that something here is fundamentally off.
