Sacred Sunday | On Living in a Historical Anomaly

We are living in a historical anomaly. 

Not a transition, not an evolution, and not a stable new normal — but a brief and unusually intense condition that does not resemble how human societies have typically organized meaning, identity, or attention.

It feels ordinary only because we are inside it.

We are a culture obsessed with watching ourselves.

Not observing the natural world,

not oriented by time or continuity or shared meaning,

but continuously documenting, broadcasting, evaluating, and adjusting our own images in real time.

Experience is increasingly mediated through representation.

The image often arrives before the moment it claims to capture, and life is filtered through how it will appear, be received, or be remembered.

Historically, this is unusual.

Societies have always told stories about themselves, but they have not lived inside constant feedback loops of self-observation.

Identity has not typically been shaped by visibility.

Performance has not replaced participation so completely, nor has exposure functioned as proof of existence in quite this way.

This condition did not emerge from vanity.

It emerged from pressure — from acceleration, instability, fragmentation, and the erosion of shared reference points.

When external structures stop holding meaning, attention turns inward — not as contemplation, but as surveillance. Spectacle becomes regulatory. Visibility offers reassurance. Watching ourselves becomes a way of checking whether we are still here, still relevant, still real.

But bodies have limits.

Novelty exhausts.

Escalation loses its effect.

Comparison saturates the very systems it is meant to stimulate. When everything is visible, little is integrated. What begins as connection becomes noise; what begins as expression becomes strain. Over time, the effort required to remain legible outweighs the comfort it once provided.

The cracks are already visible.

Fatigue with performance.

Boredom with perfection.

A growing desire for privacy, texture, and slowness.

Quiet is beginning to register as relief rather than absence. Depth is re-emerging as a form of intelligence, not a liability.

For those who feel out of step with this era — uneasy with constant exposure, resistant to self-branding, uninterested in spectacle — the discomfort may not be personal.

It may be perceptual. Sensitivity to an unsustainable environment often appears as alienation before it is recognized as discernment.

Cultures do not usually collapse when something stops working.

They reorganize.

What cannot be sustained eventually softens. Attention drifts back toward what restores capacity rather than drains it.

This period, too, will resolve — not dramatically, not all at once, but gradually, as fatigue gives way to reorientation.

We will not stop watching ourselves overnight. But we may remember, quietly and without fanfare, how to live again without needing to.

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