When Normal Becomes the Extreme

And now for something completely different.

This is not my typical post. It has nothing to do with technology. It is something I have been thinking about for a while, and the more I think about it, the more I believe there is something here worth exploring.

For most of human history, people have tried to make sense of suffering. Why does it happen? What are we supposed to do with it? Can it be avoided, endured, or somehow transcended?

What feels different now is that we have become very good at producing suffering at scale while still treating the conditions that create it as normal.

That is one of the central ideas in Gabor Maté’s The Myth of Normal. A culture can become so used to unhealthy conditions that we stop seeing them as unhealthy. Chronic stress becomes ambition. Exhaustion becomes productivity. Emotional disconnection gets mistaken for independence. Anxiety is treated as the price of keeping up. We look at how well people are functioning inside the system without asking whether the system itself is making them sick.

More than two thousand years earlier, the Buddha was asking a different version of the same question.

His answer was that suffering is tied to craving, attachment, aversion, and our constant effort to find lasting satisfaction in things that cannot really provide it. His response was the Middle Way, a path he arrived at after rejecting both indulgence and extreme self-denial.

Today, though, the Middle Way is often misunderstood.

It gets reduced to a kind of life advice: work, but not too much. Enjoy yourself, but do not overdo it. Be ambitious, but maintain balance. In that form, it starts to sound almost like a wellness slogan.

The problem is that this assumes the world around us is basically healthy.

I do not think that assumption holds.

Modern institutions have normalized and industrialized many of the same psychological processes Buddhism identified as sources of suffering.

Craving is no longer just something that happens inside us. It is something entire industries know how to create, amplify, measure, and monetize.

Advertising depends on making us feel that what we have is not enough. Social media turns comparison into a daily habit. Streaming platforms make boredom almost optional. Dating apps make intimacy feel like an endless field of alternatives. Financial apps encourage people to watch wealth rise and fall by the minute. Productivity culture teaches us to treat every hour as something that should be used better.

Even the escape routes get folded back into the same system.

We buy apps to help us use our phones less. We buy books about wanting less. We optimize our sleep so we can perform better the next day. We go on retreats to recover from lives we plan to return to unchanged.

Even mindfulness can get turned into another productivity tool.

That is the strange part. A practice that was meant to loosen attachment can be repackaged as a way to make the attached self more efficient.

So the system gets very good at selling us both the problem and the solution.

That makes the idea of the Middle Way harder than it first appears.

If the culture itself is already organized around excess, then choosing the middle of what it offers may still leave us far from anything healthy.

Take work.

We can easily see that someone working eighty hours a week might be living in an unhealthy extreme. We can also imagine the opposite extreme, someone who withdraws from meaningful work entirely. So we assume the sensible answer is somewhere in the middle. Maybe forty hours. Maybe thirty-five.

But that may not be the real issue.

A person can work a perfectly reasonable schedule and still build their entire identity around work. Their sense of worth, security, status, and meaning may still rise and fall with professional success.

The hours changed.

The attachment did not.

You can see the same pattern elsewhere.

Compulsive buying and obsessive minimalism look like opposites, but both can leave a person consumed by possessions. Hustle culture and total disengagement look like opposites, but both can come from the belief that work determines the value of your life. Constant connection and dramatic digital detoxes can both reveal just how much power technology has gained over us.

Sometimes the opposite of an unhealthy behavior is not health.

Sometimes it is just the same problem wearing different clothes.

This is where The Myth of Normal changes the way the Middle Way has to be understood.

If the baseline of a society is already distorted, then the midpoint between its extremes is not automatically balance.

Imagine a culture where almost everyone sleeps four hours a night. Some people sleep two. Others sleep six. Six would look moderate. It might even look luxurious.

It would still be sleep deprivation.

That example is easy to understand because sleep is measurable.

It gets harder when what people are deprived of is attention, community, meaning, security, belonging, or peace.

This leads to a more uncomfortable possibility.

The Middle Way may still exist, but in a culture that has moved far enough from health, it may no longer look moderate at all.

It may look strange.

A person who refuses to turn every hour into productive output may look unambitious. Someone who is not constantly comparing status may look uninterested in success. A person who decides they have enough may look like they lack drive. Someone who protects silence, boredom, solitude, close relationships, and unstructured time may seem completely out of step with the world around them.

Maybe they are.

That does not mean they are wrong.

The Middle Way was never really supposed to mean doing what everyone else is doing, just with slightly better boundaries. It was about understanding the forces underneath our behavior, especially the craving and attachment that push us from one extreme to another.

That matters even more now because the environment has changed.

The Buddha lived in a world where desire was constrained by reality. Things were harder to get. Entertainment ended. News traveled slowly. Shops closed. Social comparison mostly involved people you actually knew. A craving could arise and simply remain unsatisfied.

That is not the world we live in.

We carry devices that can stimulate almost every appetite we have within seconds. Food, sex, entertainment, shopping, outrage, validation, information, gambling, work, and social approval are always available.

The human nervous system did not evolve for this.

The environment changed much faster than we did.

The Buddha identified craving as one of the central mechanisms of suffering. We then built some of the most sophisticated systems in history around keeping that craving alive.

That is what makes the modern problem feel different.

We are not just trying to manage desire inside ourselves.

We are trying to stay sane inside systems that have become extremely good at producing more of it.

And if that is true, then the Middle Way cannot simply mean doing what everyone else is doing, only in moderation.

The Middle Way is not the midpoint between the extremes a culture gives us.

It is the place from which we can finally see that both extremes may have come from the same craving.