Living in Entropy: System Decay and Psyches Under Late-Stage Capitalism (E2 of 5 in Series)
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. If you're new here, this is the show where we look at how psychology, media, culture, and technology shape the way you think, feel, work, and live. This week, we're doing a five episode short series about what I'm calling the Entropy Age. In the first episode, we stayed close to your internal experience.
Leslie Poston:We talked about emotional entropy, existential anxiety, ontological insecurity, and anticipatory grief, and how those show up when the future stops feeling solid. Today, we're going a little deeper into how institutional and economic decay shows up in people's mental models of the world, certainly as less trust and safety, but also less people believing that any change is possible. In this episode, instead of focusing just on individual feelings, we'll talk about what happens when the larger structures that are supposed to help us, things like governments, health care, education, workplaces, and information systems, start to feel unstable, unfair, or hollowed out. You might already feel this in an everyday way. Trying to get medical care feels like a maze now.
Leslie Poston:Dealing with a landlord or a mortgage company feels like endlessly arguing with bots. Elections come and go, but material conditions do not match the promises. Tech companies roll out changes that reshape your job, social life, and sense of privacy without asking. It can be tempting to treat each of those as separate annoyances or separate problems to solve. But today, we're going to look at them as signs and signals of something broader.
Leslie Poston:The entropy of system decay under late stage capitalism, and what that does to the human mind. Psychologists like Yuri Bronfenbrenner have described human life as a nested system, where you have the close end layer of family, friends, and daily routine, and around that, you have workplace, school, and local services. Outside of that, you have larger economic, political, and cultural structures. More recently, though, researchers who build on Bronfenbrenner have argued that this picture needs to account for the digital world you move through every day as well. In their neo ecological update, Navarro and Tudge suggest that your closest environments now come in at least two forms: the physical places you inhabit and the virtual spaces you spend time in, like platforms, portals, and apps.
Leslie Poston:These aren't just screens in the background. They act like real settings in your life with their own rules, relationships, and risks. So if you think about your nested systems now, it's not just homeschool, work, and neighborhood. It's also the group chat that keeps you informed, the patient portal you fight with to get care, the scheduling app that controls your shifts, the social feeds that carry news and misinformation at the same time, And farther out, the bigger cultural layer now includes things like platform capitalism, data extraction, and algorithmic sorting as part of how society works. When things are going reasonably well, you can count on at least a few of those layers, offline and online, to feel steady.
Leslie Poston:You might have a stressful job but a solid local community. You might have a complicated family but reliable public services and an online support group that actually helps. This system hasn't been perfect over time, but previously there's been at least enough structure that you can plan ahead, adapt, and feel like your efforts in life matter. Under late stage capitalism, however, many of those layers feel strained at the same time. At the close in level, your family and your household are stretched by rising costs, caregiving responsibilities, and schedules that leave no time for rest or connection.
Leslie Poston:On top of that, the digital tools that are supposed to make your life easier school apps, medical portals, banking sites, etc often feel like extra jobs you didn't apply for, especially as AI gets shoved into every nook and cranny, regardless of if it's actually helpful or not. At the workplace level, many people are dealing with unstable employment, algorithmic management, performance surveillance, or the do more with less scrappy culture that treats burnout as normal. At an institutional level, you see underfunded schools, healthcare systems that feel more and more like billing systems than care systems, and public agencies that are not only under attack, they were already struggling to meet basic needs. Their online front doors can feel like walls. Phone trees that don't reach a human, websites that crash, or chatbots that go on an endless loop.
Leslie Poston:At the broadest level, you see economic policy and political choices that prioritize markets, investors, and donors over long term social stability, while tech policy is tilting more and more toward large platforms and authoritarian regimes rather than users and workers. When the entropy age hits and several of these layers weaken at once, people are feeling it. Small problems that would once have been a bump in the road have started to feel like cliffs because there's no safety net above or below. Endless layoffs hit harder when health care, housing, and retirement all depend on that job and when applying for benefits means wrestling with confusing digital systems. A local climate event hits you harder when infrastructure maintenance was delayed.
Leslie Poston:A policy change harms more people when we already feel close to the edge. From a psychological point of view, this layered stress isn't just, more stress. It's changing how your mind maps reality. You are learning over time that the structures around you may not function as advertised. You learn that rules are flexible for those with power and money and rigid for everyone else.
Leslie Poston:You learn that help, if it comes, may arrive late, be routed through a hostile system, or come with more strings attached than you can manage. That learning is shaping your expectations. It feeds the emotional entropy we talked about in episode one, but now you can see that it's not emerging from nowhere. It's a response to repeated encounters with systems, both on the ground and on the screen, that feel unreliable and often indifferent. When we think about trauma, we usually think about individual events like an accident, assault, or a loss.
Leslie Poston:There's another level that sociologists and psychologists have written about, which is collective trauma. This happens when whole communities or populations go through events that disrupt shared life in a lasting way. We see this writ large in The Ukraine and Palestine right now, but we also are experiencing this right here in The United States. Examples include natural disasters, wars, pandemics, forced displacement, or long periods of economic collapse. These events alter not just individual nervous systems, but also the stories people tell, the ways our communities organize, and the level of trust people place in each other and in institutions.
Leslie Poston:Over the past couple of decades, many people have lived through repeated events that fit this description. Some have lost family and friends to public health failure. Others have seen their neighborhoods reshaped by climate crisis, policing, gentrification, or industrial disasters. Many have watched financial crises, housing crises, and political crises follow one another without feeling that any lessons were learned by the people in charge. A related concept here is institutional betrayal.
Leslie Poston:This describes the harm that occurs when institutions that are supposed to protect or support you either cause harm, dismiss harm, or ignore harm. Examples can include hospitals that downplay safety concerns, universities that mishandle abuse reports, governments that minimize preventable deaths, or corporations that endanger workers while emphasizing branding campaigns about care. When people experience institutional betrayal on top of collective stress, the psychological imp is deeper. You're not just dealing with one difficult event. You're dealing with the sense that entities you relied on have been absent, negligent, or self protective in a moment when you need them the most.
Leslie Poston:This can show up as a sharp drop in trust. You start to assume that official statements are incomplete at best. You might hesitate to report problems, seek help, or engage with systems because you expect to be ignored, blamed, or treated as a liability. It can also show up as anger that has nowhere obvious to go because responsibility is spread across so many actors. Collective trauma and institutional betrayal tie directly into the feeling that we're living in an entropy age.
Leslie Poston:The very frame that is supposed to hold shared life no longer feels solid. Rules and rights feel conditional. And that sense of conditionality is feeding back into your inner life. If nothing feels reliable, it becomes harder to plan, harder to trust, and harder to imagine a future that's not just more of the same. Cultural critic Mark Fisher used the phrase capitalist realism to describe a particular mood, the sense that it's easier to imagine the end of everything than to imagine the end of our current economic system.
Leslie Poston:The idea is that capitalism is no longer presented as one option among many, but is presented as the only plausible way to organize society. You can see this in the way policy debates are framed. Proposals for strong social safety nets, public health care, or robust labor protections are often treated as unrealistic or naive, even when versions of those systems function very well elsewhere. Meanwhile, high levels of inequality, corporate subsidies, and precarious work are treated as unfortunate but natural, like the weather. Psychologically, capitalist realism does something subtle.
Leslie Poston:It narrows the field of thinkable futures. If you've been told, implicitly or explicitly, oh, this is just how things are now, then any real distress that you feel about system decay gets redirected inward. So instead of asking, why is this structure designed like this? People end up asking, why can't I handle it better? It's very individualistic and very American.
Leslie Poston:This interacts with the sense of ontological insecurity we talked about in episode one. If the ground rules are unstable, but also described as inevitable, you're left with contradiction. You know at some level that the system is not working for many people, and at the same time you hear again and again there's no real alternative. This tension can produce cynicism, resignation, or a chronic low grade despair. Three things that help authoritarian systems come to power and thrive.
Leslie Poston:So there are three things we want to deal with. Another piece of this impact is temporal discounting, which is a term researchers use to describe our tendency as people to value immediate rewards more than future. Under conditions of entropy like system decay, temporal discounting is not just a bias. It can be adaptive. When you can't trust that pensions, housing markets, or even basic human rights will exist in the same form in twenty years or heck, even five or ten years, focusing on the short term starts to make sense to your brain.
Leslie Poston:However, when many people are pushed into short term survival thinking at the same time, it becomes harder to organize for long term change. Not because people are inherently selfish or shortsighted, but because the structures around them keep raising the stakes of each immediate decision while obscuring longer term options. The result is a psychological loop. System decay feeds short term thinking. Short term thinking makes it easier for those systems to stay in place because long term organizing feels out of reach.
Leslie Poston:Over time, this can reinforce the feeling that nothing can really change, which is one of the core emotional tenets of capitalist realism. All of this theory matters because it shows up in our daily life in quiet ways. If you notice you treat every interaction with a large institution as a potential fight, that might be a sign of accumulated institutional betrayal. If you find yourself assuming that new policies, apps, or products will make your life more complex without giving you any real say, that might be a response to repeated experience with top down decisions. If you catch yourself thinking, this feels unsustainable, but what else is there?
Leslie Poston:That may be capitalist realism speaking through you. If you find it hard to picture any version of shared life that looks more humane than the one you see now, even in imagination, that tells you something about how deeply these narratives have sunk into your psyche. Seeing the pattern doesn't fix the conditions, but it does give you a way to understand why your mind is feeling the way it does right now. You're not simply bad at adulting. If you feel worn down by repeated encounters with decaying systems, you are registering that layers of support and fairness that should exist either don't exist or exist only for some.
Leslie Poston:Naming that can be a first step toward not internalizing all of the blame. It can also open up more grounded conversations with other people. Instead of saying, I'm just burned out, you might say, I am tired of having to fight every system I interact with. Instead of asking, Why am I so cynical? You might ask instead, What have I learned from my experiences with institutions?
Leslie Poston:And what does that mean for how I move through them in the future? In the next episode, we'll look at another piece of the Entropy Age, how information systems and media ecosystems contribute to this sense of epistemic chaos, and what that does to your ability to know what's true and who to trust. In this second episode on the Entropy series, we shifted from the inner landscape to the outer structures, and we talked about nested systems under stress, collective trauma, institutional betrayal, capitalist realism, and the way system decay nudges people towards short term survival thinking and quiet resignation. If any of this matches your experience of dealing with jobs, agencies, platforms, or public institutions, I hope it gives you a way to see your reactions as understandable responses to the structures around you and not as proof that you are failing at adulting. If this episode helped, share it with someone who's been saying, I feel like everything I interact with is held together with duct tape, and I don't know how to feel during this collapse or how to plan around The show notes will include research and resources if you want to explore these ideas more deeply.
Leslie Poston:Next time in this series, we'll talk about information and truth under entropy, how it feels when your feeds, news sources, and conversations are making reality feel unstable, and how your brain tries to cope with that. Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace. This is your host, Leslie Poston, signing off. Remember to stay curious, and tune in tomorrow for the next episode and the series on Entropy.
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