Living in Entropy – When the Future Stops Feeling Real (E1 of 5 in Series)
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. If you are 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 changing it up a bit. We're doing a five episode short series about what I'm calling the entropy age.
Leslie Poston:I wanna talk about what it feels like to live inside systems that are fraying under late stage capitalism, tech driven upheaval, and rising authoritarian movements, and what all of that does to our inner lives. Longtime subscribers will recall we've already talked about learned helplessness, chronic stress, burnout, and the brain's comfort seeking tendencies in past episodes. So today we're going a little deeper into what happens psychologically when the future itself stops feeling real. You might notice some signs of this in your own life. Maybe five year plans feel like science fiction, or you used to picture a clear path for yourself and now the horizon feels foggy.
Leslie Poston:Maybe your goals have quietly shrunk down to just survive the week or just keep things from getting worse. You're not alone in experiencing a strange mix of feelings right now. Time feels distorted. Months are vanishing. It's harder to remember what year a big news event happened, much less which one happened this week.
Leslie Poston:You bounce from political scandals and machinations to climate headlines, economic anxiety, elections, or AI hype and war footage, and sometimes all before lunch. It's not just stressful. It can make the very idea of a future feel thin. I want to give you language for these feelings today, not to diagnose you, but to name patterns that many of us are going through all at the same time together. We'll talk about emotional entropy as a metaphor for what's happening inside, about existential anxiety and death awareness, and about two ideas that help explain this weird unreality that we're all describing now, ontological insecurity and anticipatory grief.
Leslie Poston:My aim's not to cheerlead or tell you to think positive. I just am here to say you're not broken for feeling strange in a moment like this. Your mind is responding accurately to very real conditions. When physicists talk about entropy, they're talking about the tendency of systems to shift from order to disorder unless something is actively maintaining structure and energy. I'm borrowing the word entropy as a metaphor for what happens emotionally when you're living inside systems that keep changing the rules, shifting the goalposts, and piling on new crises.
Leslie Poston:Emotional entropy in this sense is the slow scattering of your inner life. It looks like a tension that feels harder to hold, energy that leaks away faster than it used to, or a sense that your feelings are all mixed together in a way that's just hard to sort out. Instead of clear moments of joy, anger, or sadness, you just get a vague blend of numbness, irritability, worry, and fatigue. Part of that comes from pace and layering of events. Many of us are juggling unstable work, high cost of living, concern about the climate, political threats to basic rights, and a constant digital feed that never really turns off.
Leslie Poston:TED platforms reward urgency and engagement, not calm reflection, so your nervous system ends up on a kind of low level alert even when you're sitting on the couch. It's important to say this directly. If you feel scattered or afraid, that doesn't mean you lack discipline or that you are bad at adulting. It often just means you're trying to hold yourself together inside a set of conditions that will strain anyone. This leads into a deeper level of what's going on.
Leslie Poston:It's not just that you're tired. That's not quite big enough. It's that the big questions that underpin your life have started to feel unsettled. What are you building toward? What's safe to hope for?
Leslie Poston:What kind of place are we going to be living in twenty or thirty years from now? Those questions pull us into existential psychology. Existential psychologists like Irvin Yallam talk about four big themes that human beings struggle with: mortality, freedom, isolation, and meaning. They're always there in the background, but at some points in history, they move closer to the surface. Mortality is the obvious one.
Leslie Poston:You don't need a philosophy text to feel that. We've had repeated reminders in the last five years that life is fragile. From the pandemic to climate related disasters, increasing weather instability, state and nonstate violence, and many other events that show how quickly conditions can change. And that steady of threat can keep death awareness closer to the front of our minds even if we don't talk about it. Freedom is the next theme.
Leslie Poston:In theory, modern life sells us a lot of choice. In practice, many people feel trapped. In The United States, for example, our health care is tied to our employment. Housing is expensive, educational debt is heavy, and authoritarian movements and policy choices are removing human rights that we all thought were settled. Freedom on paper doesn't feel like freedom in practice when each option is wrapped in financial or physical risk.
Leslie Poston:Isolation is another piece. People are surrounded by digital connection but still feel lonely. Communities have been hollowed out by economic pressure, long commutes, and the shift of social life into apps that are optimized for content, not care. When the social web thins out this way, existential isolation can intensify even if you have a long contact list. And then there's meaning.
Leslie Poston:Work cultures and brands promise purpose, impact, and belonging. Institutions talk about values. But when you look closely at how decisions are made, it feels like profit, control, and public image come first. The gap between the story and the reality makes it feel harder to feel like your daily efforts add up to something that matters. Researchers who study death anxiety talk about how awareness of mortality tends to push people toward psychological defenses.
Leslie Poston:This line of work is sometimes called terror management theory. When death feels close or the future feels unstable, people often cling more tightly to their worldviews, their identities, or their groups. They might double down on nationalism, ideology, or strict moral codes that promise safety and order. Others go the opposite direction and lean into distraction, consumerism, or a we're all cooked, nothing matters, might as well enjoy what I can attitude. You can clearly see both patterns happening now.
Leslie Poston:Some people move toward rigid political or religious positions and treat any challenge as a threat to their sense of safety. Others slide into resignation and talk about collapse as if it is inevitable and already decided despite monumental amounts of evidence of people getting out in the street on the ground to move society forward in a positive direction. Both are ways of trying to handle the discomfort of living with constant real risk and uncertainty. This isn't a personal flaw. It's a predictable response when existential questions get louder.
Leslie Poston:Your brain is trying to give you something firm to stand on. Even if that firm thing is a belief that everything's doomed and there's no point in caring, it's important to find a way to push past that. There are two more ideas that can help put words to the strange unreality many people experience now. The first is ontological insecurity. Psychiatrist Arty Lang used this phrase to describe a fragile sense of self and reality.
Leslie Poston:And you don't need to agree with all of his work to find the phrase helpful. Ontological insecurity is what it feels like when you're no longer sure about the basic ground rules of your life. Maybe you grew up with a story that hard work leads to stability, a meritocracy, if you will. And then you work hard and still can't afford housing. Maybe you believed that human rights, once granted, were safe, and then you watched them be rolled back by authoritarian government.
Leslie Poston:Maybe you thought public institutions would at least try to act in the common interest, and then you see decisions that clearly favor a small group at the top at everyone else's expense. When these kinds of emotional shocks pile up, it's only natural to start asking, what can I count on? What story am I living inside? Is the problem me or is the framing itself broken? That's ontological insecurity.
Leslie Poston:And it's not just doubt about one policy or one leader, it's a wobble in your sense of how reality works. The second idea is anticipatory grief. Grief researchers use this term for the sadness and anxiety people feel before a loss that hasn't fully happened yet, but feels likely or inevitable. We're more familiar with it in the context of terminal illness, for example, when the family begins grieving a person while the person is still alive. Right now, many people carry a wider version of this anticipatory grief.
Leslie Poston:You might be grieving a climate future you thought would be better than this or grieving the idea of steady work with a safe retirement. You might be grieving a sense of progress on human rights and equality. You might be grieving the life you once imagined for your child or for yourself. This kind of grief often goes unnamed, which makes it lonelier. It shows up as a heavy feeling when you read the news or an urge to joke about collapse to mask your fear or as a quiet reluctance to invest in any long term plans.
Leslie Poston:It might look like flakiness from the outside, but inside it feels like, how can I commit to a future I don't trust? Ontological insecurity and anticipatory grief can feed on each other. When the ground rules keep shifting, it's hard to orient. When you're already grieving futures that feel stolen or threatened, each new shift hurts more. No wonder so many people feel both numb and overwhelmed at the same time.
Leslie Poston:Before we wrap up, I wanna pause on one important point. A lot of messaging around you still treats these reactions as individual weaknesses or pathologies. If you're tired, unfocused, or worried, the story goes, you need better habits, a new productivity system, maybe a gratitude journal. Sure. There's a place for personal tools, but they can't carry everything.
Leslie Poston:They can't fix the system that's causing the problem. If you struggle to make five or ten year plans right now, that is a rational response to real instability. If your emotions are swinging between hope and despair, that reflects accurate mixed signals from your environment, not character flaws. If you find yourself hesitating to invest in relationships, careers, or locations, that is your mind trying to protect you from loss that feels probable. So rather than asking what's wrong with me, try a different set of questions.
Leslie Poston:Ask what future am I quietly grieving? Where did I learn the story that life would look one way, and how has that story been broken? Which parts of my life still feel reliable even on hard days? And which parts feel like they could vanish with one policy change or one corporate decision? Simply naming these questions can be a relief.
Leslie Poston:You don't have to answer them all at once. You don't have to fix the conditions that produce them by yourself. But you are allowed to treat your emotional reactions as valid data about the situation you're in, not as evidence that you're failing at being resilient enough. In the next episodes of this Entropy series, we'll widen the lens. I'll talk about what happens when institutions and systems themselves begin to decay, how information and truth get warped, and how people with power make use of that chaos.
Leslie Poston:And then we'll talk about forms of response that are grounded, small scale, and sometimes even playful. In this first part of the entropy series, I talked about emotional entropy as a way to describe that scattered, frayed feeling inside. I looked at existential anxiety around mortality, freedom, isolation, and meaning and named ontological insecurity and anticipatory grief as two patterns that can make the future feel unreal or out of reach. If any of this sounded familiar, I hope it gave you a way to see your reactions as understandable responses to the conditions you're living in and not as a personal failure. If this episode helped, share it with someone who's been saying everything feels off and I can't explain why.
Leslie Poston:The show notes will include links to research and resources if you want to read more about the ideas we talked about today. Next time, we're going to move from the inner experience to the outer structures and talk about system decay and what it does to our minds when institutions stop feeling believable or sick. Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston, signing off. Remember to stay curious and tune in tomorrow for the next episode in our special series on entropy.
Leslie Poston:And if you are a longtime subscriber, thank you for your patience. Last week, we did miss our first week ever in two years of the show due to some technical difficulties. But as you can see, we fixed them this week and we are back in action. Thanks for your patience.
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