ReThinking: Why are people acting like everything’s fine? with Rahaf Harfoush
Worklife with Adam Grant
TED
4.8 • 9.4K Ratings
🗓️ 25 November 2025
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In our rapidly changing world, it might make you feel crazy to look around and see others going about life as usual. There’s actually a term for this phenomenon: hypernormalization. In this episode, Adam talks with Rahaf Harfoush, a digital anthropologist and expert on toxic productivity culture, about the immense pressures of living through “unprecedented times.” Rahaf breaks down the concept of hypernormalization, and Adam explains why it can fuel feelings of destabilization and disconnection. The two challenge the propaganda that promotes productivity for its own sake and explore healthier ways to get things done.
Host & Guest
Adam Grant (Instagram: @adamgrant | LinkedIn: @adammgrant | Website: https://adamgrant.net/)
Rahaf Harfoush (Instagram: @foushy | Website: https://rahafharfoush.com/)
Links
Newsletter: https://rahaf.kit.com/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Everyone wants to intellectualize. We want to zoom out and we want explanations. And my gut feeling tells me that we have to actually feel how scary these turbulent changes have been in order to be able to think clearly. Because no one's making rational decisions from a place of emotional dysregulation. |
| 0:20.0 | Hey, everyone. it's Adam Grant. |
| 0:22.0 | Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast with Ted on the Science of What Makes |
| 0:25.5 | Us Tick. |
| 0:26.6 | I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating |
| 0:30.4 | people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking. |
| 0:43.3 | My guest today is Rahaf Harfush, a digital anthropologist and the author of Hustle and Float. She's an expert on toxic productivity culture, as well as rapidly changing technology, and a keen observer of the world we're living in today. |
| 0:51.3 | When I invited her on the show, I knew that was where I wanted to start. |
| 1:00.5 | You put a word to something that a lot of people are feeling right now, a word that I had never |
| 1:05.9 | heard before, hyper-normalization. What is that? So hypernormalization is a concept that was initially created or coined by an |
| 1:19.3 | anthropologist named Alexei Yerchak to describe a very specific feeling where you as a regular |
| 1:27.0 | person are living your life, but something feels weird. |
| 1:32.1 | Things feel off. It doesn't feel right. And you're sort of looking around and you're just saying, |
| 1:36.8 | like, why does it feel so strange? And hypernormalization is that feeling where you understand that |
| 1:43.7 | the world is changing or that the world is different. |
| 1:47.1 | But the people around you, the institutions, the people in charge, your elected officials, |
| 1:52.4 | they seem to just be ignoring this change and they're insisting to keep going as normal. |
| 1:58.3 | And so there becomes this weird, almost like emotional, mental disconnect where you're |
| 2:02.9 | like, I know things are really weird right now, but why are you acting like everything is fine? |
| 2:08.3 | And it creates this like cognitive dissonance that makes you feel like you're going crazy. |
| 2:12.9 | So fascinating. It seems like there's symptoms of this everywhere. I've never asked so many people, |
| 2:19.4 | how are you? And gotten back different versions of, well, all things considered, I'm okay. |
... |
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