We are living through The Great Untethering.
It shows up differently depending on where you sit: as exhaustion, as apathy, as the quiet vertigo of leading systems that no longer respond the way they should, as the rage of being inside those systems with no visible way to change them. But the condition underneath is the same. Something has come loose from its moorings, and the pace of the loosening is accelerating. The people holding the megaphone, the large corporations, the governments, the concentrated power deciding the shape of things, are not going to be the ones who name it. That work belongs to the rest of us.
This is not a modern invention. Every major civilisational transition in recorded history has produced this signal at this moment in the arc, when inherited ways of making sense stop holding and systems keep running on momentum long after they have lost contact with what they were for. The loss of contact with what is real, with each other, with what the work was actually for, with the felt sense of being part of something that matters: this is as old as the human story.
Absurdity is what surfaces when that contact breaks. Not dysfunction. Not failure. The oldest and most honest signal a system can produce.
This series is building toward the book Reclaim: Finding Your Bearings in an Untethered World. Of orientation, of meaning, and return of our agency. It is grounded in research and written in plain language, built in public, from inside the experience rather than above it. For anyone who has felt the fracture and held the quiet conviction that something worth reaching for is still there on the other side of it.
