Beneath the headlines.
Behind the timelines, there is a story no one wants you to find.
Welcome to some unapproved thinking where forgotten truths, buried patterns, and
invisible systems rise to the surface.
You weren't crazy, you were just early.
Let's begin.
My wife and I were just talking about this over the past weekend.
After an awesome conversation, I told her this would be a
great topic for the podcast.
So here we go.
At some point, crisis stopped being an exception and quietly became the baseline.
And most people can't pinpoint when it happened because it
didn't arrive all at once.
It arrived in waves.
Each one justified, each one temporary.
Each one framed as necessary until the idea of normal life without
emergency measures began to feel unrealistic, even irresponsible.
I remember the exact moment I realized we were living in a manufactured
state of permanent emergency.
It was during what felt like the hundredth unprecedented event of the year, and
I was sitting at my desk listening to the latest weather announcement.
The meteorologist kept using that word unprecedented, but
I'd heard it so many times.
It had lost all meaning.
That's when it hit me.
When everything is unprecedented, nothing is.
We were told to brace for shocks, accept disruption.
Lower expectations remain flexible, resilient, adaptable words that sound
empowering until you realize their instructions for permanent instability.
Tonight we ask when crisis becomes the system instead of disrupting it.
Who profits from keeping you in a permanent state of emergency?
This is some unapproved thinking.
We live in an age where exhaustion has become the default human condition, not
just tiredness, but a bone deep fatigue that comes from living in a world where
every headline screams emergency every day, brings a new unprecedented event,
and the new normal never seems to arrive.
I spent years of my past inside corporate systems where we discuss managing
outcomes and controlling variables.
The language was always clinical.
Professional, but what we were really talking about was how to keep people
reacting instead of thinking how to keep them responding instead of planning,
and of course, how to keep people just surviving instead of thriving.
The post pandemic world didn't create permanent crisis mode.
It just made it impossible to ignore.
Mm-hmm.
Remember those first weeks when everything was supposedly on pause
when we were waiting for the storm to pass so we could get back to normal?
That was three plus years ago.
The storm never passed.
Instead, the pause became the program.
But it's not just pandemics, it's financial shocks, it's climate
emergencies, it's geopolitical escalations, mass shootings, cyber
attacks, and supply chain breakdowns.
The world keeps bracing for the next disruption and the disruptions.
Yeah, they just keep coming.
Each one treated as unprecedented, requiring extraordinary measures,
leaving behind policies, powers, and precedents that never fully go away.
A crisis used to be something you endured and then you exited.
Now it's something you manage indefinitely.
There's always a reason, a financial shock, a health emergency, a security
threat, a climate event, an assassination, or a geopolitical escalation.
Each one requiring extraordinary measures that somehow just become
ordinary everyday operations.
When crisis becomes the operating system instead of disrupting it.
That's not chaos.
That's control.
And understanding how the crisis machine works is the first step toward
recognizing when you're being managed rather than informed, and that you're
manipulated rather than protected.
So let me walk you through how we got trapped in permanent crisis
mode and why it's so hard to escape.
The language evolution tells the story.
Crisis used to mean a turning point, a moment of decision, a
fork in the road where things would either get better or worse.
Now it means the water you swim in the news cycle has become a
conveyor belt of a emergencies.
Every story is breaking news.
Every update is urgent.
Every problem is existential.
I've been tracking this shift for years.
How many times have you heard unprecedented times?
Since 2020.
How many once in a generation events have you lived through?
How many temporary emergency measures are still in place?
Quietly renewed?
Rarely debated.
Go ahead, look 'em up.
I'll wait.
What makes permanent crisis mode so effective is that it feels protective.
It speaks the language of safety.
It frames resistance as recklessness.
Questioning becomes framed as endangering others in that environment.
Consent isn't withdrawn, it's managed.
People comply, not because they agree, but because they're
just plain old, sick and tired.
That's the key insight.
Fatigue is one of the most powerful tools of governance.
A population that's constantly bracing for the next disruption doesn't organize.
It just reacts.
It focuses on immediate survival rather than long-term structure, and
it is in that reaction state where power becomes easiest to consolidate.
I've watched this dynamic play out in corporate settings.
When employees are constantly dealing with the crisis of the weak, they
don't have time to question why.
There's always a crisis.
They don't have energy to ask whether the problems they're solving were created by
the same people asking them to solve them.
Yeah.
You know exactly what I am talking about, don't you?
Emergency measures move faster than legislation.
Temporary rules, bypass debate.
Exceptions expand quietly while attention is elsewhere.
Over time, the extraordinary just becomes ordinary.
People stop asking when things will return to normal and start
asking how to cope with this permanent version of abnormality.
That shift matters because once the expectation of normalcy
disappears, anything short of collapse feels like success.
If services degrade, it's because of the crisis.
If costs rise.
It's because of the crisis.
If rights are limited, it's because of the crisis.
Thus, crisis ends up being the excuse to explain everything while
actually solving absolutely nothing.
Not a zip zero, not a goddamn thing.
But here's what's most insidious about this whole operation.
The crisis machine doesn't even need to fabricate emergencies.
It just needs to prolong and layer them one atop the other.
One blends into the next until they form a continuous background
mind numbing hum of emergency.
The urgency never resolves.
There's no resolution, arc only escalation or replacement.
This keeps attention fragmented and anxiety elevated, which in
turn keeps people dependent on updates, guidance, and authority.
Want calm?
Reflection?
No.
Why?
Because that feels like denial.
Want stability?
No.
Why?
Because that feels naive.
And then those who suggest that permanent crisis is unsustainable, get labeled as
unserious, detached, or even dangerous.
Meanwhile, institutions adapt to the crisis environment
by restructuring around it.
Budgets are written with emergency assumptions.
Powers are renewed automatically.
Temporary agencies become permanent fixtures.
Private companies build business models around instability, monetizing, fear,
preparedness, and of course compliance.
An entire economy emerges around managing crisis rather than preventing it.
There are now billion dollar industries built on crisis management, security
surveillance, pharmaceuticals, insurance, and consulting.
The more you fear, the more you spend, the more you comply, the more you're
rewarded with the illusion of safety.
This pattern of using permanent emergency to reshape societies isn't new.
Throughout history, those who understood that crisis creates opportunity, have
used extended emergencies to consolidate power and eliminate resistance.
The Roman Empire used permanent threats barbarians at the gates,
internal conspiracies to justify expanded imperial powers that never
contracted when the threats passed.
The emergency became the excuse for eliminating Republican institutions and
concentrating authority in imperial hands.
I've read about how this worked in practice.
Roman citizens were told that extraordinary times required
extraordinary measures.
The measures became ordinary, but the times remained extraordinary.
The crisis justified the power and the power perpetuated the crisis.
The Reich Stag Fire in 1933 became the excuse for eliminating
democratic constraints in Germany.
The fire was just the beginning.
The emergency powers it justified were expanded and extended until they became
the permanent structure of the state.
The crisis didn't end when the threat was eliminated.
It evolved to justify new forms of control.
Wartime emergency powers in democracies rarely fully expired After wars ended,
the infrastructure built to manage wartime crises became peacetime institutions.
The surveillance systems, the economic controls, the restrictions
on movement and assembly, they all found new justifications.
Once the original emergency passed, the Cold War created a 50 year state of
emergency that reshaped entire societies.
The threat was real, but the response was designed to be permanent.
Nuclear anxiety justified surveillance systems, military spending, and
restrictions on civil liberties that outlasted the Soviet Union by decades.
The pattern is always the same.
Temporary measures become permanent infrastructure during extended crises.
The marriage of crisis management and authoritarian expansion is a
recurring theme throughout history.
Populations accept restrictions during crisis that they
would reject during peace.
But here's what's different about our current moment.
The crisis machine is global, it's digital, and it is always on.
The feedback loop between media, government, and corporate interests is
far quicker and far tighter than ever.
The same headlines, the same talking points, the same sense of
urgency everywhere all the time.
The more you adapt to crisis, the less you remember what stability feels like.
The more you accept emergency measures, the less you expect accountability.
The more you internalize instability, the less you demand solutions.
Historical precedent shows that permanent crisis mode isn't a
response to unprecedented challenges.
It's a governance strategy that's been refined over centuries.
The techniques work because they exploit fundamental human psychology.
The need for safety, the tendency to defer to authority during emergencies,
and the willingness to trade freedom for security when fear is high enough.
Now let me show you the mechanics of how permanent crisis mode operates,
because once you see this pattern, you'll recognize it everywhere.
The pattern always begins with crisis explaining failure without
assigning blame, while justifying centralization of authority.
When everything is an emergency, nothing is anyone's fault.
It's just the cost of living in unprecedented times.
But the solutions always involve giving more power to the same institutions
that failed to prevent the crisis.
We have all seen this dynamic in various corporate and even political
settings where manufactured urgency becomes the excuse for bypassing
normal oversight and accountability.
The crisis becomes both.
The explanation for failure and the justification for expanded authority.
Emergency measures move faster than legislation, bypassing,
debate, and democratic oversight.
When everything is urgent, there's no time for careful consideration,
public input, or constitutional review.
The emergency becomes the excuse for eliminating the processes
that might prevent bad decisions or expose hidden agendas.
Fatigue becomes one of the most powerful tools of governance.
A population constantly bracing for disruption doesn't organize
around long-term solutions.
It reacts to immediate threats.
People become so exhausted by constant crisis management that they stop asking
why There's always a crisis to manage.
Permanent crisis mode solves several problems at once.
For institutions under strain, it explains failure without assigning blame, it
justifies centralization of authority.
It lowers public expectations.
It reframes decline as resilience.
Most importantly, it makes questioning the system seemed
dangerous rather than necessary.
The crisis doesn't need to be fabricated.
It only needs to be prolonged and layered.
One emergency blends into the next until they form a continuous background hum.
That makes normal life seem impossible.
The urgency never resolves because resolution would eliminate the
justification for emergency powers.
Media plays a critical role, not necessarily through
deception, but through framing.
Headlines reset daily.
The urgency never resolves.
There's no resolution, arc only escalation, or replacement.
This keeps attention fragmented and anxiety elevated, which
keeps people dependent on updates, guidance, and authority.
The most insidious aspect is how the system makes people
complicit in their own management.
Citizens demand action during crises, accept restrictions for
safety, and become grateful for any relief from the constant pressure.
The crisis machine feeds on the very human desire for security
and stability over time.
This reshapes psychology people internalize instability.
They delay plans, they lower ambitions, they accept precarity as normal when
every year feels like an exception.
Nothing feels worth building for the long term.
This benefits systems that rely on short-term extraction
rather than long-term trust.
A population that cannot plan is easier to steer.
A population that is always reacting cannot organize around root causes.
Permanent crisis mode also obscures accountability by blurring timelines.
If something fails, it's never clear whether it failed because of poor design
or because of extraordinary circumstances.
The crisis becomes a shield.
Against evaluation leaders, rotate policies persist.
Mistakes are absorbed into the narrative of difficulty rather than addressed
structurally, this is how decline can be managed without admission.
It's not collapse.
It's managed deterioration, framed as resilience.
Now, of course, not everyone has accepted permanent crisis as
the new normal around the world.
Individuals and communities have recognized the pattern and chosen
stability over managed chaos.
Some communities built resilience rather than just crisis management systems.
They demanded sunset clauses on emergency powers.
They maintained long-term thinking despite short-term crisis pressure.
They refused to internalize instability as normal and recognized that stability
is something to demand, not just hope for.
I've met people who weathered recent crises not by accepting permanent
emergency measures, but by building community cohesion, local self-reliance
and transparent leadership.
They understood that the places that handled crises best weren't the ones
with the most restrictions, but the ones with the most genuine resilience.
Individuals who recognize that stability is something to demand rather
than hope for chose to build despite being told everything was temporary.
They refused to let crisis define their lives, demanded solutions
instead of settling for management and remembered that planning for the
future is a right, not a privilege.
Some leaders chose to tell people the truth about trade-offs
rather than managing them through manufactured urgency.
They explained costs and benefits, honestly respected people's ability
to make informed decisions and built trust through transparency
rather than compliance through fear.
People who chose to build networks, grow food, learn skills, and
refuse to let fear become their operating system, demonstrated that
individual resilience is possible.
Even within systems designed to create dependency, they showed
that you can prepare for genuine emergencies without accepting
permanent emergency as a way of life.
The most important resistance comes from people like you and me
who refuse to accept that quote unquote, crisis is the new normal.
We demand accountability instead of just ongoing adaptation, and we recognize
that the difference between managing crisis and solving problems is the
difference between surviving and thriving.
We and all these other outliers prove that permanent crisis mode isn't inevitable.
Each one of us who maintains long-term thinking, every community that builds
genuine resilience, every leader who chooses transparency over fear
management helps preserve alternatives to crisis-driven governance.
Mm-hmm.
Understanding how the crisis machine operates should change everything
about how you respond to emergencies, how evaluate institutional claims,
and how you protect your own mental autonomy from manufactured urgency.
Every crisis announcement should become a question worth examining more carefully.
When institutions declare emergencies, you should start asking Who benefits
from these emergency powers, what normal processes are being
bypassed in order to install them?
And whether the proposed solutions actually address the stated problems
or just expand institutional authority.
The phrase unprecedented times should become a red flag
rather than an explanation.
When everything is unprecedented, then nothing is unprecedented.
Real unprecedented events are rare.
They are few and far between.
Manufactured unprecedented events are tools for bypassing normal
oversight and accountability.
Emergency measures become suspect when they don't have clear
expiration dates or success metrics.
Real emergency responses are designed to end when the emergency ends.
Permanent emergency responses are designed to create permanent authority regardless
of whether the emergency continues.
The importance of maintaining long-term thinking becomes clear when you
understand how crisis mode is designed to fragment attention and prevent planning.
Refusing to let manufactured urgency control your decision-making becomes an
act of resistance against systems designed to keep you reacting instead of thinking.
Pattern recognition becomes more important than individual crisis response when
the same techniques for manufacturing urgency appear across different
institutions and different issues.
Recognizing the pattern helps you understand that you're
experiencing systematic manipulation rather than random emergencies.
The value of genuine resilience increases when you understand the difference between
crisis management and crisis prevention.
Building actual capacity to handle genuine emergencies becomes more important
than accepting permanent restrictions designed to manage manufactured ones.
Most importantly, you realize that your right to normal life
isn't something you have to earn.
Through compliance with emergency measures, stability planning, and
long-term thinking are not luxuries to be suspended during crises.
They are in fact, the true necessities for maintaining human
dignity and democratic governance.
Now look, the goal here isn't to ignore genuine emergencies or
reject all institutional authority.
Nope, quite the contrary.
The goal here is to distinguish between those real crises that require
temporary and even extreme responses, and those constructed, fabricated
and manufactured crises that are used to justify permanent control.
They turned crisis into a business model and called it governance.
They made emergency the default setting and called it necessary.
They created a machine that runs on your exhaustion, your anxiety,
and your willingness to trade freedom for the promise of safety,
a safety that never really comes.
We have all watched this transformation from corporate
meeting rooms to living rooms.
We have all seen how the same techniques used to create customer dependency
just got scaled up to create national or even global citizen dependency.
The crisis machine doesn't solve problems.
It manages them hell.
It may even create them.
It doesn't provide security, but rather it provides the illusion of security
in exchange for the reality of control.
At some point, crisis stopped being an exception and quietly became the
baseline we were told to brace for shocks, accept disruption, lower
expectations, remain flexible, remain resilient, and become adaptable.
Words that sound empowering until you realize their instructions for permanent
instability and even a bit of enslavement.
But here's what they can't control your awareness that this isn't normal.
Once you understand that permanent crisis mode is a choice, not a
necessity, you can't unsee it.
Once you recognize that the crisis machine needs your compliance to
function, you can choose not to comply.
Yeah, just flick the off switch and stop participating.
The difference between managing crisis and solving problems is the difference
between surviving and thriving.
When you accept permanent emergency, you accept, manage decline.
When you demand stability, you demand accountability.
They want you exhausted, reactive, grateful for any relief
from the constant pressure.
They want you to believe that normal life is impossible, that planning is
pointless, that the best you can hope for is to manage the chaos rather than end it.
But normal life is possible.
Stability is achievable.
Long-term thinking is not a luxury.
It's a necessity for human flourishing.
The crisis machine only works if you believe there's no
alternative to permanent emergency.
The official story is that we live in unprecedented times that
require unprecedented measures.
The real story is that we live in manufactured times that require
manufactured consent for measures that serve the power rather than the people.
The pattern is always there.
The only question is whether you're still pretending not to see it.
When you stop accepting crisis as normal crisis then just stops being normal.
When you demand solutions instead of management solutions really do
become possible when you choose stability over manufactured chaos.
You get to choose freedom over control.
The crisis machine runs on your compliance.
The question is, are you ready to stop feeding it?
Hmm.
Tracy out
If this story didn't sit right with you, good.
You are not here to be comforted.
You are here to see what others overlook.
Thanks for exploring some unapproved thinking.
Learn more@someunapprovedthinking.com.
New episodes, drop weekly.
Subscribe, share, and keep questioning because the patterns still playing out.
And next time we're going deeper.