Collective Dissonance
The defining condition of an era that refuses to resolve
In my thirties, I had a handful of years that were exceptional in both directions.
My husband and I both had bona fide health crises (13 surgeries in two years between us). But we also had a son and a daughter, and our lives changed unequivocally for the better. I took a new and exciting job, but I also faced a global pandemic that hit while I was six months pregnant. We bought our dream house but my family also went through an unthinkable geopolitical crisis. As Dickens said, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
I felt the joy of the good things and the stress of the bad things but it was the dissonance between them that really got me. It wasn’t just a period of high highs swinging to low lows, it was a period of both of those things happening simultaneously. And in some ways, that was harder than if it had just been one or the other.
The same thing is happening now, but on a societal level
AI is fueling industry growth at unprecedented levels, but a majority of Americans don’t like it. GLP-1s are on their way to helping with just about everything, we may soon have a blood test that can screen for 50 different kinds of cancers and gene editing is moving from science fiction to curing disease. But we are also feeling more anxious, more depressed and lonelier. Globally, we’re in a period of historic conflict; domestically, we’re looking at record lows in violent crime.
And then there’s the economy – boy are we pissed about that, and yet the reality is more complicated. It’s true that we’re having fewer children, buying fewer homes and not moving up at work. But as the economic journalist Annie Lowery points out, 96 out of every 100 Americans who want a job have one; the unemployment rate is low; the labor market participation rate is high; disposable personal income is at a record high, and inequality has actually eased. It’s not perfect out there economically, but to say the stats don’t match the sentiment is a huge understatement.
The temptation for everyone from leaders to journalists to your neighbors is to resolve the tension — to pick the story that’s most convenient in that moment and tell it confidently. There’s a reason for this. Psychologist Leon Festinger’s cognitive dissonance theory says that we really, really hate to sit with things that don’t jive. Instead, we look to resolve that tension. We either pick a side and double down, even if the different realities aren’t actually mutually exclusive. Or we invent new rationalizations, however illogical, to justify the inconsistencies. Festinger theorized that cognitive dissonance is actually a drive state, meaning it’s like hunger or thirst. So we can’t just sit with it – we have to resolve it, even if we sacrifice the facts in the process.
One of his particularly vivid experiments around this was a study he did of doomsday cults. He found that even when the big event (say, the rapture) failed to occur, members actually dug deeper into their own beliefs. That, he saw, was easier for them than confronting the dissonance that they’d built their lives around something that turned out to be false.
The doomsday cult part is (hopefully) not relatable, but this thread of experiments continued in different contexts, eventually showing that overall, failed predictions usually don’t correct beliefs, all for that same reason: dissonance is really hard to live with.
So we pick a story.
These days, it’s usually the doomer story though occasionally an optimist breaks through. AI is going to take all the jobs or AI is going to create all the jobs. We will cure all diseases in our lifetime or we’ll be faced with another pandemic that we’re totally unprepared for. The social fabric has irrevocably frayed or IRL experiences are bringing everyone together again. And so on.
The truth is we’re not living in a period of unprecedented breakthroughs nor a period of existential threats – we’re living through a period where both of these things are happening. These aren’t phenomena running on opposite axes, it’s not a good news-bad news story. This is a story about parallel trajectories, where we are experiencing incredible acceleration in both directions at the same time. And that’s a whole different animal.
I think that this extreme collective dissonance is the defining condition of the current era.
It’s not just about uncertainty, everyone’s favorite buzzword. There are actually plenty of certainties, but they seem to contradict each other, and that’s harder to sit with than not knowing. That’s what’s messing with us.
Collective dissonance has impacts that are showing up in all kinds of ways. We humans are meaning-making beings and we’re always crafting a story of what’s happening in the world to satiate that need. But when the story doesn’t make sense, at least instinctively, we need to find the meaning elsewhere. This is why you see people who are totally checked out from world events, but hugely invested in their kid’s soccer team, for example. Or you’ll get people who have opted out of voting, but made it their mission to get the local library renovated. This isn’t all bad – our national narrative is so fragmented that we’re being forced to look for meaning in new places and that has some benefits. But those places tend to be smaller and siloed, which can exacerbate the larger divisions we already face.
Which brings us to the trust problem – the foundational issue of our time. We’ll never all agree completely on what’s happening in the world. But living with collective dissonance means we don’t know how to feel, we don’t know what our story is and we don’t know which direction we’re heading. A confused narrative means we don’t have a shared story and that breeds distrust, in our institutions, our neighbors, even ourselves.
The psychologist Pauline Boss coined the term ambiguous loss to name the specific feeling for a loss without closure (like a soldier who never comes home). Now, she’s expanded that definition to all kinds of losses that feel hard to grasp, like the feeling of losing trust in the world as a safe and predictable place. The story of this era isn’t solely about loss but I think her answer to tackling it holds. We have to build the skill of sitting with two competing ideas at once, she says. She called this “both and thinking” and argues that it reduces stress, perhaps because it brings us closer to seeing things as they are. It might look something like this: The planet is in trouble, and there are people making real progress towards saving it.
During my individual period of extreme dissonance, I struggled to articulate what was happening to myself.
But when I look back, I think about the peaks much more than the valleys: the 13th surgery worked, the kids arrived healthy, my family came home. That period forced me to learn the skill of holding multiple truths. I couldn’t pick a side even if I’d wanted to – I couldn’t ignore the good (kids) or the bad (health) so I involuntarily practiced carrying them both at the same time. But I graduated to a new level of resilience after that time, and it’s served me well ever since.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” gets the most airtime but the rest of that Dickens passage is worth a read too. “It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
I think that the people and institutions that will succeed in the long run are the ones who can acknowledge the contradictions honestly and stick to their values regardless. Collective dissonance is uncomfortable but it is a shared experience, and that’s valuable even when it’s hard. Instead of picking a narrow story and telling it confidently, the most credible thing you can say right now is the core of the reality: both things are true.
**A housekeeping note: I’m turning on the paid option for The Hannalyst today, but all of my content (weekly essays) will still be free for everyone.
That’s the short version, here’s the long one:
I’m ~9 months into writing this blog and it’s so much more fun than I anticipated. My next door neighbor said she’s gotten to know me better because of it. A woman I grew up with wrote to say the stories resonate. A stranger DMed and said she saw herself in what I wrote. It’s been an awesome exercise in human connection and it’s made me realize that I want to reach more people.
From what I understand about Substack, turning on the paid tier will allow me to do just that. So I’m giving it a try. But the essays will remain free for everyone. The paid tier is truly optional and it won’t get you anything extra — it’s just a way to support the work. Give if you want to and you can, don’t if you don’t want to or you can’t. The real thing I want is to reach more readers, writers and listeners. Thanks for letting me experiment with this journey.