Have you noticed how everything feels so weird, and life just seems strange lately?
The world feels unstable. Since Covid, many of us in the Western World have noticed that things are getting weirder. The usual order and expected norms of behaviour have gone out of the window.
Technology is accelerating faster than our emotions can follow.
We’re living through a period where our once familiar world is coming undone, and something entirely new is trying to emerge.
Psychedelic thinker Terence McKenna once said, “The world isn’t just getting strange, but it’s getting stranger and stranger until we can’t ignore it anymore.”
His point wasn’t despairing; it was prophetic. The increasing weirdness we sense is not a sign that things are broken, but that the old systems and ways of thinking are dissolving under the weight of transformation. Chaos, he said, is the birthplace of renewal.
Don’t worry: everything feels so weird because the old world is dissolving
We use to draw comfort from the familiar. Governments, economies, religions, and social norms gave us a sense of security, but they’re struggling to keep pace with the speed of change. Technology evolves exponentially, rewriting how we work, communicate, and even love.
The planet’s climate, too, seems to be reflecting that same instability. All of it creates a collective sense of vertigo.
McKenna believed history itself moves in waves of increasing complexity, each one bringing new possibilities for consciousness to expand. When an old wave reaches its limit, it collapses which then creates this sense of chaos. .
The tension we feel right now between the familiar and the unimaginable is simply what evolution and change feels like from the inside. The old world isn’t dying because something went wrong; it’s dying because it has fulfilled its purpose.
A collective initiation
What we are experiencing is not unlike a spiritual initiation on a planetary scale. Every initiation begins with disorientation, and a passage through uncertainty before a new understanding can emerge. McKenna once described this moment in human history as “a fire in the madhouse,” a time when everything familiar burns away to make space for the next stage of consciousness.
For ancient cultures, this descent into the unknown was never meaningless.
It was ritualised, framed by story and symbol, so that the initiate could move through it with awareness. In our modern world, stripped of ritual and myth, the same process feels like chaos and collapse. Yet the energy is the same: something sacred is being born through confusion.
When we reintroduce simple rituals into our lives such as lighting a candle, breathing with awareness, or marking the cycles of the sun and moon, we bring consciousness back into change. Ritual doesn’t erase uncertainty; it gives it shape.
It reminds us that transformation has always been the rhythm of life.
The shifting language of reality explains why everything feels so weird
To Terence McKenna, the world was made of language. Words were not just tools for description but the very structure through which reality takes form. The stories we tell define the world we experience.
This view is echoed by thinkers such as Carl Jung.
Today even language feels unstable. Meaning fractures in the flood of information, and the narratives that once united us no longer hold. Yet this too is part of the transformation. As the old words lose their power, we are being invited to speak new ones, to craft stories that honour connection, empathy, and possibility rather than fear and division.
Every time you describe your life differently and if you replace “I’m lost” with “I’m in transition”, then this is subtly rewriting the reality around you. The practice of mindful language is a quiet form of magick, a way of participating in creation rather than being swept along by it.
Standing on the evolutionary edge
As uncomfortable as this period feels, it is not the end of the world. It is the edge of our evolution.
Humanity has always faced thresholds in ice ages, plagues, and wars. We’ve generally adapted and grown in ways we could never have predicted. McKenna reminded us that “nature loves courage,” that when we commit to growth, life itself seems to conspire to help us through.
The strangeness many of us feel is not evidence that something is wrong with us; it’s evidence that we’re evolving faster than our systems and stories can keep up. To live through this is disorienting, but it’s also extraordinary.
For the first time, a species is becoming conscious of its own transformation.
“we look back at every society that preceded us with great smugness at how naive they all were. Well, it never occurs to us, then, that maybe we’re whistling in the dark too! That the universe is stranger than you CAN suppose, and that that openness that that perception imparts is a great joy, a great blessing, because then you can live your life not in service to some fascistic metaphor but in service to the living mystery: the fact that you’re not going to understand it; it is not going to yield to logic; or magic; or any other technique that’s been developed” – Terence McKenna
How to stay grounded when reality feels unreal
In times like these, stability doesn’t come from control but from presence.
The simplest acts can become anchors: slowing your breath, stepping outside to feel the ground beneath your feet, creating a daily ritual that reconnects you to rhythm and meaning.
Limit what floods your senses.
Not everything happening in the world deserves your nervous system’s attention. Nourish yourself with what restores coherence such as nature, art, silence, and conversation that feels real.
Above all, let’s be gentle with ourselves. Confusion is not failure; it’s the natural symptom of deep change.
From chaos to creation
McKenna often spoke of a “transcendental object at the end of time”.
This is a poetic image for the moment when consciousness and matter converge into something new. Whether you take that literally or metaphorically, the essence is the same: the world’s increasing weirdness is not random. It’s the sound of the next pattern emerging.
So if life feels too strange to understand, pause. Breathe. Feel your feet on the earth. You are not broken, and you are not falling apart. You are part of a vast and beautiful process of becoming. It is still unfolding, still uncertain, and yet entirely sacred.
Perhaps the world isn’t ending at all.
Perhaps it’s only just beginning to remember what it really is.
If this reflection speaks to you, explore more rituals and writings at Cultivated Zen — a space for grounding, clarity, and wonder in times of change.
