We are surrounded by systems.

You call the clinic and navigate a phone tree for twenty minutes, only to be told your referral expired and you’ll need to start over. Nothing is broken — the system worked exactly as designed. And yet something feels deeply wrong. This is why normal feels wrong — not because you’re broken, but because the system is exporting its cost into your body.

When people struggle inside them, the reassurance usually sounds the same:

The system is fine.
This is how it works.
Nothing is technically wrong.
It’s all connected.

And yet — suffering persists.

Not because systems are absent.
But because they have lost contact with lived reality.

People Don’t Experience Systems. They Experience States.

No one feels the cardiovascular system.
No one feels an organizational chart.
No one feels policy alignment or workflow efficiency.

People feel:

• heat
• pressure
• urgency
• confusion
• friction
• fatigue
• exposure
• collapse

These are physiological states, not system components.

Systems exist on paper.
Bodies exist in time.

And when the two drift apart, the body notices first.

The Category Error We Keep Making

Modern systems are built as if humans were modular.

As if:

• parts are discrete
• boundaries are clean
• inputs produce predictable outputs

As if we were snap-together toy figures.

Snap this piece here.
Route that piece there.
Escalate if needed.
Optimize the flow.

But bodies — and humans inside institutions — don’t behave that way.

They behave like:

• fields
• feedback loops
• thresholds
• accumulated load
• delayed consequences

Life moves by rhythm and momentum, not flowcharts.

Systems don’t fail because they’re poorly designed.
They fail because they are over-simplified representations of complex, living processes.

Why Normal Feels Wrong

When a system technically functions but feels intolerable, people are told the problem must be personal.

The woman whose labs are “normal” but who can’t get through the afternoon. The employee whose performance metrics are fine but who cries in her car at lunch.

You’re stressed.
You’re sensitive.
You need better coping skills.
You need lifestyle changes.

But what’s actually happening is this:

The system is exporting its incoherence into human nervous systems.

People compensate.
They buffer.
They adapt.
They self-regulate around friction.

And the system appears stable —
because bodies are paying the cost.

Physiology as the Canary

A hot flash is not a failure of the endocrine system.
Anxiety is not a character flaw.
Fatigue is not laziness.
Brain fog is not cognitive decline.

These are state signals.

They emerge when regulatory systems are pushed beyond their ability to resolve input cleanly.

The body isn’t broken.
It’s responding accurately to an environment that no longer moves at a human pace.

Systems Language Explains After the Fact

Systems language is tidy.
Retrospective.
Third-person.

Physiology is immediate.
Relational.
First-person.

When explanation doesn’t line up with sensation, people lose trust — not just in the system, but in themselves.

That loss of coherence is where suffering begins.

A Nervous-System-First Orientation

The more useful question is not:

Is the system correct?

But:

What state does this system induce in the bodies living inside it?

If the answer is:

• chronic vigilance
• bracing
• fragmentation
• exhaustion

Then the issue is not compliance or resilience.

It’s mismatch.

Closing

People don’t suffer because systems don’t exist.

They suffer because systems no longer track how life actually moves —
and the nervous system is left holding the difference.

The body is not malfunctioning.

It’s reporting.

Whether we listen is another matter.

This is what midlife care should actually address: not your coping skills, but the mismatch itself. [Start here →]