Feeling Crazy Isn’t the Same as Being Crazy
Gaslight in the 21st Century
For a long time, I thought exhaustion came from doing too much.
Lately, it feels like it comes from trying to stay oriented in conditions that keep shifting while being told, calmly and repeatedly, that everything is fine.
It doesn’t feel like sudden collapse.
It feels like slow constriction.
It feels like the walls are ratcheting in one notch at a time - just enough that you’re never quite comfortable, but never quite panicked either.
Remember the story about a frog in a pot of water?
Drop it into boiling water and it jumps out.
Place it in cool water and raise the temperature gradually; it stays - adjusting and adapting until… It’s Frog Stew.
The danger isn’t invisible.
It’s incremental.
That same pattern shows up in a story many people know, even if they don’t realize where a familiar term comes from.
The word gaslighting comes from a 1944 film called Gaslight.
In the film, a man slowly manipulates his wife into doubting her own perception of reality.
He doesn’t yell or threaten.
He dims the gas lights in their home and insists nothing has changed.
He hides objects and tells her she’s misplaced them.
He creates small disturbances and calmly denies they ever happened.
Each moment, on its own, seems minor.
Easy to explain away.
Easy to internalize.
Over time, she begins to question not just her memory, but her sanity.
What makes the story unsettling isn’t cruelty in the open.
It’s the insistence that what is plainly happening isn’t happening at all.
I first saw that film when I was twelve or thirteen.
At the time, I didn’t have language for manipulation or psychological abuse.
What I remember instead is confusion - and a quiet, creeping unease.
I couldn’t understand why someone would do that to another person.
The deliberate distortion didn’t make sense to me.
But the story made one thing clear.
This can happen.
That framing mattered.
I had a reference point for recognizing a pattern, even if I didn’t yet understand it.
Most people don’t get that kind of framing.
They encounter the experience first - without context, without language, without a story that tells them what they’re living inside has a shape.
Living under sustained financial and social pressure while being told - over and over - that everything is fine can create a similar strain.
The math stops working.
Bills creep higher.
Margins get thinner.
You adjust.
You compensate.
You try again.
And still, nothing ever quite… settles.
Meanwhile, the reassurance never changes.
Inflation is low.
The economy is strong.
Growth is up.
You’re told you’re doing well, even as your own world feels tighter than it used to.
At a certain point, this stops feeling confusing.
It starts feeling destabilizing.
You don’t just wonder what’s happening.
You start wondering whether you’re allowed to notice.
Even when you’re sure - quietly, firmly sure - that what you’re experiencing is real, it doesn’t feel safe to say so.
Not at work.
Not online.
Sometimes not even with friends.
You learn quickly that naming the mismatch can carry consequences.
Conversations shift.
Tone changes.
Doors close.
So you edit yourself.
Not dramatically.
Quietly.
You choose your words carefully.
You let things pass.
You pretend not to notice what you’ve already noticed.
And because so many others are doing the same thing, the silence itself starts to feel like evidence.
If no one else is saying it, maybe it really is just you.
That’s when doubt turns inward.
Not because your perception is unstable, but because acknowledging it feels risky.
The exhaustion doesn’t come only from pressure.
It comes from carrying perception without confirmation.
At the same time, there’s a persistent sense that no matter how carefully you play by the rules, getting ahead feels out of reach.
People joke about “F-You money.”
The idea that if you had enough financial buffer, you could finally breathe.
Speak freely.
Live more honestly.
For most people, that idea stays hypothetical.
The ground keeps shifting.
There’s rarely enough space to think clearly about how to get there, even if you wanted to.
You want to slow down.
You want to rest.
You want to build deeper relationships.
But those things start to feel frivolous when survival occupies so much mental space.
Rest feels irresponsible.
Pausing feels like falling behind.
So you keep going.
You adjust.
You hustle.
You tell yourself that once you get through this month, this quarter, this year, things will stabilize.
They rarely do.
The finish line moves.
The rules change.
It starts to feel less like progress and more like running on a hamster wheel that you can’t get off of.
What makes this especially draining isn’t just the pressure itself.
It’s the insistence that the pressure isn’t real.
That you’re fine.
That the system is working.
That if things feel harder, the problem must be personal.
Over time, that contradiction takes a toll.
It wears people down.
It makes them doubt not just institutions or narratives, but their own ability to trust what they see with their own eyes, and feel through their own nervous system.
And because so much of this is carried quietly, it’s easy to mistake it for personal failure rather than a shared condition.
Sometimes orientation begins there.
Not with answers.
Not with solutions.
But with the relief of realizing that what you’re experiencing has a shape, a name.
That it’s recognizable.
That you’re not imagining it.
Sometimes, just having a story that tells you this can happen is enough to make the world feel a little less disorienting.