Does it feel like we're shifting back to normal or further into crazy?

Wait until November 2024 and I'll let you know.
- US Presidential election, for anyone outside of America wondering why this got so many upvotes

There's always been some craziness but I feel like it's growing more crazy every month. One of the superpowers started a war it can't win, the other 2 are slowly going into a cold war, the climate is becoming more and more unpredictable and there's always some kind of disease lurking around the corner. At the same time there's some cool progress in technology and science (and even that comes with its own issues).
- Yet even that war, horrible though it is, at least has a clear villain, it’s morally black and white, and most of the world is in agreement . Makes you wonder how the prequel nine years ago got mostly ignored
- "Super power" was the soviet Union. Russia is just a regional power that happens to have nukes and inertia and covets the power of the soviet Union.
- Technology is really awesome! We managed to squeeze really fast PCs into the size of a Nintendo Switch. Or even a Switch Lite in case of the Ayaneo Air 1S. We could make small PCs before but they used to lag far behind desktop PCs or laptops. Although the super small VAIOs were nevertheless cool.
  But now Bethesda's Starfield is out there and PCs such as Steam Deck can keep up. Maybe not with full detail but running AAA games on such compact hardware was unthinkable back then. You couldn't take the original Crysis and put it on a super small VAIO and expect it to even remotely keep up. Later UMPCs got stronger ofc but still lagged far behind their bigger siblings. It took us until GPD released the Win 2 to get an Ultrabook processor instead of using weak tablet processors or worse. Nowadays GPD and competitors use AMD APUs which allow us to actually catch up with laptops and PCs. Still not the same as using dedicated graphics but it's still really good. VR runs okay too and if performance scales just as much over the next years, i think that we can run VR off handheld PCs with AMD really well in about 3 years.
  Kid from a lithium mine: "Excuse me ma'am, can you give me something to eat? My boss told me that i can't get food because i haven't mined 10 kilograms of lithium today."
  Me: "NO, I'M PLAYING STARFIELD! WITH ONLY 30 FPS MIND YOU!" (kicks child to the ground)
  Me: "Gotta love modern technology!"
  
  Forget Switch sized. I'm still impressed with Phone Sized. My first computer was a bulky 286 with a full megabyte of RAM and 40MB hard drive space. (Yes, megabytes for both of them, not gigabytes.) I thought that there was no way I'd ever fill up that hard drive.
  Now, the phone I'm typing this on is orders of magnitude more powerful and it's a few years old (and wasn't even bleeding edge when it was released).

Crazy is the new normal

I’ll take shitstorm for $100, Alex.
Elections are still coming. “Inflation” hasn’t been tamed. We’re also waiting for the next pandemic. Planetary thermal events are in progress. Mega drought in the American Southwest threatens to cripple hydroelectric power generation and agriculture for millions.
Normal? That’s just what they want you to think.
- It’s getting back to the point where crazy seems unelectable, those committing election fraud are being charged, those committing treason are being jailed, at least some gerrymandering is rejected, and that crazy down south picked a fight with his states largest employer and lost.
  We have the biggest environmental bill in history starting to take affect, and we just started receiving routine seasonal vaccinations for the most virulent diseases
  I can’t help with megadrpught in the Southwest, except to say there are plenty of places to live with more water
- yeah "they" god damn "them"

I couldn't tell you- It's either slipping into crazy or I'm just paying more attention to how fucked it always was.

Too early to say. Crazy has been modestly rebuked and it's only making them more crazy. Even if main crazy is punished, we might see fringe crazy respond in a variety of obviously undesirable ways. If they do, then normal crazy might step back out of a desire not to be seen as associating with fringe crazy, but that doesn't mean that crazy will have passed. Crazy will just change tactics and lightly rebrand to new crazy.
The only way to end crazy is to thwart crazy's plans at every turn and make crazy nonviable as a means for gaining power.

Instead of using terms like normal or crazy, I'll instead use terms like stability. Things are pretty unstable where I live right now. The economy is unstable; high gas prices, high rent and home prices, high mortgage rates, high homeowners insurance rates with some leaving the state, the closure of small and local businesses are increasing, etc. My state also has a political crisis, a restrictions of rights and extremism from the far right.

Hell, I don't know. My baseline is shot. I'm just trying to survive with virtue at this point.

I go outside, talk to my friends, my extended family, it feels normal and stable.
I go online, and apparently the US is dying.
I think ita just an online thing.

We're just experiencing quantum immortality. Most earths died in their reality in 2012. So the state of our universe grows more and more unlikely as time goes on and we avoid the worst possible outcomes of potential world wars, scientific experiments going sideways and pandemics.
Just imagine how the universe must look like for the people who didn't have covid 19.
- You shouldn't state quantum immortality theory as fact. It's not like the theory of gravity where we have a pretty solid understanding with overwhelming empirical observations. It's just wild speculation and thought experiment. It's philosophical; not scientific.
  Brain death/loss of consciousness is not binary; it's a progressive loss of cognitive faculties. Here is a decent write-up debunking quantum immortality. (PDF warning).
  Quantum immortality is just the new Mandela effect in pop culture.
  
  Oh you mean that was a serious post? I thought it was clearly a joke 😅

Going "back to normal" is homeostasis. We don't do and have never done that. We do allostasis: adapt to the new thing.
People do indeed seem to be adapting to the new thing. You can tell because they are still here.
- Wise words

Its because majority of the politicians are dying off. Their brains are shutting down.

Normal is, just like beauty, in the eye of the beholder....
Oh wait, that's truth, normal is what the majority accepts... we're domed, just don't look up.

I think normal died around this time in 2019 for me.
To give some context, in Judaism Rosh Hashanah (which coincidentally just ended) is the new year. There's a superstition that whatever you do on Rosh Hashanah will be a reflection of the upcoming year. For example, if you nap you'll have a lazy year.
Anyway, that year, my younger son and I were at Temple for services. We noticed someone sitting behind us who seemed odd, but didn't think much of it. At some point, he left so we focused on the service.
Midway through the service, my rabbi suddenly shouted NO with the same force as Gandalf addressing the Balrog. Then I saw why. The "odd guy" was running down aisle shouting happy new year to everyone. He was wearing a t-shirt. And ONLY a t-shirt.
He reached the front and tried to get up the stairs to where the rabbi, cantor, and torahs were. Only, my rabbi clotheslined him back down the stairs. The ushers rushed in and dragged him off. My son was smart and looked away. I wasn't as smart and got "visual confirmation" that he wasn't wearing anything below the waist. It was only for a moment but it burned into my brain.
So remember how I said "how Rosh Hashanah goes, your year goes?" I joked with my wife later that hopefully this wouldn't mean we were going to have a crazy year.
Then 2020 hit.
Only I think this got stuck somehow and now EVERY year is crazy.
- Wait, so YOU'RE the reason we're stuck in this crazy timeline?! Why didn't you say so earlier we could have done something about this years ago!
  Next year at Rosh Hashanah post here again. We'll all come to your Temple and make sure you have the most normal service imaginable. We'll ring the building keeping any crazies out to ensure all of our future's track back to normal. Just let us know!

The way I see it, things are continuing down the crazy path but it feels more normal because people aren't denying it completely like they were a decade ago.

Definitely crazy. But when things get weird, they usually get even weirder as a response before settling down. I think things will start to settle down soon, into a new normal where it's not absolutely nuts out there.

Yes.

We can't shift back to normal. It was never normal. It was just a different flavour of crazy. Sure, it's easier to see this new crazy, but it's also more honest. Sliding back is nothing but regression, and THAT scares me.
- Those who actually push for regression are scary. But they don't truly push for regression, they push for a cherry picked and misremembered version of the past. And the bits they would like to keep vs rollback are different from how I would choose. But a lot of the elements of what we have now are not improvements on the past and I think we need to figure out how to undo some of the damage we've done.
  And I think part of the reason we have so many scary regressive people is because they feel the ways that the world has gotten worse, even if they misdiagnose it.
  
  They don't know they're pushing for regression, but that's what it is. And a fool can cause as much chaos as a villain.
  I've worked in programming for long enough to know that one person's bug is often a security feature, or a feature someone else literally can't work without. Sometimes, they're the one that asked for it. If that gets rolled back, it would cause regression issues and that's literally what they're called.

You have to provide more context..

It feels like news, politicians and people I swear to god have to be literal NPCs, are all trying to insist that everything's going back to normal. Everything's fine, everything's gonna work itself out, just calm down, take a deep breath and it'll be fine. But then they turn around and talk about how the world is ending. Everything's horrible, the world is collapsing. Then they turn around again and say, "seriously though, everything's fine, I swear."
Then you look around and realize everything is very much not fine. Things are very much getting worse and there doesn't seem to be a rational, peaceful solution to it because the people causing problems are whipping each other into a frenzy. They desperately want violence. They desperately want blood. They've been told it's the only way to have a good life or get into heaven, and they'll be damned before they'll let you stand in their way or try to show them who the real enemy is.

The people that ask this question are always boomers drowning in confirmation bias