I don’t know if you, like me, have been waking up already hot these days. The thermometer read 82 degrees, at seven in the morning. You might have thought, “well, it’s summer,” but deep down, something told you this isn’t the heat you remember from childhood. And yet, day after day, that whisper gets fainter. This is how the most dangerous habit of our time begins: considering what is not normal to be normal. “Oh god, another article about the heat.” Yes, but also no. Stay with me.
The Habit Trap
We’re like a person living next to a busy street: at first, the sound of horns wakes them up at night, then slowly they get used to it until they no longer hear it. We’re applying the same mechanism to extreme heat. We complain, we look for shade, we turn on the air conditioning, but deep down we’re starting to think that 95 degrees in the shade in June is the new normal. This process has a specific name: hypernormalization. It’s when we all know things are strange and out of control, but we accept this fiction as if it were reality. It’s a collective defense mechanism to avoid facing a truth too terrifying to handle. The climate has become our busy street: we’ve stopped hearing the background noise of what we refuse to call a “crisis.” Besides, how many crises have we lived through as a society? Dozens. It’s normal to normalize them, in the end. Crisis has become the norm.
The Mountains: A Concrete Answer
A recently published report can give us food for thought. The “Rapporto Montagne Italia 2025″ by UNCEM tells an interesting story: the mountains are repopulating. Not just words, but numbers: nearly 3,500 mountain municipalities were examined, and—a surprising detail—between 2022 and 2023, there was a positive migration balance, with nearly 100,000 people deciding to leave the lowlands to move to higher altitudes. It’s a choice that also seems driven by the unbearable heat in urban centers. This upward migration is not just a search for a different quality of life, but also an instinctive response to the unbearable heat of our cities. These mountain territories don’t just offer cooler, cleaner air; they are becoming laboratories for sustainability. For example, through Green Communities that create clean energy grids and develop smart infrastructure, they demonstrate that concrete alternatives exist to the urban model that is suffocating us. This isn’t an escape from reality; it’s the construction of a different reality. At a more acceptable temperature. It’s a concrete response to the ongoing change, even if some claim that nothing is changing (and they probably say this while sitting comfortably in an air-conditioned room).
How to Stay Vigilant Without Becoming Paralyzed
By now, you’ve probably understood that hypernormalization is not a healthy response and that finding the increasingly frequent extreme weather events to be normal is a protective mechanism, but also an escape from reality. The challenge, then, is to maintain awareness without falling into paralyzing anxiety. The first step is to stop calling them “heat waves” and start calling them extreme climate events. Words shape our perception: a wave passes, an extreme event is a symptom of something deeper that requires a reaction other than “let’s wait for it to pass.” The second step is to actively inform yourself. It’s not enough to scroll through alarmist headlines on social media. It means understanding the connections: why intensive agriculture, land use, and industrial emissions are all parts of the same problem. It’s like learning to read your body’s signals: the more you know how your system works and how everything is connected, the better you can take care of yourself.
Take Concrete Action
Here’s what you can do, starting right now:
- Manage heat at home differently. Air conditioning is fine, but don’t turn your living room into an icebox. Use fans, close the blinds during the hottest hours, and turn off unnecessary lights. If you have a house with windows on opposite sides, open them to create a cross-breeze (the kind that people of a certain age complain about for giving them a stiff neck, but which, in this case, are very important and welcome). Every small action reduces the strain on the power grid.
- Support those building alternatives. When you go on vacation, choose mountain destinations that invest in sustainability. Buy from local producers who respect the environment. It’s like voting with your wallet for the future you want.
- Reward courageous administrations: those that focus on climate policies, Green Communities, and urban reforestation.
- Talk about the difference. To your children, your grandchildren, your younger friends. Tell them what summers were like twenty years ago. Memory is resistance against normalization. They might call you a grumbling old-timer, but don’t pay it any mind: something will stick.
The Power of Not Giving Up
This isn’t about living in constant alarmism, but about cultivating what we can call “healthy indignation.” It’s like when you see someone flick a cigarette butt on the ground: it bothers you because you know it’s not right, even if you see it happen a hundred times a day. Keep that feeling of “this isn’t right” alive when you hear that it’s normal for glaciers to disappear, for summer nights in the city to have tropical temperatures, for the only outlook to be an escalation of these phenomena. To accept it would be to surrender to a story written by others. But you’re still holding the pen. Every time you refuse to get used to the unacceptable, every time you choose a sustainable alternative, every time you keep the indignation for what is not normal alive, you are rewriting the ending. Extreme heat does not deserve to become our new normal.