We Are in a Recession, Why No One Will Say it, and What That Means For Us Now

This recession is more than a cycle; it is the symptom of a profound failure to reform the system after the last crises.

Right now we are seeing a collective failure to acknowledge a reality that is, by many metrics, obvious. This isn’t accidental to me. It’s a predictable outcome of a system that has become pathologically aligned around a distorted narrative.

But I have always been the one to call out uncomfortable truths. I can’t bear comfortable lies, because I know they end in disaster. Truth always catches up to us one way or another, even if it takes a while.

So what are the dynamics at play driving this irrational game of denial? 

The Politicians: Survival in the Narrative Ecosystem

For most politicians, their primary reality is not the economy itself, but the political narrative about the economy. Their survival depends on their funding, their re-election, and their power. This all depends on maintaining the coherence of their tribe’s story in real time.

First, we have leader’s tribe. To admit a recession is to validate the opposition’s criticism. It’s seen as disloyalty. The incentive to double down on the narrative is overwhelming, creating a bubble of “alternative facts.”

Second, we have the opposition. Even they often hesitate to call out that there is a full blown recession. Why? Because declaring a recession can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and they don’t want to take the blame for that either. It spooks markets, shakes consumer confidence, and can deepen the very downturn they’re describing. They have to weigh the political gain against the potential real-world harm.

The Economists: Trapped in the “Cult of Objectivity” and Complexity

We live in a world that devalues and often denies the truth of real-world, every day, lived experience. I call this the “cult of objectivity.” Economists are often hiding behind data and definitions to avoid the messy, subjective truth, like many other experts do.

One of the classic definitions of a recession is two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. If the data is massaged, if one quarter is slightly positive, they can technically say, “It’s not technically a recession.” They retreat into semantic arguments to avoid the palpable reality of every day economic pain. It’s a form of intellectual cowardice disguised as rigor.

There’s also the fear of looking too political. Many economists, especially in institutions like the Federal Reserve, cling to the illusion that they are apolitical, as if politics doesn’t affect everything and isn’t affected by everything. Acknowledging a recession in a highly charged political environment is seen as taking a side. So, they use opaque, technical language like “period of negative growth,” or “economic slowdown” to avoid the politically charged word, even if it’s actually the most accurate one.

The Media: The Amplifier

The media is often trapped in a false balance. If one side is denying reality and the other is acknowledging it, then to them, the “balanced” approach is to present both sides as equally valid, which artificially inflates the credibility of the denial. They become a resonator for incoherence. This has long been a problem and has played a big role in creating the very mess we find ourselves in now. This is also cowardice disguised as objectivity.

The Systemic Picture: A Collective DMN

Our collective reality is the macro version of an individual brain’s Default Mode Network (the neurological seat of ego). The body politic has a shared, collective DMN. A shared story of identity (“we are a prosperous nation”) that is fiercely protected by its constituent parts (politicians, media, institutions). A recession is a paradigm collapse for the national story. It forces a painful rewrite of the national identity from “prosperous and strong” to “struggling and vulnerable.”

The collective amygdala — the fear center of the body politic — activates. The response is denial, identical to the common response of an individual facing a traumatic truth that shatters their self-narrative. The system prioritizes the short-term stability of its self-story over the long-term health that comes from actually confronting the problem. In essence, the system is straining to maintain a “prosperity” narrative that has fallen out of phase with the fundamental economic reality people endure daily. The dissonance grows, and the denials are like turning up the volume on one speaker to drown out the shrieking feedback from the other.

This recession is more than a cycle; it is the symptom of a profound failure to reform the system after the last crises. The real tragedy is that so many have built their identities on this fragile edifice. To reform it now feels like a psychic death. So we kick the can down the road, denying the system’s inherent unsustainability — a design flaw that guarantees it will eventually consume itself. They will continue the denial until the pressure of lived experience — the grinding weight of recession in every household — becomes so overwhelming it shatters the narrative. The collapse of this incoherent frame is inevitable. The only remaining question is the scale of suffering that will occur before the system is forced to rewire itself around the truth.

We are watching a real-time case study in collective cognitive dissonance. It’s the same resistance to the needed paradigm shifts I see in physics and healthcare playing out in economics (and politics). The same laws of coherence apply.

So, I will be the one to say it. We are already in a recession.

Not the hypothetical one economists hedge against. Not the “soft landing” fairy tale that gets floated around every few months. A real recession. One you can feel. One that people are already living through. And for a lot of people, it is already suffocating. Wages aren’t keeping up. Savings are being drained. Credit card delinquencies are rising. Rent burdens are unsustainable. Student loans are in default. People are working two jobs and still falling behind. If that’s not a recession, then what exactly are we waiting for to declare it?

The refusal to name it doesn’t prevent collapse. It absolutely guarantees it.

Denial delays response and paralyzes planning. It feeds confusion, incoherence, and mistrust. And worst of all, it turns what could have been a manageable downturn and needed reform into a full-blown crash. Not just economic, but psychological. Perhaps for some, even physiological, because shock can harm the body. Recessions don’t become depressions because we name them. They become depressions precisely because we refuse to.

So we have a choice to keep spinning the story of denial, or stabilize the system around reality, before it collapses on its own. Because either way, truth is coming.

And it will rewrite the story with or without our permission.