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LA Hypercosm: Living With Contradiction

  • Writer: Bret Hansen
    Bret Hansen
  • Aug 20
  • 2 min read

Updated: Aug 21

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When I first moved to Los Angeles, I expected the city would eventually sort itself out in my mind. That after a few years, the contrasts would soften, and the city would feel more coherent. But even now, years later, Los Angeles still strikes me as both exhilarating and unsettling. Driving across town can feel like looking into a split screen: one side filled with beauty and opportunity, the other with reminders of struggle and fragility.


I’ve come to think of Los Angeles as a kind of Hypercosm. If a microcosm is a small-scale version of a larger reality, a hypercosm is the same thing exaggerated, intensified, and turned up to full volume. Los Angeles doesn’t just reflect American life, it amplifies it. The endless sprawl of freeways, the glamour of the hills, the ocean shimmering at the edge of the city—all of it suggests possibility.


And yet, woven into the same landscape are reminders of precarity: tents under overpasses, storefronts in decline, whole neighborhoods pressed to the margins.

What feels so striking is that the city doesn’t conceal these opposites. It puts them on display together. Driving here can be like watching two films projected at once—dazzling and sobering, hard to reconcile, impossible to ignore.


That same “hypercosm effect” plays out in our inner lives. Most of us live with parts of ourselves that feel equally at odds: the part that is hopeful and the part that is anxious, the part that longs for belonging and the part that expects rejection, the part that dares to imagine a future and the part that worries it could all fall apart. At times, the contradictions can feel too stark, as if we need to pick one side or the other.


This is where therapy can be so valuable. Instead of splitting off from the parts of ourselves that scare or confuse us, therapy invites us to bring them into the same room. In the safety of a therapeutic relationship, it becomes possible to recognize both the excitement of possibility and the dread of loss, and to see them not as proof that something is wrong with us, but as signs of our humanity.


Holding contradictions is rarely comfortable, but it is often transformative. When we allow ourselves to acknowledge both sides—the freedom and the fragility—we discover that our capacity to live with tension is what makes us resilient. It opens us to deeper connections, greater creativity, and a more grounded sense of self.

Los Angeles, in its own theatrical way, insists that we look at extremes side by side. Therapy helps us do the same within ourselves. And in that work, we discover something essential: that living with contradictions doesn’t weaken us. It expands us.

If life feels like it’s pulling you in opposite directions, therapy can offer a steadier ground. To learn more about how it may help, you’re welcome to schedule a free 15-minute consultation.

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