During the pandemic, it’s useful to see the role your coping mechanisms play, if only to stop yourself spiralling into anxiety
Exactly how terrible are the next months and years going to be? As a generally apocalyptically minded sort of person, I’ve been feeling some pride in watching my favourite question become everyone else’s favourite question, too; it’s like being a 19th-century aristocrat and seeing your debutante daughter become the star of the London season. But in deciding who to listen to, and thus how alarmed to be, it’s easy to overlook a crucial factor: in a crisis as all-consuming as this one, nobody – not academic experts, not media commentators, not that one friend who keeps urging you to be less (or more) worried than you are – is a completely neutral observer. Because predictions about the future aren’t solely about the future. They’re also coping mechanisms for dealing with the present.
This is obvious enough in the case of the strenuous optimist who insists that in a few weeks everything will be back to normal; she’s clearly attempting to generate a sense of security in a time of uncertainty. But it’s been fascinating to witness the opposite, too: the people in my social circle, and especially my social media feeds, who seem deeply invested in asserting that things will be worse than the rest of us can imagine. (Even professional epidemiologists are engaged in an arms race to predict a longer and longer timeframe for social distancing.) Psychologically, though, this makes sense. When everything’s up in the air, the person foreseeing absolute disaster has found solid ground: at least things won’t get worse than that.
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