Reality Check

I think the reality of the situation is starting to set in for people. The last couple of days I'm seeing people start to crack. So let's start off with the tough love, then we'll get to the pep talk and positive spin later.
Here's the thing about disaster. You have to get it together and make your peace with it and get on with your life. This is only the beginning. You're going to start seeing escalating death tolls and a lot more bad news. You're not going to get to stop isolating yourselves any time soon. You're going to see it hit closer to home, and you're probably going to know some people who will get really sick or even die from it. It might be a friend of a friend, it might be a neighbor or distant relative, and in very rare cases, it might be your parents or kids or your partner. It's hard to even imagine that, but it's a possibility, although a small one. Chances are, you won't be directly affected by death from covid-19.
The economy is going to actually be the worst part of this whole thing. It will collapse, or at least come as close to a collapse as we've ever seen. The economy is an abstract concept, though. It's numbers and math that don't have much basis in the real world. It will be rough, and hurt a lot of people, but we're all going to be in the same boat, and economies can be rebuilt. Like I said, they aren't even real in many ways. There have been people hurt by it and living on its fringes since civilization began, so it's nothing new.
You're going to see a lot of bad news and very little good news on TV. The news media thrives on bad news, so you're going to get overwhelmed by it if you focus on it too much. Don't watch it if you can't handle it, and if you can handle it, watch it so it desensitizes you a bit. Just realize that it's weighted to the side of hyperbole and worst case scenarios, because that gets people's attention, and in the end, they are trying to compete for your attention and sell their product. Make sure you search out good stories and positive content elsewhere.
There, that's the worst of it. Now we can move on to discussing some of the aspects of the whole thing and our behavior and reactions, and that will morph into the pep talk I promised you.
Most people are having problems adapting to this new reality for a lot of reasons. First off, it's unpleasant, and people are good at ignoring or downplaying unpleasant things until they can't anymore. Then one day, they wake up and realize that wishing it away isn't going to work, and instead of slowly acclimating themselves to it, they are now thrown into it all at once. That's why you should learn to live with your eyes wide open. That's why leaders who inspire trust and confidence are unflinching in their resolve to face problems head on. Most of us are loathe to do that, that's why it seems like a superpower when we see someone else do it. That's why we carve their heads on mountains, or put them on our currency. Our current president is not one of them.
The other thing is that life has just been too good for most of us. As much as we complained about everything, now we feel like we are living in hell because of a bunch of inconveniences. Granted, some aspects of it go beyond mere inconvenience, especially for medical staff and workers still out there doing essential jobs. There are people suffering some pretty big hardships as well, but mostly I just see people complaining about not being able to do what they want, or being bored, or bitching about having to entertain their kids. Yeah, it's annoying, but just grow the fuck up and get over yourselves. If the biggest complaint you have during a deadly pandemic is that you feel like you've streamed all the TV and movies you want to watch, well… That's not exactly the same as living through the Great Depression, or the Civil War, or the Blitz in London, or the Holocaust. Ironically, you don't really hear the doctors or the workers still out there doing essential jobs or the people who are really getting hit hard griping and complaining, just the selfish or entitled ones sitting at home.
Then there are the people I mentioned at the beginning of this essay that's already going on too long. The ones who are afraid, whose anxiety is gripping them tighter, who are uncertain and in disarray. Chaos has a way of making you feel untethered, but your tether is sort of an illusion anyway, like security at the airport. You know that if a terrorist really wanted to do something on your plane, the TSA isn't likely to stop them. You still get on the plane, though. Life is simply controlled chaos, and most of the control part of that equation isn't real. So the feeling of losing control of everything isn't actually reality, it's just your perception. It's just you being able to see the chaos instead of regulating it to that steady background hum where it usually lives.
The thing to remember is that on a base level, all this is nothing new. Life has always been full of inconveniences and misery, and disaster was always waiting right outside the door, it was all just easier to put out of your mind before this. Really, your survival odds have only gotten a couple of percentage points worse at the most. People have trouble living in the moment on their best day. Now we're all longing for the past and dreading the future. We're incapable of finding anything good in the present, but that's not reality either. There's plenty of good things to cling to, and plenty of distractions to engage in.
It will take some work and adjustment, but just lower some of your unrealistic expectations, make peace with the fact that you're going to have to give up some things, and don't let fear make you irrational. Realize that you're going to be exposed to the virus at some point, and the odds are overwhelmingly in your favor that it's going to be a quick and relatively painless illness. You might not even get any symptoms. It's already much different than you think it is, because there's no real testing being done here. That means while you're busy being frightened by the numbers you're seeing, those numbers are most likely only a small part of what's really going on. That means that a lot more people have already had it than you think, so we're probably doing a lot better than the current numbers tell us on survival and mortality rates.
Speaking of mortality rates, you have been living in a world where thousands of people die every single day. They are murdered, they die in accidents and wars and genocides, babies die in their cribs, old people die in their beds, disease and addiction cause us to waste away, cancer eats us alive, and heart attacks and blood clots cut us down in an instant. We have lived hand in hand with death our whole lives, and most of us do it without thinking. Now we are suddenly aware of it, and we can't shake our fear.
Same with poverty and societal collapse. It's happened before. Again, it's been happening all around you every day of your life. There are plenty of nations and regions who have been living in abject poverty and misery everyday for decades. There are so many in this nation of plenty who live on the streets, or don't know where their next meal is coming from, or if they will have clean water or electricity. No matter how bad things get, most of us will never have it as bad as a lot of people who currently live everyday in conditions that would destroy you if you were in their place. Most of us can leave our house and find people living like that within a five minute drive, but we've learned to put it out of our minds. We don't see what we don't want to see.
And that's what a lot of the fear and dread is. We are now forced to imagine ourselves in situations we felt far enough removed from that they would never actually affect us. We are learning how fragile and tenuous our hold is on so many things we simply took for granted. But again, the thing to remember is that it's always been that way. The fact that you see it now doesn't make it any more real, it's always been there and it's always been real, and still, you've made it this far. You'll get through this, and driving yourself crazy and obsessing over every aspect of it is not a good way to do it. What's going to happen is going to happen, whether you torture yourself or not. That's just more of your brain trying to trick you into believing you have control.
So focus on positive stuff instead. The normal that people are so nostalgic for was pretty fucked up. It was full of injustice and cruelty and compound misery. If the world is going to be torn apart, instead of lamenting it and freaking out, let's work at figuring out ways to put it back together the right way when we get the chance. Any businessperson or politician or predator will tell you that chaos means opportunity, so let's take that opportunity to get back some of the control we've lost over the decades. Maybe we won't be at the mercy of a corrupt and narcissistic imbecile next time a preventable nightmare like this comes along. Maybe there will be a fair playing field, and no one will have to live everyday in squalor and misery. You might scoff, and say such a vision is impossible, but did you ever imagine that the situation we're in now could ever exist?
Because that's the real takeaway here. Nothing is guaranteed, nothing is safe or written in stone. That works both ways. It means that things might get worse, but with a little bit of effort, they might get so much better. It goes to figure that if something this huge and unimaginable was this close to us, maybe that utopia we're told is a fairytale is at hand as well. Even disasters are a gift, and we almost always ignore them, and we marvel about how the disasters keep repeating themselves.
This is a crisis, no doubt. It is horrific and monstrous and terrible, that's true. But it's also a wake up call and an opportunity, all that remains to be seen is how we react to it.