A few days ago I was starting to write something about the pandemic, which now seems unconscionable.
It took the form of a letter to an agony aunt:
“Dear Deidre, I have an ugly confession. I am quite excited by Covid-19.”
This is how the piece went:
“I’m not a psychopath, honest. Although the disease scares me some, the raised cortisol levels I’m experiencing - it’s not just about the fear. I have to admit to a sort of Covid exhilaration.
Three days on, rather than completely abandon the article I thought it might be instructive to examine these thoughts.
A lot has changed in the last 72 hours.
The country where I live went from eight to 28 cases and counting, the borders went from wide open to completely closed, the retail pandemonium levels ramped from defcon-vaguely-amusing with funny anecdotes about toilet paper to rationing on certain items and supermarkets putting out joint press releases basically asking shoppers not to be dicks.
It’s real. What’s happening might be best described as a fast moving train crash with everyone on board.
Not that the speed of this thing is any excuse.
I had originally sought to reassure everyone, especially my elderly mother, that my excitement didn’t stop me being really worried about her, and everyone else’s elderly mothers, fathers, grandparents, great grandparents. All those people suffering and dying around the world. I’m not a complete bar steward.
What was behind this guilty euphoria? - I suppose a plaintive hope that this unprecedented - the word that politicians and newscasters are loving right now - disruption to our system may bring about a better world.
Or as I wrote bombastically:
“My heightened state is the anticipation of a future laden with grand possibilities.”
One of them being a better understanding of the connection between our actions and the environment.
Lots of people have been saying look, you can see fish in the canals in Venice and look there’s blue sky over Beijing. Isn’t that great. Nature is fighting back. Yep that’s awesome. But Covid-19 isn’t going to fix climate change, our biodiversity disaster, the freshwater crisis or any of those other ways in which we were messing up the world.
Some mutant virus magically fixing our environmental messes, no, that wasn’t the source of my exhilaration. I wasn’t placing my hopes on what severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) could do for the planet, more like the effect it might have on human thinking.
I was inspired by Dame Anne Salmond’s lovely oped. She pointed out the benefits of a collective pause for thought.
“While we are in limbo, perhaps we can take stock as a nation. Do the ways we have been living in recent years make sense? What kind of future do we want for our children and grandchildren?”
My excitement was predicated on the idea that this enforced departure from the grind of unrelenting economic growth may give us a chance to experiment with new ways of being.
That closer communities, compassion and cohesion, a lack of indiscriminate flying, working from home, not jumping in cars every day, and the opportunity to take in the natural wonders near our homes, all those things might actually bring about a reboot.
Something which inspired a meme popular in my silo: “Covid is mother nature’s way of telling us to go to our room and think about what we have done.”
And that still holds true for me.
Other thoughts did intervene. I wondered if in fact we might be seduced by the loucheness of it all. That the temptation might be to just fill those non-commuting hours by squeezing every last viewing possibility out of Netflix. I understand the company is buying up extra servers like there’s no tomorrow. Bad phrase, sorry.
Even the serious-pants former broadsheet The Independent was offering my newsfeed a listicle of top TV shows for self isolation, not 10 or 20 recommendations but 31, a measure of the anticipated scale of lounge lizardry.
People are pointing out that the Netflix and chilling quarantine may bring about a spike in population. Some are calling them the coronites. Myself I prefer “Covid boomer” with the enjoyable possibility that in 20 years or so they’ll be calling out those old privileged stick-in-the-muds, “hey millennial.”
I had explained that I wasn't the only one who felt like this. I knew at least one other. My friend Q. His business in the creative industries is fairly much screwed. Yet:
“I’m elated,” he told me. “Anything could happen”
His eyes twinkled. I figured mine were twinkling too.
“I suppose at worst we might lose the house. Could always go and camp in the woods, plant a garden.”
It was hard to talk about this with our partners, paragons of organisation and planning. They’ve already got the hybrids in a circle, hoarded broccolini seedlings, kombucha mothers and are just waiting for the viral balloon to go up. Yes, you may have gathered by now we are deep in the middle class jungle.
So about this point in my self-absorbed rambling, it dawned on me. I recognised what I’d been doing. Well I had to look it up first - then I realised.
False consensus effect, as they call it in psychology, also known as consensus bias.
I had conflated everyone else's experiences with my own. Everyone in the world. How egotistical is that? Now usually I’m a pretty empathetic guy, if I say so myself. Maybe it’s the survival instinct. Maybe it’s an inner selfishness. But there’s something about this pandemic and how we experience it, that can blind us to other people’s realities.
Covid anxiety consists of two very divergent concerns at the same time. It’s a personal threat to yourself and family - and - it’s a risk to the globe. I think that might be confusing. Certainly for me.
There is a unity for sure, to be drawn from that universal threat. The pandemic is affecting everyone, the classic fallacy trap which I fell into was to imagine that it was affecting everyone the same.
Like climate change and your pile of washing in the laundry, Covid hasn’t made inequality go away.
We are all in the same boat, yes - or to rely on my clunky analogy - on the same train - heading at breakneck speed towards the broken bridge across the ravine.
But we’re not in the same caboose. Middle class seats are somewhere towards the back. While the engine and the front two carriages might be about to plummet towards the winding river 500 metres below - the passengers at the rear end of the train are still happily munching on Walkers crisps.
You cannot ignore the cushioning effects of money.
“As the coronavirus spreads across the globe, it appears to be setting off a devastating feedback loop with another of the gravest forces of our time: economic inequality.
In societies where the virus hits, it is deepening the consequences of inequality, pushing many of the burdens onto the losers of today’s polarised economies and labor markets.
Research suggests that those in lower economic strata are likelier to catch the disease.”
I finally twigged when I heard myself talking with friends and colleagues about self isolation. About the pros and cons of getting out of pyjamas.
I found that I was trilling about this new reality with complete and utter consensus bias - like working from home would be the new normal - for everyone.
Apart from some essential services, surely everyone will be telecommuting. Well no.
Looking at 2017 stats from the US, this article based on Bureau of Labour figures shows a massive divergence in possibility when you consider education and income.
Less than nine per cent of those without a high school diploma had ever worked from home, that compared to 43 per cent of those with an advanced degree.
That same trend applied to lower and higher income workers in the lowest band eight per cent had worked at home - the highest band nearly a third.
The working from home stats in NZ show that nearly 60 per cent of professionals and managers can and do work from home, about two thirds of kiwis work in jobs where they haven’t or can’t.
Working from home is indeed a rich people thing.
So yes, a third of those in this country may well get an amazing opportunity to press pause, to sit at home, draw a salary, watch Netflix, make babies and contemplate a more enlightened future.
But the majority will probably be putting themselves and families at risk by continuing to operate machinery, dig ditches or deliver groceries. Things they can’t do from home.
Others will be getting laid off in their thousands, trying to look after their kids and sick elderly, while desperately trying to find another job.
So there’s my shame. Glad I caught it.