Processing a Pandemic
Watching the world suffer from a pandemic is like staring down the barrel of humility. You quickly realize the fragility of a human life, we are not invincible, no matter how hard we try to appear as such. We, as citizens of the universe, are being plagued by the same form of suffering, resulting in a variety of sacrifices. The Coronavirus has a remarkable ability to make the world feel small and all its people feel congruent. This virus shows no mercy, it doesn’t know your race, gender, or sex. This virus has no intention of affirming your identity or respecting your pronouns. This is something greater than politics and it threatens our ability to divide ourselves out of differing opinions. It only knows how to attack human lives. Perhaps, this virus is something that illustrates our undeniable similitude, in that no one is exempt from being a victim of the Coronavirus. I cannot help but crave normalcy and a swift societal recovery, as I imagine most people feel. This leads me to question what parts of ‘normal’ life are we yearning to get back to? This breed of forced leisure enables us to think deeply about our typical day-to-day activities and why we do or do not enjoy them. The unsettling stagnation is difficult for people like myself who thrive in fast-paced rigor. Before the pandemic, I had days where I would dread leaving the house because I had something banal to do. Now, I would rather wake up in one of those days than the days I am waking up in now. This makes me think about Aristotle’s ideas on pleasure and pain in Nicomachean Ethics. He articulates that if we were capable of constant activity, we would be capable of constant pleasure, and thus, diminishing pain and removing what makes pleasure at all desirable. Since we are experiencing the opposite end of constant activity, where most of our activities are limited or prohibited, what types of pleasures of our daily lives can we maintain and still derive pleasure from?
American culture has an obsession with fast-paced living. However, the hunger for fast-paced living varies in every American, not everyone is built for the level of work that goes into the encouraged American lifestyle. I struggle with extended leisure and am the type of person that would thrive in an intensive career path. This sudden end to the rigor I was enjoying has forced me to think about the mental toll that the coronavirus will take on people. We have been met with an invisible force that riddles people with fear, what will this do to people who attempt to reintegrate back into an in-person social life after the stay at home order has been lifted? I fear that the next pandemic will be an exacerbated version of the preexisting mental health crisis in America.
Being ordered to stay at home for over a month or longer could result in a large number of people struggling to reintegrate successfully back into the normalcy we all once knew. How is this going to influence the mental health professionals? America was experiencing a shortage of behavioral health providers prior to the pandemic, what will that shortage look like when we are ordered to continue back into our daily lives? This relentless beast of a virus has the ability to expose our fragility in ways we were not expecting. Realizing how fast things can change, on a global scale, will forever alter the way we see our day-to-day interactions.
