The new normal is worse than you think. So why does Ryan Holiday say you should not be afraid?
"What did you think living through history was going to be like?"
Welcome to The Experiment, where we’ve got something to apologize for. But first, Frank Spring has another chapter in his Pinkerton caper, Regulator. It’s good as hell, people. Start here if you’re just now diving in; there’s a link at the bottom to the next chapter.
As always, we recommend things to do (mail order cookies from people who used to be in prison), read (this study on the pandemic’s psychological effects on U.S. society), watch (Muscle Shoals on Amazon Prime) and listen to (the new season of Song Confessional).
But first, I need to apologize for something I did two years ago today.
Two years ago this week, the first American died of a new virus that started in Wuhan, China. A few hundred Chinese people had already died. Americans were evacuated as initial hopes that the virus could be contained deflated when infections rose tenfold. This was not the biggest news of the week. Roger Stone receiving a light sentence for lying to Congress and Deval Patrick ending his presidential campaign were thought more important stories, but this virus spreading in China rustled and scratched in the crawlspace in the attic.
Reassurances from politicians and media that this virus was not a worry achieved the opposite of the intended effect. After three years of being gaslit by those waiting for Donald Trump to turn the corner and finally become a regular president, we had been conditioned to bring an umbrella when the news said it would be a sunny day.
Still, I perceived all this through my political brain: If Trump says X, then the truth is negative-X. I never thought this through. I stopped at “Trump is obviously wrong,” mistakenly substituting a geometric proof for actual meaning. This was just a thing to think, an intellectual exercise in truth rather than what it was in reality: a warning.
And so dumb me posted this on Facebook:
This pandemic has been going on for so long it’s popping up in my Facebook memories from two years ago, which is why this morning I was reminded of my embarrassing attempt to beat back fear with pixels and a Substack. It’s safe to say, as we enter year three of the pandemic, the fears enjoyed a steady diet of death and isolation. Our fears grew fat as we heard the sirens of ambulances running through empty streets by day and we play-acted bravery every night by banging on pots. Fear did not go hungry.
As my friend, best-selling author, and actual, no-kidding philosopher Ryan Holiday said on his podcast, “What did you think living through history was going to be like?”
By any measure, COVID-19 has taken a fearsome physical toll on us. We’re losing more than 2,000 people in the United States a day from the coronavirus and quickly approaching 1 million dead. One virologist estimated that about 40% of the U.S. population was infected by Omicron, albeit the majority asymptomatic, which yielded this headline in The Wall Street Journal: “The World Is Likely Sicker Than It Has Been in 100 Years.”
But the real long tail of COVID-19 might emotional. Last week I mentioned James Pennebaker’s analysis of Beatles lyrics. This week I’m bringing him back with a study he co-authored with Ashwini Ashokkumar called “Social media conversations reveal large psychological shifts caused by COVID-19’s onset across U.S. cities.” They measured societal-level changes in Reddit conversations, and long story short, we freaked out and stayed freaked the heck out for all of 2020 in a way that may have altered our perception of reality.
…a comparison of people’s language during the pandemic with the previous decade revealed that the mental health impacts of COVID-19 may have been greater than anything the United States has seen in recent times. …
The primary difference is that in previous single-event upheavals, adaptation referred to returning to baseline levels of behavior. The COVID-19 crisis, and presumably other long-term upheavals, simply settle on a new baseline during the normalization phase. In this period, people’s altered psychological states persisted but stabilized, reflecting a new normal.
We have been knocked off our emotional axises by this pandemic. Our internal orbits are elongated. The days creep as the months lap us. Our reaction to external stimuli seems outsized in contrast to the Before Times, but we’re either farther from the sun and more emotionally distant than humans have ever been or screaming too close to the sun.
This period of sustained anxiety and, for many, isolation, is the largest and most sudden change in human behavior since language started taking up unused space in our frontal, temporal and parietal lobes, and it’s really messing with us. Brains are shrinking. There’s a spike, mostly among women, in Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or broken-heart syndrome. People are afraid of catching the virus in a hospital and skipping cancer treatments, so cancer deaths are up. Not all of us are built for the rapid evolution required of the moment.
But most of us are.
It turns out, according to Ryan, I was right about feeding the fears. I posted that during what Pennebaker called the “warning phase” of the pandemic. And we were right to be scared. (See also: almost a million dead) But if getting scared is an unavoidable emotional reaction, fear is a choice.
“Be scared, you can’t help that,” wrote William Faulkner. “But don’t be afraid.”
In his latest book, Courage is Calling, Ryan asks, “Do you know what the most repeated phrase in the Bible is?”
“Be not afraid.”
The Bible doesn’t say there’s nothing to worry about. Jesus doesn’t tell you that it’s really no worse than the flu or try to pin the blame on China. Just, be not afraid. For that matter, Ryan points out, The Odyssey has more than a dozen similar examples: “Be brave,” “Don’t be scared,” “Have courage.”
Last November, The New York Times Magazine asked this question on its cover: “Could Covid Lead to Progress?” This puzzled me, because inside the pages was evidence that it already had. This mass behavioral shift taught us pandemic mode. We know what to do when there’s a new variant. We are at a societal level more resilient by orders of magnitude, though each of us bears the emotional stretch marks of that hard-won wisdom.
Before COVID-19, mRNA vaccines “were a promising, if unproven, line of inquiry for years,” wrote Steven Johnson in the Times. Now companies are using mRNA technology to develop vaccines for malaria and H.I.V.
And I don’t think we give COVID-19 nearly enough credit for ending the “reign of the widely loathed open-office scheme,” as Rob Walker put it in that same issue. Despite the vaccines, for the first time since the pandemic began most knowledge workers in U.S., Europe, Australia and Japan are in hybrid office situations, sometimes working from home, sometimes in the office, sometimes perhaps from a third location such as a WeWork, a Starbucks, or a—I kid you not—a U.F.O. in Joshua Tree. This mass shift in human behavioral patterns has prompted the New York Post to ask, “Are work romances still taboo if you’re working remotely?”
I’m going to leave you with what I think might be the best effect of COVID-19 on what it means to act like a human. My sons were born into the longest war in our history and have come of age in the pandemic. They have no interest in going back to normal, and unlike me, they won’t rationalize warning signs about the next thing, because there’s always going to be another thing because people my age and older are still thinking there’s a peaceful status quo to return to. We’re not fixing, let alone preventing, the apocalypses that are coming my sons’ way.
But my sons won’t be the ones disregarding reports of a zombie apocalypse. And with any luck, their generation will set things to rights so that some day my grandchildren can ask me what it was like when people got sick, went to war, and were otherwise at the mercy of their own repeated mistakes. I figure I have at least a decade to come up with a good cover story. Wish me luck.
And be not afraid. We got this.
Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. He works at the Austin Independent School District as Chief of Communications and Community Engagement, though he would want to point out that these are his personal opinions and his alone, but you already knew that. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.
Más
How we’re getting through this
Making gravlax
Are we, though?
Buying more air freshener
Cheering good #MeToo news
Ordering cookies from ex-cons
Making rosemary-paprika chicken
Failing to distinguish paid content
Welcoming our pizza robot overlords
Signing books at The Painted Porch in Bastrop
What I’m reading
Ashwini Ashokkumar and James W. Pennebaker: “Social media conversations reveal large psychological shifts caused by COVID-19’s onset across U.S. cities” - We are deeply and historically freaked out, people.
…a comparison of people’s language during the pandemic with the previous decade revealed that the mental health impacts of COVID-19 may have been greater than anything the United States has seen in recent times.
Monica Hesse: “Joe Rogan is too powerful to keep acting as if he’s just a regular guy chopping it up” - I don’t have an opinion about Joe Rogan worth sharing, but she does.
Rogan is neither prepared like a journalist nor learned like an expert. Listeners who defend Rogan by pointing out that he’s not a journalist or an expert — that he’s a merely an everyman whose audience is composed of everymen — are highlighting how much of a risk it is for Rogan to share his enormous platform with guests who are uninformed at best or malevolent at worst. …
I don’t think Rogan is doing this in bad faith. I think it’s simpler than that: He’s just not up to the task he has created for himself. He’s not nimble enough or forethinking enough to engage in intellectual battle with guests who are not there to seek truth but to recruit converts. He does not seem fully aware that treating all guests exactly the same doesn’t make you fair-minded, it makes you a patsy.
Margaret Sullivan: “The existential dread of journalists watching the Sarah Palin trial” - I still remember mistakes I made in a story for the Los Angeles Times in 1993.
When it comes to credibility, speed kills.
What I’m watching
The effect Muscle Shoals, a tiny area in Alabama, has had on popular music is outsized. Muscle Shoals, a 2013 documentary on Amazon Prime, is revelatory, though Mick Jagger comes across as more than a little cringe.
Reacher, the Amazon adaptation of the Lee Child novel Killing Floor, is watchable as heck without causing undo strain on your intellect.
What I’m listening to
Lucy Dacus’ “Kissing Lessons” is so infectious it probably could give you mono.
My friend W.L. turned me onto the Austin-based Sun June, who put out a dreamy album last year called Somewhere. Put it on in the background, and you’ll instantly feel 37% cooler.
And speaking of W.L., he and his compadre Z.C. are back with a new season of Song Confessional.
You probably need to listen to the first 12 minutes of this podcast by Seth Godwin.
Thanks to Noom, I lost 40 pounds over 2020-21 and have kept it off since then. Click on the blue box to get 20% off. Seriously, this works. No, this isn’t an ad. Yes, I really lost all that weight with Noom.
We set up a merch table in the back where you can get T-shirts, coffee mugs, and even tote bags now. Show the world that you’re part of The Experiment.
We’ve also got a tip jar, and I promise to waste every cent you give me on having fun, because writing this newsletter for you is some
Buy the book Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick banned from the Bullock Texas History Museum: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself is out from Penguin Random House. Out in paperback this June!