Hello,
Maybe you noticed a shift this week, with masks coming off outdoors and reopenings accelerating. The pandemic is in full retreat across the U.S. (faster where vaccinations are more widespread), with viral transmission chains dead-ending, hospitals gradually emptying of Covid patients, and a sense growing that we’re actually going to make it to the other side of this.
And yet the pandemic has left many of us with deep psychic bruises that limit the relief we can feel now even as the pressure is starting to ease off, as Ed Yong writes in this critical piece in The Atlantic:
People who endure long bouts of stress often collapse when they get a chance to be calm. Soldiers who return to the everyday world “describe it as boring, which gives them more time to think about what happened in the theater of war,” Steven Taylor, a psychiatrist at the University of British Columbia, told me. Similarly, he predicts that, in the quieter moments after COVID-19 infections wane, health-care workers may remember the patients they lost, or the morally challenging decisions they had to make about apportioning care. And that’s if they get quiet moments between dealing with surgeries that were rescheduled during surges and patients who are coming in sicker than usual because they deferred care. “You’re just frayed, but you have to do everything that didn’t get done,” Saskia Popescu, an infection preventionist at George Mason University, told me last summer. “You don’t get a mental break.”
Fortunately the reopening provides us with one of the best tools for finding relief from stress and trauma: talking things through with people from outside our closest-knit social ties. As I’ve started venturing out once again, I’ve thought a lot about sociologist Mario Small’s book Someone To Talk To, a brilliant, systematic study of who people choose to confide in about the matters most important to them, how they choose these confidants, and why. In the book he shows that, opposed to conventional wisdom, weak ties are just as important as strong ones when it comes to confiding in someone about our worries, troubles, and secrets.
It’s common to assume that people have what sociologists call a “core discussion network” made up of their closest friends and family, and that these are the people we confide in when we have worries on our mind. But, Small argues, there are three major reasons to be skeptical of this assumption.
First, our beliefs about what we do often differ from what we actually do — we may recall (to ourselves and to an inquiring researcher) all the times we leaned on a close friend for support, but forget the times we poured our heart out to a relative stranger at the gym or in a cafe.
Second, we often have real reasons to avoid close friends or family. Maybe we worry, since strong ties are by definition people who know most of our other close contacts, that they’ll gossip in a way that embarrasses us. Maybe confiding in one close friend or family member might complicate our other close relationships in the same network. Maybe our close friends and family just don’t understand the specific thing we’re going through or can’t be objective about it because it involves someone or something they’re also close to. Or—and this could be especially the case after having been locked in the same household for 14 months together—maybe we worry, rightly or not, that the people closest to us are tired of hearing about the same problem for the millionth time.
Finally, Small argues, we’re not always particularly rational and deliberate about who we talk to. Most of us can think back to a time a conversation with an acquaintance, coworker, or stranger took an unexpected turn into personal territory—often in these cases you find yourself saying “I can’t believe I’m telling you this, but…”—in ways that left us feeling unburdened and understood.
The pandemic shut off most of our avenues for finding or activating these casual confidants by damming up what Small calls the “stream of interactions” that used to characterize daily life. The lockdowns shuttered the third places where we used to encounter and socialize with people outside our core set of social ties, as I discussed in an earlier issue. Remote work and education are mostly sterile when it comes to the chance encounters and stray conversations that allow us to build trust with coworkers and fellow students or otherwise allow for us to confide in one another about non-work/school topics. And even though occasional video chats, texts, and phone calls with more far-flung friends and family have been sustaining for many of us, nothing quite matches the potential intimacy, mutual focus, and vulnerability of being in person (and unmasked) in the same physical space with someone.
But now things are loosening up again. You’re probably starting to notice the trickle of interactions with people outside your immediate household thickening up into a stream again, as you encounter more people face to face, for longer periods of time, and under less-stressful conditions as the virus recedes.
One thing all of these people you’re encountering will have in common with you is that they’ve lived through this miserable pandemic. People’s individual experiences of the lockdowns have varied, and not everyone feels we’re out of the woods yet. But we are, in the most general sense, all survivors. That collective experience is a foundation for one of the things Small argues is most important in choosing a confidant: cognitive empathy, an expectation that the other person will be able to understand what you’ve gone through, or what you’re going through now.
We tend to expect understanding and empathy from people who are like us in one way or another, according to Small. Maybe we think they’re the same kind of person we are (“attribute similarity”), or they’re facing, or have faced, a problem like our own (“situational similarity”), or they’re in the same social position we’re in (“structural similarity”).
Thanks to the pandemic we can expect at least some situational similarity from most of the people we meet in our daily lives, especially now in these early months as society emerges from lockdown. It’s a remarkable thing, to see people again.
You don’t have to talk about the pandemic in these encounters, and in fact it might be better not to at first. But signaling your focus on the interaction, listening and reflecting back to people, by offering little confessions yourself and reciprocating when the other person makes an opening, you may find yourself quickly back in the conversational groove, and happier for it.
The pandemic, and in particular the way certain political actors used it as a cultural weapon, has eroded people’s trust in one another. The first step to rebuilding that trust, to exhaling after all of this, is something we’ll have to do in practice, in the stream of interactions in which we find someone to talk to.
// Quick Link Roundup
Endemic Covid: Pandemics always end, one way or another, but they almost never end with the eradication of the pathogen at their heart. Almost certainly, the SARS-CoV-2 virus will be with humanity for the long haul, circulating and causing “small surges of milder illness” for decades to come, writes Helen Branswell.
— “How The Covid Pandemic Ends: Scientists Look to the Past to See the Future.” Helen Branswell, STAT.Novelty means severity: It’s hard to make it to adulthood without catching the flu, and in a post-2020 world, the same might well become true for SARS-CoV-2. In this fascinating guest post, evolutionary biologist Dylan H. Morris goes in depth about why novel infectious pathogens are so dangerous, and why it’s so crucial for our immune systems to get advanced warning about them through vaccines. He notes that age of first exposure to a pathogen is especially important. Children have robust immune responses and can generally handle novel infections well, he writes, but even viruses we think of as pretty mild in children can be devastating if they’re encountered for the first time as an adult. He continues: “See something for the first time as a kid, and you'll most likely be okay (but only most likely). See it for the first time as an adult, and it can be nasty. The older you get, the worse it becomes to be infected with a virus you've never seen.” The essay highlights importance of vaccinating your kids now, as they become eligible.
— “Novelty Means Severity: The Key To the Pandemic.” Dylan H. Morris, The Insight.Fixing the medical profession: The pandemic inflicted all kinds of traumas on health care workers, but the burnout so many of them feel didn’t come from nowhere — in many cases it just accentuated the pressures of a profession that has for decades been crushing doctors and nurses. The pandemic offers us an opportunity to radically reconstruct the medical profession in a way that treats healthcare workers more humanely.
— “Covid-19 Only Exacerbated a Longer Pattern of Health-Care Worker Stress.” Agnes Arnold-Forster and Samuel Schotland, The Washington Post.How to talk to vaccine-hesitant friends and family: I found this little interactive feature to be really helpful — a research-based choose your own adventure that guides you through a conversation by text message with someone who’s on the fence about getting their Covid shot. Give it a try!
— “Your Friend Doesn’t Want the Vaccine. What Do You Say?” Arnaud Gagneur and Karin Tamerius, The New York Times.
Drink sangria in the park: Finally, in honor of New York’s May 19th reopening, I leave you this Karen O + Danger Mouse cover of Lou Reed’s Central Park-inspired ode to a perfect NYC day.
That’s it for this week! Share the newsletter with someone you’ve just met, subscribe through the button below if you haven’t yet, and I’ll see you next week in your inbox.