Abundance Tribe Bi-Weekly Question : What is the effect of fear on our individual and collective psyche?

This is my response to @abundance.tribe's biweekly question

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For this question I'm going to limit myself to the most obviously relevant and immediate 'fear of the Covid-19 pandemic'.

Fear of getting covid-19 oneself is essentially a fear of suffering through illness and a fear of one's possible untimely, uncomfortable death, and also the fear of passing it onto others, and thus being implicated in someone else’s own suffering through illness or death.

Despite the irrationality of emotion in general, I don't think there’s anything especially irrational about fearing illness or death – the former is not only potentially unpleasant (by many accounts), it also temporarily cripple’s one’s capacity to take care of oneself and others, while death is just a great big pain in the ass for those we leave behind.

There is nothing necessarily bad about fearing being implicated in passing on covid-19 to other people, in fact I’m quite encouraged by people’s efforts to want to prevent the spread of the disease.

NB – I say encouraged, what I mean by this is that social distancing and wearing face masks are done out of a sense of social conscience, which I see as good, however what isn’t encouraging is how misplaced this might well be – in that such measures are based on people’s not having a full grasp of the facts about the actual death-risk of covid-19 - and that the consequences of such measures (the economic downturn) may well do more harm in the long run than would have been the case had we let covid-19 just work itself through without doing anything.

Whatever the actual risks of us suffering due to Covid-19, I'm certain our sense of fear of suffering is greater than the actual risk.

The effects of Fear on Our Collective psyche


I can’t help but feel we’ve been prepped for something like Covid-19 through many years of moral panics conditioning us to be afraid, so in a sense there's nothing new about this at all.

Probably the most dramatic (engineered) threat to our safety of the last 20 years, both at an individual and a cultural level, has been the threat of fundamentalist Islamic terrorism (rather than the much more widespread and systematic state- terrorism).

But there are many, many more things which pose a threat to our individual safety – Cancers, obesity risks, pedophiles and so on....

All of these risks and threats have progressively made us more cautious, more risk averse, less sure of ourselves, and of course more anxious.

You can see this in a clear generational affect – when I were a lad, most teenagers were full of confidence and broadly optimistic about the future, whereas so many of today’s teenagers have mental health disorders, a snowflake generation.

I think we've been tending towards less social interaction an more privatised social cliques for many many years now, it's as if Covid-19 is the perfect excuse for us to finally, finally retreat into our private life-worlds for good, and not have to deal with the dangerous world out there if we don't want to.

Another affect of increasing fear of so many things is that there's an increasing social expectation that we should be cautious - so it's not so much fear of bad things happening to us that leads us to 'doing less' it's fear of breaking social norms.

The effect of fear on my own individual psyche


I'm not personally worried about contracting covid-19, I'm sure I'd bounce back fairly quickly, so i'm going to say that this has had very little effect on me personally.

However, I do find the atmosphere out there in the brave new socially distanced social world a lot more unpleasant, what with all the masks and the walking on the other side of the street and the suspicious glances, not to mention the uncertainty.

This has affected me so much that I don't want to go out anymore, I certainly don't want to go back to regular work.

How to overcome this?


Good luck answering this question - I'm off to Portugal next month to hang out with some sane people and pretend this whole Covid-19 thing never happened!

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