Prolonged Boredom Is Hugely Stressful

Earlier this week our five-year-old fell out of bed. It is a loft bed we built ourselves, almost six feet off of our hardwood floors. One of the kids falling out has been our worst fear, and it finally happened. We both woke in the middle of the night in a panic at hearing the crash, and rushed to check on him. My wife, who works in medicine, found him on his back, hurting and crying, and took over while I went for an ice pack. She determined he had landed on his back--not his head, thank God--and immobilized him. We decided he should go to the emergency room to make sure nothing vital was injured, and began deliberating who and how for getting him there.

We decided to not take any chances with his spine and called 911 for an ambulance. I did what I could to comfort him while he remained facedown on the floor with the ice on his back, moaning in pain, as we overheard her conversation with the dispatcher. She responded to a series of questions about our Covid status (negative) and she confirmed we would be wearing masks.

"Will they come into our house?" he asked me.

I told him they would and started assuring him they would provide great care for him.

"But I don't want you to catch Covid," he said, more worried about me than himself.

That's how much this pandemic has impacted emergency responses. EMTs are afraid to help people for fear of the virus and young children are afraid to accept their help for fear of infecting their parents. We couldn't even go to our preferred children's hospital because they aren't receiving ambulances at this time.

Thankfully, he's fine. Just bruised and sore. He was feeling well enough by the time the ER doctor examined him that she didn't even order any scans or tests, and we followed up with our general practitioner yesterday to be sure. Everything's okay.

A drawing of his. Strawberry smoothie is unhappy because it's being drunk.

This really resonates.

Late-Stage Pandemic Is Messing With Your Brain 

We have been doing this so long, we’re forgetting how to be normal.

I first became aware that I was losing my mind in late December. . . . 

Since then, I can’t stop noticing all the things I’m forgetting. . . . 

This is the fog of late pandemic, and it is brutal. . . . 

The pandemic is still too young to have yielded rigorous, peer-reviewed studies about its effects on cognitive function. But the brain scientists I spoke with told me they can extrapolate based on earlier work about trauma, boredom, stress, and inactivity, all of which do a host of very bad things to a mammal’s brain.

“We’re all walking around with some mild cognitive impairment,” said Mike Yassa, a neuroscientist at UC Irvine. “Based on everything we know about the brain, two of the things that are really good for it are physical activity and novelty. A thing that’s very bad for it is chronic and perpetual stress.” Living through a pandemic—even for those who are doing so in relative comfort—“is exposing people to microdoses of unpredictable stress all the time,” said Franklin, whose research has shown that stress changes the brain regions that control executive function, learning, and memory.

That stress doesn’t necessarily feel like a panic attack or a bender or a sleepless night, though of course it can. Sometimes it feels like nothing at all. “It’s like a heaviness, like you’re waking up to more of the same, and it’s never going to change,” George told me, when I asked what her pandemic anxiety felt like. “Like wading through something thicker than water. Maybe a tar pit.” She misses the sound of voices.

Prolonged boredom is, somewhat paradoxically, hugely stressful, Franklin said. Our brains hate it. “What’s very clear in the literature is that environmental enrichment—being outside of your home, bumping into people, commuting, all of these changes that we are collectively being deprived of—is very associated with synaptic plasticity,” the brain’s inherent ability to generate new connections and learn new things, she said.

Our brains hate prolonged boredom.

Of course, I realize it's only privilege that allows me to experience boredom and brain fog. Not everyone has been able to work from home and stay safely sheltered (or call ambulances), and their experience of the pandemic has been entirely different and much worse.

The Legacy of the Lost Year Will Be Devastating Inequality

Covid amplified every structural bias that exists.

Covid amplified inequality—by race as well as income, gender, occupation, and nationality. For many, the lost year threatens to become a lost decade akin to America’s doldrums after the deep recession of 2007-09 or Japan’s long slump after its asset bubble popped in 1991.

The cumulative future damage is likely to be even greater than the havoc Covid wrought in its first, acute year. Doctors coined the term “long hauler” to describe patients with lingering health problems; society itself will be a long hauler. And the least-advantaged will suffer the most in damaged health, derailed schooling, and wrecked careers. . . . 

In February 2020 unemployment rates were just 3% for Whites, 4.4% for Hispanics, and 6% for Blacks. A year later the respective rates were 5.6%, 8.5%, and 9.9%. The longer you’re out of work, the harder it is to rejoin the labor force. . . . 

Last year, in a paper for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, economists Eric Hanushek of Stanford and Ludger Woessmann of Germany’s IZA-Institute of Labor Economics calculated that students in grades 1-12 affected by Covid closures “might expect some 3% lower income over their entire lifetimes” on average—lower still for disadvantaged students who get less help at home. That, they estimated, could reduce their nations’ annual economic output by 1.5% for the rest of the century. . . . 

Compared with the death rate from Covid for non-Hispanic Whites, the rate is 1.9 times higher for Blacks; 2.3 times higher for Hispanics or Latinos; and 2.4 times higher for American Indians, according to data as of Feb. 18 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. . . . 

Laws and regulations don’t explicitly give Whites more protection against exposure to Covid, but the practical effect of government policy is often to widen the racial and ethnic divide, says an article in the forthcoming issue of the Emory Law Journal, “Systemic Racism, the Government’s Pandemic Response, and Racial Inequities in COVID-19,” . . . 

The World Bank estimates the pandemic will push about 60 million people in the world’s 74 poorest countries into extreme poverty—defined as living on $1.90 a day or less—by the end of 2021. . . . 

Taxpayers will bear the cost of caring for people whose health or employability have been damaged by the virus and the recession it caused.

Some of us are anticipating a return to some kind of normalcy sometime soon, but not everyone.

There are signs of possible positive change.

California Program Giving $500 No-Strings-Attached Stipends Pays Off, Study Finds

A high-profile universal basic income experiment in Stockton, Calif., which gave randomly selected residents $500 per month for two years with no strings attached, measurably improved participants' job prospects, financial stability and overall well-being, according to a newly released study of the program's first year. . . . 

The idea of universal basic income was featured prominently in the 2020 campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and has gained further traction during the coronavirus pandemic. Supporters say that for people living in poverty, a guaranteed income can alleviate stress and provide the financial security needed to find good jobs and avoid debt.

Critics worry it could eliminate the incentive to work, as well as endanger certain existing safety net programs.

Tubbs countered this criticism in a 2018 interview with NPR's All Things Considered, saying research and trials from the previous three decades did not indicate that $500 a month would discourage people from working. He argued that more financial stability would "make people work better and smarter and harder," as well as make it possible to spend time with their families and participate in their communities. In a subsequent interview this January, he told NPR that the money had decidedly not quashed people's work ethic. . . . 

Individuals spent most of the money on basic needs, including food, merchandise, utilities and auto costs, with less than 1% going toward alcohol and/or tobacco. . . . 

Similar initiatives are cropping up in cities across the United States. . . . 

Tubbs told NPR in January that he believes the time is right for the idea of universal basic income — of which Martin Luther King Jr. was an early proponent in the 1960s — to finally take hold.

"We are literally at ground zero with sort of the racial reckoning we're having but also with the economic impacts of COVID-19," he said. "When I think if we can get a guaranteed income, an income floor, at this time, we also have to have a conversation about the moral awakening our country needs because, again, as Dr. King said, poverty robs us of the richness of a society where everyone's given the opportunity to realize their full potential."

Things could be so different if we all agreed to take care of each other.

I love this so much. The fragmentary, episodic nature. The pictures. The sentiment expressed, of course, and also how it's expressed. Even the symbol used to break the fragments. ⊕ I wish I could share the entire thing. It's a wife reflecting on being a caregiver to her husband during his treatment for lung cancer and all the countless hours of waiting. A personal essay. Here's a snippet.

Notes on Building a Somewhat Bearable Space for Disbelief 

A treatment plan is formulated. A nurse navigator assigned.

A proton therapy simulation carried out to ensure precision targeting.

It is all math & chemistry & physics.

The husband’s body an approximation. A range of possibilities. A venue preparing to host a series of small-angle scattering events.

⊕

Days feel laden. Beset.

Her body taut-muscled. A knot having tied itself between the blades of her shoulders, make-believe wings prone to make-pretend flight.

Sometimes, a spark will flicker there. Sometimes, a raging fire. Either way, she knows the burn. The liability of matchstick bones.

Inflammation: the language of forewarning.

⊕

Breathing is something she thinks about more.

After.

Between pandemic & diagnosis, it seems unavoidable, to consider such things once so seemingly ordinary, unremarkable. The body’s need for respiration. Air exchange.

Especially in the hospital, its interior broken down into smaller & smaller spaces. Clearly marked now with instructions, COVID configurations of six-feet-apart & four-people-only. Everything measured. Calculated. Please stand here. Please do not sit here.

She sits, waiting, a mask covering her mouth & nose.

Inhale for four seconds.

            one Mississippi…

                                                two Mississippi…

                                                                                    three Mississippi…

                                   four Mississippi…

Hold for five.

            one Mississippi…

                                                two Mississippi…

                                                                                    three Mississippi…

                                    four Mississippi…

                                                                        five Mississippi…

Exhale, until there is no breath left in the lungs.

⊕

It is impossible to hold one’s breath to the point of completely stopping the rhythmic process of inhaling & exhaling, of taking in oxygen & discarding carbon dioxide.

I learn: This is an act that does not lie within the range of human volition.

I learn: Three hundred cubic feet of air are breathed in & out of a person’s lungs every day. Effortless. Unchanging.

She did some wonderful photography reworking images of artwork in the treatment facility, included in the piece.

Here's a poem about being a caregiver, love, and toxic masculinity. A snippet.

I Am Tired of the Movie About Sentimentalized Male Failure

I’ve known men like that man in the movie—men who hide

in their bourbon, men who hide in their fiction, men who hide

in being men who can’t love, and all of it is the same hiding.

Fear disguised as grappling disguised as American manhood.

 . . . 

If you want interesting,

forget the drugs, the blood, the road. Forget your own lack,

every idea about how you can’t love or what you deserve.

If you want a reckoning, love someone for a long time.

The only kind of reckoning I trust ends in more love.

Here's one I'll share in its entirety because it is so brief. Not about the pandemic, just life in general.

Side Effects 

. . . may include dizziness, flatulence, nausea,

brief notions of immortality,

headache, joint pain, ear ringing and lead to

a sense of euphoria.

Your body may experience

shortness of breath, sudden comprehension of Neumann’s Theory of Gaming,

night blindness, an irrational desire

for hot beverages, jimmy leg,

and diminished capacity to operate heavy equipment.

Avoid extreme gestures -

Pruning trees in public space,

inviting your cousin to view Mars through a telescope,

selling household items on e-bay,

and

whistling that certain tune at midnight -

while hosting a body

under the influence.

Playful and fun. Under the influence of what, I wonder?