The Emotional Long-Haul of the Pandemic

I'm now officially two weeks past my second shot. I don't plan to completely give up on the social distancing, but I may relax it a bit to put more focus back on the usual emotional distancing. ;-)

Today we're making the two-hour trip to visit my brother and sister for the first time in over a year, something we normally do every month or two.

A few quick timely things to share today; a fairly short post.

I haven't felt stuck in this for the entire pandemic, as I've had some peaks and valleys in the mix, but this has become a pretty familiar state.

There's a Name for the Blah You're Feeling: It's Called Languishing

It wasn’t burnout — we still had energy. It wasn’t depression — we didn’t feel hopeless. We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. It turns out there’s a name for that: languishing.

Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021.

As scientists and physicians work to treat and cure the physical symptoms of long-haul Covid, many people are struggling with the emotional long-haul of the pandemic. It hit some of us unprepared as the intense fear and grief of last year faded. . . . 

Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health. It’s the void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being. You don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but you’re not the picture of mental health either. You’re not functioning at full capacity. Languishing dulls your motivation, disrupts your ability to focus, and triples the odds that you’ll cut back on work. It appears to be more common than major depression — and in some ways it may be a bigger risk factor for mental illness. . . . 

Part of the danger is that when you’re languishing, you might not notice the dulling of delight or the dwindling of drive. You don’t catch yourself slipping slowly into solitude; you’re indifferent to your indifference. When you can’t see your own suffering, you don’t seek help or even do much to help yourself.

Even if you’re not languishing, you probably know people who are. Understanding it better can help you help them. . . . 

So what can we do about it? A concept called “flow” may be an antidote to languishing. Flow is that elusive state of absorption in a meaningful challenge or a momentary bond, where your sense of time, place and self melts away. During the early days of the pandemic, the best predictor of well-being wasn’t optimism or mindfulness — it was flow. People who became more immersed in their projects managed to avoid languishing and maintained their prepandemic happiness.

The dulling of delight; the dwindling of drive; slipping slowly into solitude; indifferent to indifference. All entirely too familiar. Spring allergies are not helping at the moment.

A colleague shared this recently.

"I'm pretty sure I've already told you this, but you were always [my daughter]'s favorite storytime librarian. She still remembers going to your Toddler Storytime at [your] Library when she was 3, and she's almost 15 now."

Storytime would definitely help with the languishing. My last one was over a year ago, and I won't have another until 2022. (I opted out of being one of the people to offer them virtually, as I can't really perform for the camera and it's not the same without the kids there.) With our library services limited for safety, kids haven't really been part of the equation for us during the pandemic. I've missed those interactions.

This is interesting.

Vaccine Skepticism Was Viewed as a Knowledge Problem. It’s Actually About Gut Beliefs.

In recent years, epidemiologists have teamed up with social psychologists to look more deeply into the “why” behind vaccine hesitancy. . . . 

What they discovered was a clear set of psychological traits offering a new lens through which to understand skepticism . . . 

A team of scientists found that skeptics were much more likely than nonskeptics to have a highly developed sensitivity for liberty — the rights of individuals — and to have less deference to those in positions of power.

Skeptics were also twice as likely to care a lot about the “purity” of their bodies and their minds. They disapprove of things they consider disgusting, and the mind-set defies neat categorization: It could be religious — halal or kosher — or entirely secular, like people who care deeply about toxins in foods or in the environment.

Scientists have found similar patterns among skeptics in Australia and Israel, and in a broad sample of vaccine-hesitant people in 24 countries in 2018.

“At the root are these moral intuitions — these gut feelings — and they are very strong,” said Jeff Huntsinger, a social psychologist at Loyola University Chicago who studies emotion and decision-making and collaborated with Dr. Omer’s team. “It’s very hard to override them with facts and information. You can’t reason with them in that way.”

These qualities tend to predominate among conservatives but they are present among liberals too. They are also present among people with no politics at all.

I've said it in various ways before and I'm sure I'll say it again; this came across my feed this week and says it perfectly:

The single biggest thing I learned was from an indigenous elder of Cherokee descent, Stan Rushworth, who reminded me of the difference between a Western settler mindset of "I have rights" and an indigenous mindset of "I have obligations." Instead of thinking that I am born with rights, I choose to think that I have born with obligations to serve past, present, and future generations, and the planet herself.

So frustrating.

How Extremists Weaponize Irony To Spread Hate

Fuentes responded, "Why don't you smack her across the face?"

The rant continued for minutes.

"Why don't you give her a vicious and forceful backhanded slap with your knuckles right across her face — disrespectfully — and make it hurt?" Fuentes went on. At one point, he pantomimed punching a woman in the face.

He then added, "No, I'm kidding, of course. Just kidding. Just a joke."

Fuentes was following a playbook popular among domestic extremists: using irony and claims of "just joking" to spread their message, while deflecting criticism.

Researchers who track domestic extremism say the tactic, while not new, has helped several groups mask their danger, avoid consequences and draw younger people into their movements. . . . 

But Fuentes has said himself that he uses irony and "jokes" to communicate his message without consequences.

"Irony is so important for giving a lot of cover and plausible deniability for our views," Fuentes said in a 2020 video. He specifically cited Holocaust denial — or what he termed Holocaust "revision" — as a topic that is too fraught to discuss earnestly, even on the far right.

"When it comes to a lot of these issues, you need a little bit of maneuverability that irony gives you," Fuentes said. . . . 

Gavin McInnes, the [Proud Boys]'s founder, said in an email that the media, including NPR, "willfully ignores" jokes to paint the group in a more negative light. The Proud Boys are "funny dudes, not Nazis," McInnes wrote.

But Cassie Miller of the Southern Poverty Law Center said the group's use of "jokes" is strategic. "It distracts from what their actual political ideology is and from their violence," said Miller. "Because if you point it out, it's, like, 'well, they're so goofy.' " . . . 

"The problem is that all of this kind of trolling behavior, some of it is harmless and goofy," said Schroeder, "and others of it is designed to look harmless and goofy but will drive our kids' social media and YouTube algorithms toward alt-right and even more extremist content." . . . 

Historians have documented how the early iterations of the Ku Klux Klan were portrayed by group members and their allies as outlandish, rather than as a dangerous terrorist group. The KKK put on racist minstrel shows and created its own songs.

Descriptions of attacks by men in hoods, who had titles like "dragon," "ghoul," and "wizard," were often seen by white Americans as tall tales and ghost stories. Newspapers that supported the KKK played up those aspects of the group and mocked their opponents for supposedly taking the KKK too seriously, said Elaine Frantz, a historian at Kent State University.

Pro-KKK newspaper editors would often "talk jokingly about what the klan has done," said Frantz, "in order to be deniable."

The historical connection is great.

Glad for the evidence.

Study: Body-Worn Camera Research Shows Drop In Police Use Of Force

A new study finds that body-worn cameras reduce the use of force by police — and that the benefits for society and police departments outweigh the costs of the cameras.

Not surprised, of course.