The pandemic is changing who we are
THE pandemic has revealed a lot, hasn’t it? From inequality in society, to the fragility of the systems that bind the world together, to the nature of human beings. For most of us who have not been profoundly personally affected yet by Covid-19, the biggest impact could be on our habits. Not just the change in them, but also in the realisation that as people, we are largely made up of habits.
We are, in many ways, just a slightly random collection of the things we do. We may have made choices at some point about taking on habits, and we may even have worked hard to build habits, but eventually they just become the default position in our lives. While we make lots of small decisions every day, I believe we are not largely ruled by our conscious minds. It is the tide of our unconscious that defines our days and nights, the powerful, unthinking pull of habits.
As life during pandemic became more routine and ritualised, and as we built new scaffolding to hold us up and keep us sane, we simultaneously leaned more on some of our habits, saw the pointlessness of other habits, and developed new ones. We viewed all of these changes as temporary measures, a form of emergency legislation we enacted without the usual due process — different rules for different times. We tacitly agreed with ourselves that we would resume our previous normal “when all this is over”.
But of course, it’s going on, and is predicted to go on, much longer than we thought, which means these new habits we have developed have had time to take hold, and the old ones we have jettisoned could be gone for good.
Lots of the things we did, just because that’s what we do, things we might have continued doing for the rest of our lives, have been disrupted, and may now be consigned to the dustbin of history. And lots of the new temporary measures we took on may become the fundamentals of a new us.
The new habits I have taken on are a mix of good ones and bad ones. For example, like many people, I hadn’t run much since I was in school. Four months ago, if you had asked me, I would have said I couldn’t run to catch a bus. In my previous life, on the odd occasion that I did have to run, I would become alarmed at how my ankles and knees reacted. I was convinced I could not run, and that I should not run. I would never have known without this pandemic that in fact I can run, and that I can keep running for half an hour if I don’t stop. That’s the key to it. Don’t stop. You feel like stopping, but just keep going, one foot in front of the other.
I hate it. I hate running. Every single time I do it I don’t want to do it. When I wake up and remember that I don’t have to run today, because I ran yesterday and I will run tomorrow, I am elated. I really hate it.
But running has had the time, in the course of this pandemic, to bed in as a habit with me. So even though my conscious mind hates it, the power of habit swings in and propels me along. I still don’t think of myself as someone who can run. But actually, somehow, I am.
If I hate running, I love bread.
There is nothing like bread, is there? I think no other food feels as good as bread. Crisps and biscuits are up there, but bread rules. Recently, I had largely trained myself out of eating much bread in my day-to-day life. I didn’t have to use willpower all the time not to eat bread. The subconscious power of habit did it for me. Eating bread was not something I did… Well, apart from maybe weekends and hangovers and holidays and nights out and other special occasions.
Right now I eat bread pretty much every day. I eat it for my lunch, sometimes for my dinner as well, and often as a snack in between meals. I also eat a lot of butter with it. To try not to eat bread now would be very hard for me. It would involve my puny conscious mind and my measly willpower trying to swim against the tide of the almighty unconscious. I know I can cut it out — I do it once or twice a year for a while — but I know it would take weeks of fighting the habit, until I again created the new habit of not eating bread. And I will do that some day Lord, but not today.
I was always a handwasher; indeed I was always a washer in general. But now I wash them more than ever. I barely think about it now. It is ingrained in me. I suspect I will wash my hands excessively for the rest of my life now. I come in the door home, or I get up from watching TV, or just before contact with food, and I automatically go wash my hands. I sing “Wash the Covid off your hands” to the tune of London Bridge is Falling Down, which is one of many little ditties I came up with to try and ritualise handwashing for the girls. I think the handwashing is largely bet into them now. I am hoping this means none of us will ever get a cold or a flu again.
I think we should all think a bit more actively about the habits we are dropping and the habits we are developing right now, because our habits are a huge part of who we are. I stress, I am not a medical professional. But have a think about it there and we might come back to it next week.
BTW, if you’re wondering what the last line of the song is, try “CoVIDNineteen” or Don’t GET Covid”.