I think of leaders as those people who do what needs to be done when the rest of us are too uninformed or too irrational to know better. The pressure is on them to predict the top of the coronavirus curve, to let people know when we can go back to the way things used to be, or at least to deliver an exit plan to help us get there. As well as expecting them to be adults we also want our leaders to be fortune tellers. We could just wait and see what happens, but that notion sounds preposterous? We need to know. Now!
We can’t help wanting to know the future. It’s the way we’re wired. It’s why we spend hours watching an analysis of a sporting event, before the event; our time would surely be better served pursuing more meaningful ventures. Wanting to know the future is why we get pissed off when the indicator boards on our train platforms are broken, because now we don’t know if the train will be along in 3 minutes or 10, even though knowing the answer isn’t going to change what we do in the intervening period.
Any gap in our understanding of how the world works, or how we expect it be, requires our brains to expend effort. Frustrated and restless they burn calories speculating on how the future might resolve itself until a path emerges that is both clear and acceptable. Our brains represent only 2% or our body’s mass but consume 20% of its energy. The good news is they acknowledge their greed and have evolved ways to economize on fuel.
We’ve all noticed how we get more competent the more we do something. It seems such an obvious things to state – practise makes perfect – but do you also notice how our brains switch off as tasks move from conscious effort into unconscious mastery? The brain creates shortcuts, and these can cause us to come unstuck when we experience rapid pattern disruption. Think of the regular requirement to change certain passwords (for ‘security reasons’) and how, without even realizing, your fingers promptly enter the old log in details at the very next time of asking. But what has all this to do with Covid-19?
My old patterns were disrupted, hard-dying habits keep tripping me up, and my routine was upended, and yet I was ok. Then I wasn’t. One night, suddenly and unexpectedly, I needed to know the future. I was so discombobulated I wasn’t even able to articulate my concerns let alone my thoughts. The following morning, as is so often the case after sleep’s succor, I was a little calmer and with more resolve. I chanced upon a BBC article which, although it didn’t furnish me with everything I wanted, did set out viable options. I instantly felt better.
A few hours later I augmented this foundational BBC information with an interview I saw conducted with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infection Diseases in the USA. He too failed to provide me with the full picture but he added clarity. Iteratively I cobbled together information from these and other disparate sources. An image of the future slowly began to coalesce in my mind’s eye. It would have been tempting to keep researching but the prospect of sifting through so much coronavirus information, misinformation and disinformation filled me with dread. There comes a point where the way forward is clear enough.
The image I ended up cleaving to feels about one part data to four parts faith in human nature. I am working on the basis that our leaders will place lives before dollars, if only because their careers and reputations depend on it. If our goal is to save lives then we need capacity in our hospitals, and to protect that capacity like our lives depend on it, because they do. We need to protect our care-givers; they are essential workers and not sacrificial ones. We will emerge slowly, constantly checking infection rates, throttling back on freedoms and social norms as needed to ensure we don’t over-extend either those who care for us, or the resources at their disposal.
I had been snuggling with my image for a couple of days when I heard the governor of California articulate the very notions I had come to realize for myself – if only I had waited to see what actually happened. He referred to our emergence from the pandemic as if we were controlling a dimmer switch. I added his validation from Sacramento to information in a slide presentation from Albany. The governor of New York displayed a matrix charting essential groups against infection risk, and he explained how those who blended ‘most essential’ with ‘lowest risk’ would be in the vanguard.
It felt good to be right. (This feeling is also in our wiring.) Of course I may just have easily been a victim of the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon (or ‘frequency illusion’) – how suddenly there are more red minis on the road as soon as you have bought a red mini yourself. Our leaders had probably been giving me this information for some time but my mind had been closed to their message.
All this was confirmed a few days later when I saw an old recording of Dr Fauci from the day of my anxiety. I had watched his interview at the time, and it explained our path out of this quite clearly. I had heard none of it. As a former colleague once remarked to me, “some people listen, they learn from others, and can anticipate the consequences of their actions; then there are people like you, who just need to piss on an electric fence.” I guess that’s just how I’m wired.
