Eight days. Eight days my neighbour was blasting away at his decking with his pressure washer. An hour a day stretched over a two hour slot, on average. Now he’s started sanding it with a small power sander. Three days and counting. If I recall, he was quite successful in finance before early retirement. Tempted to put ‘finance’ in ” “.
I don’t have cabin fever, quite the opposite. But many do. We’re still in “lockdown” at the time of this entry. Rumour is the pubs will “open” (this time in quotation marks because I fear open will not be open in the sense that we knew it BL – that’s Before Lockdown. Ridiculous protocol to abide by, no doubt. Awkward balancing acts of mass neurosis and business priorities. Priorities being – to actively trade as much as possible, in case the rules of language and customs of sanity have been totally mutilated by the time someone reads this.
I am seeking for a psychological term to describe what I fear many people are going through within this Pandemic Panic Public Relations Hysteria Stunt. It’s not agoraphobia – though a part of it is uncertainty about the safety of leaving the house. It’s not hypochondria; not germophobia – though again; it bears all the hallmarks. It’s cognitive dissonance actually, and a sort of acute ambivalence. A word not usually associated with acute conditions; it remains thus.
People. We. We all know it’s a big PR stunt; a mass delusion. A folie a tout as opposed to deux. Yet the equation is in too perfect an equilibrium for so many people; between the benefits of leaving the house, seeing pals, taking jobs, work, sunshine, retail therapy and so on… and the capricious nature of the costs and risks of doing so. Phantom-like notions drift into people’s minds through the Media and voices of Government. That there is a killer virus out there; that there are riots on the streets (there are) – Black Lives Matter are busy barbequing major American cities and vandalising European ones. And the veiled threat that one might be judged be either neighbour or society or Police for leaving the house without a sufficiently valid reason.
So many people just stay inside. Nothing gained, nothing lost. But in 2020, in urban areas, it’s all but impossible to shut the outside out completely. We all have whatsapp; the noise of traffic outside our windows and commercial aircraft flights landing and taking off, and of course the incursion of television and radio media; serve as constant reminders that… we’re alone and surrounded at the same time.
In military terms I think the word is “ambushed”.
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