We've collectively undergone 21 months of exposure therapy.
 | By Indrani Sen Culture Editor, Opinion |
When I first saw a news alert, in late November, about the Omicron variant of Covid-19, I held up my phone to show my husband across the table, where we were eating dinner with our two young children. He looked at it silently, we both rolled our eyes, and I put my phone away for the rest of the meal. |
It's not that we didn't think the threat was serious: It certainly seems to be. We've seen by now the large-scale tragedy that rapidly spreading variants of this virus can cause. There's plenty to be terrified about. |
But we just couldn't muster the kind of visceral, emotional fear that we felt in March 2020, or even earlier this year, when the Delta variant emerged. That's partly because we're fully vaccinated, thankfully, though many questions about Omicron, the risks it poses, and its ability to evade vaccines remain unanswered. Still, our main reaction was numbness and dread. |
It makes psychological sense that people aren't as scared as they used to be — or as scared as we perhaps should be — writes the organizational psychologist Adam Grant in a guest essay today. |
He shares a useful analogy: "We've all seen this horror movie before, and when you've watched the killer jump out brandishing a weapon 10 times — even when you've watched him kill — it just doesn't freak you out the same way." |
We're living through what Grant calls a "boring apocalypse," in which billions of people have basically gone through the kind of desensitization treatment that therapists often use to cure people of phobias. |
In exposure therapy, Grant writes, a person with arachnophobia, for example, would be exposed to spiders — either gradually or alarmingly all at once — to get them so used to the creepy crawlies that seeing one will no longer set off the brain's fight-or-flight response. With Covid-19, people have become so used to the state of high alert, and have been so bombarded with scary news, that it has similarly stopped sending them into a panic. |
This numbness, a kind of herd immunity to fear, makes it a lot harder for public health authorities to get people to comply with their warnings, or to make the behavior changes necessary to slow the spread of Omicron, Grant writes. And he offers some new ways to frame the messages: Instead of presenting each new threat as if it's an apocalyptic horror movie, he suggests, perhaps we should think of it as a mystery to unravel, or a science fiction flick. |
"One thing is clear," Grant writes. "Repeatedly blasting an emergency alert brings its own risks. The last thing needed in a pandemic is a country of people too bored to pay attention and take action." |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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