The Walls Of Your Brain

Thoughts on the disquietude of seeing your own neural utility room

Covid is still spreading. People are still dying. Vulnerable people are still in an indeterminate situation. In that sense the pandemic continues. But enough people have made their peace with this that the pandemic as a social and even economic phenomenon is over.

But not completely—a lot of us work remotely some or all of the time, and the social element of…everything isn’t quite where it was. It feels to me like everyone lost a few years’ worth of social skills, niceties, conversation ability. It feels like we did because we did.

I’ve been thinking about how much time I spend alone. (Being on social media doesn’t count as social; it should be called anti-social media. Whoever first came up with “Scrolling Alone” deserves a medal.) It’s a strange thing to be immersed in ideas and conversations in this disembodied manner, and eventually realizing that you’re not sure what you believe.

They say professional wrestlers eventually lost the ability to discern storyline from real life; I feel something like that once in awhile emerging somewhere in my brain. It’s like a feeling of floating, or disorientation, and I find that getting out into the world, even alone in a car, or going to an event or conference or something, metaphorically—maybe, almost, in some sense literally—pulls me back to earth.

What the pandemic crystalized for me is that it’s only in a social context that we can completely understand who we are individually. You don’t know who you are alone. This is our wiring. Part of the sheer weirdness of the last four years—and it is four years, even a little longer—is that we really stress-tested our brains. I feel like I’ve actually glimpsed my own neural utility room; scraping the bedrock, feeling the invisible, background evolutionary inheritance straining.

Somewhere along the way some pastor somewhere coined the term “Covidtide”—as though the pandemic were a season in the traditional church calendar. That implies, I think, that Covid was like Lent—not a punishment, not a culture war issue, but a test, an adversity that we could make the most of if we chose to. A forced mental fast, like Christ’s 40 days in the desert, from which we could return humbled, simplified, with our consumerism shrunken and our solidarity enlarged.

Well, we failed.