Anxiety, Freedom and Meaning: How Coronavirus Covid-19 Reveals the World and Our Place in It
When the world becomes threatening and our place within it feels unsafe, anxiety erupts.
Beyond biology, what does the coronavirus covid-19 virus mean to us and what does it show us?
Everywhere and nowhere, covid-19 is the perfect, anxiety-inducing threat. Everyone we encounter, and practically anything we touch, is a potential source of infection. Some actions, like handwashing, not touching one’s face, etc. will confer some protection, but there is no certainty. With the potentially infectious trails that others carelessly leave behind them crisscrossing our path, human activity – the meaningful world of engagements and social encounters – becomes threatening.
The only guarantee is isolation, yet beyond the practical impossibility of this (the delivery ordered online is still prepared and delivered by human hands), what is isolation for a social creature such as ourselves? There is a reason why solitary confinement is employed as a punishment; for most of us, prolonged isolation is intolerable, ultimately conferring what we might consider death of the soul.
We are lucky in a sense that we have access to technologies that can circumvent the worst of this: a video call with a loved one is better than nothing. Yet it can never be as enriching as time spent in the physical presence of others. We exist with others not merely to share information, but to be-with them. The online or telephone encounter takes place not here, or even there, but elsewhere. Once it is over, I return to where I am, and in that place I am alone.
Everywhere and nowhere, the disease causes a shift in our understanding of the world and those we encounter within it. Our daily practices are revealed as threatening, which presents us with choices we do not usually have to make. Normally, we walk to the tube, take up our usual spot on the platform, and squeeze onto the train without thinking about any of it. Now, we have to wonder: is this safe? If not, what other options do I have to get there? If I don’t make the trip at all, what do I do instead? Suddenly, our freedom and the fact that we have a life to live shows up. We cannot merely ‘go along’ with others and our unthinking routine: we have to make a conscious choice, and the response is anxiety and stress. Having to make choices wakes us up to being free, responsible, and having a life to lead.
Each of us, whether we are aware of it or not, engages in life in a particularly meaningful way. Perhaps my children give my life meaning, or my job. This defines my ultimate way of being, the kind of thing that governs how I act in many facets of my life, which I usually engage in without having to think. Let’s say this way of being that gives my life ultimate meaning is ‘to be a good parent’. So, each day I get the kids ready for school, pack them and their bags of gym kits and lunches and books into the car, and drive the same old route to the school gates. I do this because it is what I believe a good parent does. Now, in the face of this unseen threat, I have to think: is it safe for them to go in at all? If they don’t, who will look after them? I stop to think about this because my way of being is ‘to be a good parent’.
What if ‘being a good parent’ now conflicts with ‘being a good employee’, as if the kids don’t go to school perhaps I can’t go to work. These differing ways that I use to define my identity that are usually in some sort of harmony are now in conflict, and anxiety erupts. Perhaps worse, what if the very way I define myself is no longer possible at all. For instance, what if my identity is ‘to be an athlete’ or ‘to be a restauranteur’ in a world where the athletics season is on hold or attending restaurants is banned? In being disrupted or no longer possible, the choices I have made about what matters to me and who I think I am show up more clearly. Anxiety follows, a sense that my place in the world and my identity is under threat.
Covid-19 shows us how we find ourselves in a world and make choices, conscious or otherwise, in navigating that world. ‘World’ here isn’t the Earth, but the meaningful context through which we come to understand ourselves and others. We are at home in a world we understand; we feel comfortable and safe. Further, we have chosen our way of being in this world, something we are not usually aware of, and feel anxious when this way of being is challenged. There is an assumption that the world we are thrown into at birth and set about discovering will persist through childhood, adolescence and maturity. The world will just go on, and we address ourselves to it accordingly. Yet what if we’re wrong? What if the world can change? Where does that leave us? What lengths will we go to in order to preserve this world of ours?
Let’s consider one aspect of the pandemic that reveals our collective world. There have been great steps taken by governments and central banks to protect the economy. This might seem an obvious step to take, as measures necessary to protect ourselves against covid-19 are likely to cause great economic disruption. Yet what does ‘economic’ really mean here? ‘The Economy’ is a summary term for ‘how we live now’. So much of how we define ourselves and how we live day to day is wrapped up in ‘The Economy’ – we are employees, consumers, investors, pensioners and so on. We are both the used and the users, and as such if The Economy fails our identity and way of life collapses.
This ‘Economic World’ underpins how we address one another and ourselves. Through exchange, offering and receiving, value is attributed, and the system decides what and who has value and what and who does not. In the Economic World, my value is primarily as a thing-of-use to be discarded if my offering is unwanted or if I cannot meet my economic obligations. The rush by governments to secure mortgages, rather obviously, arises because if I cannot meet the repayments due to loss of income my home will be repossessed. Commerce and competition stands as ethics.
My power and value are revealed as contingent and dependent on the Economic World, and my place within it, persisting. Being of no use in the Economic World means being unable. As unable, I lack power; without use, I lack meaning. Powerlessness and meaninglessness is existential death, a physical and spiritual nadir that is perhaps worse than the threat of biological end. How far will we go to defend ourselves against this?
For some a covid-19 infection will be fatal. For those not at severe risk themselves, the fear of infecting others is great. These issues are very serious and not to be underestimated. In addition, with the potential to strip away all meaningful human activity, Covid-19 points not only to our biological status but to our existence: being mortal and having a life to lead amidst a contingent, meaningful world.
In throwing into question the activities that make our daily life what it is – going to work, visiting restaurants and cinemas, travelling on trains and planes, sending our children to school – the underlying contingency of the life we lead is revealed. The perhaps unwelcome gift offered is our own freedom, to anxiously and ethically consider the question: how am I to live, both in this changed world and whichever one that follows it?
The foregoing is inspired by a variety of ideas in existential philosophy, most importantly those of Martin Heidegger and his work ‘Being & Time’. I encourage anyone who wonders about the meaning of human existence to have a read.
Written by FTCC Psychotherapist Alexander Morriss MBACP.