The last couple of years have been…hard.
Really hard.
I don’t think I’m alone in saying that. Life since 2020 has been objectively shitty for pretty much every single person I know.
Liberal. Conservative. Black. White. Man. Woman.
Life has been shitty in the cities. It’s been shitty in the suburbs. It’s been shitty in the small towns. It’s been shitty for every person who lost their job during one of the many bouts of insanity and incompetence, and it’s been shitty for every person who didn’t. It’s been shitty for people who had money, and even shittier for those who lacked it.
Across the board, life has just sucked.
…
I’m not normally that frank about things, but yeah.
There’s no way to sugarcoat it.
Not without being disingenuous.
To try to put it in nicer terms; to make it sound more pleasant and agreeable would be to make it everything the last couple of years have not been.
The last couple of years, for the vast majority of people, have not been “trying times”. They have not been “learning and growth experiences”.
They’ve been a complete and utter nightmare.
To try to cloak things in euphemism would be like describing the Titanic as a “Once in a lifetime boating and swimming experience”.
I mean, I guess technically it was, but just give me a pass to the local pool and a canoe. I’ll settle for the less notable aquatic adventure.
The world has felt darker. Sharper. Angrier. Sadder.
At the core of it all, sadder. Sadder and more afraid.
Nobody has been spared.
If a person wasn’t terrified of Covid, there were Covid restrictions to be terrified of. If neither of those were at the forefront of thought, there were the layoffs, and then the staffing shortages, and the inflation, and the supply chain problems. There were the countless canceled flights. The countless ruined vacations. The constant uncertainty of life’s daily routines: Of no longer knowing whether Dunkin Donuts would be open at 2 P.M., or whether Walmart would have food on the shelves. Of not knowing whether a person’s city would be shut down or put under a mask order on a random Tuesday, or whether the basic laws a person has lived under his or her entire life would change overnight.
There were the missed and canceled doctors’ appointments. The illnesses and injuries compounded by that; the things that would have been a lot better if they would have been caught a year earlier, back when the original appointment would have been scheduled.
There’s still a backlog. Trying to get a doctors’ appointment for something that’s not on fire is nearly impossible; trying to get an active fire dealt with is inevitably a three month wait.
Same for the legal system.
Like healthcare, it had hardly been a well-oiled machine to begin with. Now? Judge Judy is looking like the just and dignified option for the fortunate few.
And then, of course, there has been the endless interpersonal strife.
Between news outlets, social media, isolation, and all of the factors mentioned above, plus the fact that people have a hard time getting along under the best of circumstances, the last couple of years have been…interesting.
The world has never been as civil as certain nostalgics make it out to be, but for a while there, trips to Target were feeling pretty Mad Max-esque.
And alas, all of this was superimposed over the difficulty and pain that is inherent to life.
The resentments and frustrations everyone already had? The leaky roofs and aging furnaces that were already on their last leg, and had already been pushed back a year for lack of money? The 90 year old grandparents who probably didn’t have another decade left, anyway?
None of that stuff went away. Those problems were all still there. If it was a problem in 2019, it didn’t just magically go away in March of 2020.
All of this to say, it’s been a lot.
On everybody.
…
Something that doesn’t come up a lot is that I have a decent background in neuroscience.
I mean, I’m not an expert or anything, but in my undergrad days as a psychology major, we weren’t learning about Freud. We weren’t learning about the DSM. We were learning about the brain.
Many, many sleepless nights were spent pouring over flashcards, trying to memorize all of the neurotransmitters and the functions of the lateral occipito-temporal cortex and parietal lobe. I understand the basic role of the amygdala, and neuroplasticity, and how connections are formed in the brain. And right now, I feel like I have a 70 lane superhighway of anger and sadness running through my head.
It makes sense that I would. It makes sense that anybody would.
Anger, sadness, and fear are salient emotions. Going back to the roadway analogy, those are all a part of the street grid. And, they’re usually a pretty big part of the street grid—one or two people might be so blissful and well-adjusted Sadness Street is just a residential cul-de-sac, but on my best days, Sadness Street rivals I-40. The rumble can always be heard in the background, even when I don’t perceive it. The signs directing me toward it are never far away. I might go a week or two without getting on it, but its presence always looms just over the horizon.
That’s how it is on the best days.
For two years now, though, the traffic patterns have really favored that one thoroughfare.
The cars that would normally be distributed along three interstates, six or seven major boulevards, and an endless series of avenues and side streets have instead all been packing Sadness Street.
And so, Sadness Street has grown. Neuroplasticity has done its job. The brain’s department of transportation officially made Sadness Street an interstate unto itself (henceforth to be known as I-Sad), and lanes have been added as needed to help keep traffic flowing smoothly. Seventy lanes into the expansion, traffic is really moving.
Unfortunately, that also means that I-Sad is a three-mile wide behemoth bisecting the normal traffic grid. Every thought gets sent down I-Sad, including things that would have just been a two minute walk before the I-Sad expansion.
It’s…not a great system. Especially since I-Sad is a pretty miserable drive to begin with.
And, again, I don’t think I’m alone in any of that.
For the last couple of years, life hasn’t been great. Every story in the news has said to be afraid—to be very, very afraid. Politicians and pundits from both sides have really worked overtime to remind everyone that approximately 50% of their friends, family members, and neighbors are a direct threat to both democracy and the continuation of life on this planet. Stock portfolios have taken a beating. It costs roughly $300 to make a casserole, and that’s only if a person can find all of the ingredients in the first place.
And so, it makes sense that I-Sad has seen some serious traffic. It makes sense that the brain’s department of transportation has added lane after lane, trying to keep the traffic moving. Trying to get all of the thoughts where they needed to go.
But now? Now the limits of the I-Sad Superhighway are becoming clear.
It turns out there’s a reason I-40 doesn’t have 70 lanes.
The eight lanes don’t always feel like enough during rush hour, but adding 62 more lanes would create more problems than it would solve. It would decimate the existing street grid. It would wipe out parks and neighborhoods and businesses. It would turn lots of trips that are currently a two-minute drive into circuitous journeys requiring multiple interstate exchanges and miles of unfamiliar side streets and service roads.
And that’s also what happens in the brain when Sadness Street gets torn down to make I-Sad, and I-Sad gets turned into a 70 lane superhighway. Everything gets sent down the I-Sad.
Spill some coffee? Misplace the scissors? Get cut off in traffic? Find out that the catty girl from sixth grade spent the week vacationing in Aruba? Have to reset an internet password? It’s all going down the I-Sad (or the I-Pissed, as the superhighway is also known). All of those minor annoyances that used to be mentally processed in under a minute are now a thing.
It’s the mental equivalent of having to drive an hour to get to the nearest gas station.
And much like having to drive an hour to get to the gas station, that’s…probably not a person’s only task for the day. There are still other things to do and other responsibilities that have to be met besides just working through the trauma of a misplaced sock.
When it takes an hour just to get to the gas station, that makes the whole day longer. There’s less time for other stuff. Less time to do things more meaningful than pumping gas.
And therein lies one of the additional casualties of the I-Sad expansion. Life becomes even drearier yet as all of the two hour round trips to the gas station cut into the time and energy that would have normally been spent on something better. Something more worthwhile.
I’m sharing all of this not because I think I’m unique, or because I want people to feel sorry for me, or even because I have some brilliant fix that I want to share with the world.
Quite the opposite.
I’m sharing this because I don’t think my experience is unique at all. I think a lot of people are going through this to varying degrees. Most people, even.
And I think it helps to have words for it. I think it helps to have an explanation, beyond simply “I’m tired and the world is shit, and I don’t feel as good at things as I used to be”.
Because I’m not a scientist, but in this case, neuroscience does hold a lot of the answers.
The environment shapes the brain, but the brain also shapes the environment. And just as how the last few years have negatively shaped the brain, neuroplasticity also holds a way forward. The same processes that have allowed Sadness Street to balloon into a 70 lane behemoth can also close lanes and jackhammer away at the asphalt until it goes back to being a normal thoroughfare. The parks and side streets can be rebuilt. The city of the mind can slowly be transformed back into something vibrant. Something teeming with life. It might not look exactly the same as it did before—a three-mile wide version of I-40 would take out some buildings that can’t really be replaced—but that doesn’t mean incredible new things can’t be built.
The whole thing is hard. It’s shitty. Nothing about dismantling an entire interstate, rerouting the millions of cars that travel it every day, and then building back a functional grid is easy. It takes an incredible amount of time and money, and those are both finite resources. Resources that few people had enough of to begin with, myself included.
But, it can be done.
All that can be built can be dismantled. All that is dismantled can be built anew. Such is the wonder of both the built world and the brain.
Such is the wonder of life.
Wonderful bit of writing. Certainly resonates with me. I-Sad (aka I-Pissed) is a great image. And as you say, every resource we had (and many we don't have) has been thrown into the project of making it 70 lanes wide. It reminds me of the economic argument about war. War is "great", because you can make money making loads of things (shells, bombs, planes) which _then get destroyed_ - so more are needed.
It feels as if exactly the same has been going on for 3 years. Not just money spent on filling landfill with those endless stupid little plastic, one-use tests, but money, time and human labour, from the top of the hierarchy to the bottom, devoted to _making life miserable for people_, to destroying the other roads of life (and the parks, and the neighbourhoods, as you say).
I love the hope at the end. But it needs more than hope: it needs money, thought, attention. Hope should demanding all of those!