“We really did have everything, didn’t we?” — Dr. Randall Mindy (Don’t Look Up)
Increasingly, in conversations with friends and associates, as well as from reports by social scientists, I am coming to believe that the Covid pandemic has had a hidden but devastating impact on our collective mental health.
Whether we consider ourselves introverts or extroverts, humans are inherently social creatures. We may not want to admit it, but we need regular contact with each other. Without it, our hopes shrivel and our dreams die.
But during the pandemic too many of us became accustomed to being alone, isolated and living our lives by remote control.
With this in mind, today I’m republishing an edited version of an essay I wrote on this topic two years ago, when we were first emerging from the worst of the pandemic. It still feels relevant today.
***
According to Dutch sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst (2009), prior to the pandemic we were replacing half of our social network every seven years. Of course that was back in the times when there were many mores social opportunities.
So I wonder how that figure has fared over the past two years. Though many made efforts to reconnect with old friends through group zoom calls and other virtual tools including social media, Covid-19 created a vast social desert. It seems obvious that new relationships were hard to come by for most of us .
Meanwhile, one of the main points in an article in the Atlantic called, “It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart,” is that we need our friends now more than ever.
Friend love is often overlooked in our literature and films, but the love provided by friends plays at least as big a role as family in most people’s lives.
Furthermore, a large and growing number of Americans are single and living alone — for them friends may constitute their entire family.
I said I wouldn’t watch “Don’t Look Up” twice but I did anyways — the film with Jennifer Lawrence and Leonard DiCaprio about the impending end of the world.
The concluding scene where the main characters gather with a handful of friends for dinner as the killer asteroid closes in on earth is emblematic of everything I’ve said above about friendships, both new and old.
How would you choose to spend your final moments under such circumstances? Anyone who answers “alone” is probably lying.
The Solution? Connect. Keep making friends. Renew friendships that have atrophied. Rebuild your social network. Make new friends. Maybe it’s easy for you, maybe it’s hard, but keep at it. In the final analysis, that may be the only way that we as a species will avoid that catastrophic last scene from becoming reality.
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