Some thoughts on self-pity
When we left London last June, I felt immense relief, and more than a little guilt. We had proved ourselves, when it came down to it, tourists. When the city’s magic dimmed, we could pack up and leave.
Still, I feel a perverse sense of FOMO when I think of London now. I’m strangely sorry to be missing out on a defining collective experience, one that everyone my age in Britain will measure their lives against for decades to come: living through a pandemic. And I mean truly living through it, through not just a few weeks’ lockdown, but the year-long interruption of daily life, through a real and lasting cultural shift. Even as I recognise how terrible that experience is, the fact we’re not having it in New Zealand seems oddly like missing out. Some shared, global experience is lost to us, here on the edge of the world.
I recognise this is a position very few Kiwis are likely to sympathise with. What kind of monster would wish the pandemic were worse in our country? But perhaps that’s not quite what I mean. Of course we’re better off without mass unemployment/overrun hospitals/endless lockdown, and of course many Kiwis had a terrible time of it in 2020. I mean rather that I’m bothered by the myopia I’ve observed since returning. It is frustrating talking to people who have been in New Zealand throughout the pandemic and who can’t, or won’t, imagine an experience worse than their own. Seven weeks confined to your own home are terrible. Many months confined to your own home in a place where the daily Covid deaths number in the thousands, and the ambulances squawl past at all hours, and the Prime Minister clearly has no grip on events are something else entirely.
When we returned to New Zealand, it seemed like nobody wanted to remember this; like nobody wanted to feel outdone. Anytime someone described what it had been like elsewhere, someone would interrupt, almost competitively, with the details of their own lockdown. Occasionally I wondered whether I had only imagined life during the pandemic to be worse overseas. After all, Kiwis suffered too during the pandemic. Relative to their own former lives, they suffered enormously. But then I thought of the things we had left behind when we came home. I remembered reading that there were more than 2,000 cases in our London borough alone, an area less than half the size of Waiheke Island. I remembered watching the grey-faced woman across the street being brought out of her house on a stretcher. I thought of the spate of doctor suicides. I remembered Italy, where towns stopped ringing the traditional bells for the dead, because to mark them all would have meant ringing for hours. I remembered the mass graves dug in Brazil, the body pile-ups outside New York morgues, the makeshift hospitals spun out of gymnasiums and train stations all over the world. I remembered London, where not even one week of normal life — people mingling thoughtlessly in cafes, maskless public transport, work at the office — has taken place since last March. In short, I thought about the actual threat of illness and death and the justified grounds for despair. It was worse elsewhere; I didn’t see how else you could argue it.
Why do we have such difficulty accepting that someone else has it worse? Where does this blindness to other people’s suffering come from? The charitable read on events is that it’s just too painful to think about worse situations. If you’re lonely and frustrated and housebound yourself, it’s a large emotional load to consider how bad it is for other people. Or perhaps it’s just become impossible to imagine something you can’t see, a phenomenon exacerbated by the contemporary reliance on visual media.
But if we are honest, I think it’s likelier most people want to feel like victims. There has not been a pandemic approaching this scale for a hundred years. When it first started, fear was tinged with — admit it — excitement. It is astonishing to be confined to your own home for seven weeks, even if nobody you know dies. It has always been the case that your own experience is the most vivid you know of, and you naturally conceive of it as important and feel entitled to complain about it. And increasingly, there is a dangerous kind of social credit attached to playing the victim. Not only are you rewarded for publicising your experiences (the result of social media’s spread), you benefit from foregrounding your disadvantages (the result of a new focus on identity politics, which is exacerbated and fragmented by social media). Never have there been more people trying to publicly point out how the world has disadvantaged them even when their disadvantage is relatively insignificant. I think this phenomenon is an unfortunate side-effect of the hugely necessary movements against racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia. These movements foreground individual experience and encourage people to talk about the ways they have suffered — a vital conversation. But there’s a difference between protesting against racism and protesting about lockdown, or between agonising over a loved one’s death from Covid and agonising over Covid delaying your holiday plans. There’s a difference between acute suffering and temporary inconvenience.
It is human nature to fixate on one’s own experiences, but I worry the pandemic suggests that many people don’t really think about anyone else’s. It frightens me more than I can say what such myopia bodes for the all-but-inevitable future challenges of climate change: a spike in climate refugees; mass food shortages; further novel health risks. With its geographical advantages, New Zealand will suffer the effects of climate change comparatively little, at least to start with. I hope we will be able to realise our relative luck: that when the time comes, Kiwis will be grateful to be able to go outside, not just complaining about rising sea levels imperilling their baches. We will be the ones to show, not require, compassion, just as we are now.
I’m not sure exactly what I’m advocating for. Obviously New Zealanders should not feel guilty all the time; obviously it’s a good thing we have the pandemic under control; obviously the lockdowns here were (are) not fun. I guess I just wish there were a little less frustration with our lockdowns and a little more appreciation of the enormous freedoms between them; a little more distinction between acute suffering and temporary inconvenience. A little less playing the victim when so many others aren’t playing at all.