All day, every day, I talk with leaders about the challenges they're facing, and over the past ten months a series of themes have emerged in these conversations. At first there was a tremendous amount of uncertainty: Were we facing a modern-day plague, or were such concerns completely overblown? When it turned out to be a serious pandemic, there was initially a degree of chaos and overwhelm, and then a sense of resolve as people responded to the crisis and rose to the occasion. Still later came a grim determination as it became evident that a return to any semblance of normalcy would take many months of sustained effort. By no means did all my clients experience these states in a uniform sequence, but I certainly observed this progression from one chapter to the next across the scope of my practice.
And over the past few weeks yet another chapter appears to be unfolding. Many people who had previously managed to remain highly productive are finding it harder to focus and stay motivated. Others who've historically prided themselves on their resilience are feeling surprisingly demoralized. And still others who've always been able to function effectively in hard times are suffering from the effects of sustained stress, in some cases for the first time in their careers. This isn't the majority of my clients, but it's a material percentage, and these themes have cropped up with regularity in conversations with clients since the beginning of the year.
I attribute some of this to dashed hopes. Some thought that the successful vaccine trials at the end of the year might signal the approach of the end of the pandemic, only to see that possibility retreat into the distance as the difficulty of vaccination production and distribution on a global scale was made fully apparent. There's also a connection to the social and political environment. While there's reason to hope that new leadership in the U.S. will lead to some improvements, it seems likely that we're entering into a era of heightened unrest and discord. Even as we acknowledge that change is necessary, the prospect of pursuing change in the midst of polarization and violence is daunting. [1]
But I also believe something else is happening here, something much more personal: People are not grieving their losses.
To be clear, I'm using "loss" in the broadest possible sense of the term: Anything that has been taken from someone as a result of the pandemic. Most of my clients are CEOs, and most of the rest are in similarly senior roles. In any number of ways they enjoy privileges that have insulated them from the worst effects of the pandemic--and this is true for me as well. We've been able to continue working remotely. We've been able to minimize our risk of infection. We've been able to invest in efforts to improve our quality of life, from better workspaces to exercise equipment. In some cases (myself included), we've even been able to relocate to new homes that are better suited to life under these conditions. So to a great extent we haven't experienced loss in the form that so many others have.
Relatively few of us have had someone we know personally die from the virus or suffer grievous and lasting harm. Relatively few of us have had our financial prospects dim because we lost our jobs or our businesses were shuttered. Relatively few of us have had to abandon dreams and plans in order to survive under pandemic conditions. By and large, our losses and our suffering have been far less severe--but that's not to say that we haven't experienced loss or that we haven't suffered.
We enjoyed these privileges and this insulation from loss before the pandemic, but the current environment has heightened our awareness of them, which has had a number of consequences. One is a growing willingness to interrogate the societal arrangements that have led to such disparate outcomes and that have left so many people vulnerable to loss of life and livelihood. Another is an expanded capacity to put our own losses and suffering in perspective--to recognize that so many things we viewed as "problems" in the past were merely petty annoyances, and that so many things we view as "problems" today pale in comparison to the far worse difficulties faced by others.
And yet if the recent themes I'm observing in my practice are any indication, a commitment to societal change and a greater capacity for perspective-taking are insufficient in enabling many of us to overcome the challenges of the present moment. We can and should strive for a more just and equitable world--but having spent seven years at the outset of my career working for organizations that served low-income and homeless families, I'm keenly aware that such efforts are the work of a lifetime. And we can and should seek to put our personal experiences into perspective--but perspective-taking doesn't mean ignoring or dismissing our sense of loss and suffering, just as the vital and necessary work of emotion regulation doesn't mean emotion suppression.
I have suffered serious losses over the years, and I've learned something about grief. [2,3] Grief is a necessary step in the process of letting go of a loss and healing from suffering. When we fail to grieve, we stay stuck, holding on to what has been taken from us and revisiting our suffering over and over again, which is ultimately exhausting. Just as efforts to suppress an emotion can be counter-productive and actually heighten the emotion, a failure to grieve can prolong the sense of loss.
With this in mind, one way of interpreting what I'm seeing in my practice in this latest chapter is that people are failing to grieve their losses. In some cases this may simply be a form of denial--a passionate belief that life will return to normal and a refusal to accept any of the costs of the pandemic as permanent. But in many others I suspect that people who enjoy the privileges that I share with my clients believe that their losses are somehow illegitimate because they are lesser, and that grieving their losses would be unseemly or inappropriate when so many have suffered far worse.
This is a form of perspective-taking, and it's essential that we recognize the disparities in the pandemic's impact. But it's equally essential to mourn our own losses in the process, large and small. The gravity of the current environment doesn't cancel out any individual's pain or sadness. Both are true. All losses are legitimate. All suffering is legitimate. Our loss and suffering may be lesser, and we will need to put them in perspective, just as we will need to surmount them to rise to the challenge of the present moment, but we can mourn them all the same. As my wise friend Sage Cohen once wrote, "Grief can be the path to grace if that is what you choose." [4]
This post is the fifth in a series on coping in the current environment:
- Part 1: Pockets of Agency
- Part 2: Aggression, Panic, Paralysis, Denial
- Part 3: Tumbling Down Maslow's Hierarchy
- Part 4: Wounded Creatures
- Part 5: The Legitimacy of Loss
- Part 6: Risk Calculus and Social Norms
Footnotes
[1] My thinking on the social and political environment (and the likelihood of sustained unrest and discord) has been shaped by the historian Peter Turchin, who wrote in Nature in 2010:
The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe... In the United States, we have stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, and exploding public debt. These seemingly disparate social indicators are actually related to each other dynamically. They all experienced turning points during the 1970s. Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability... In the United States, 50-year instability spikes occurred around 1870, 1920 and 1970, so another could be due around 2020.
The accuracy of Turchin's predictions a decade ago has led me to pay even more attention to his ideas, and I've found these works influential:
Return of the Oppressed (Aeon, 2013)
War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires (2007)
Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History (2016)
That said, Turchin has his critics, and this recent assessment of his work includes a thoughtful challenge to his methodology:
The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse (Graeme Wood, The Atlantic, 2020)
[2] Mourning Ends, Grief Need Not
[3] I Will Miss You So Much, My Friend
[4] @sagecohen
Photo by Jim Choate.
