Whatever your preferred phrase is for hard times — the wringer, the fire and the flames, or maybe just some s*** — we’re really going through them right now. And though one might well feel inclined to marvel at the profound changes that have taken place between this and our last missive, an expression of incredulity is not enough.
Our core assumptions about the world have been violated.
Our personal survival and sense of security have been threatened.
Our relationships with the institutions we depend up on for survival have been disrupted, if not denied to us.
So we have to call these changes what they are: a collective trauma. And as some readers know well, it can be very difficult to understand the full effects of such experiences contemporaneously. It might take a flareup of symptoms for us to stop gritting through and ask “why am I like this?”
We may never get a satisfactory answer. But I can already tell that my internal monologue is getting weird.
Take this little guy for instance:
Why do I feel such kinship with it? And if we’re all feeling seen and summarized by a wet, slumped over raccoon, what does that mean for our economic futures? These medium-sized mammals still have thumbs, which I guess means we can expect some similarity. But they are notoriously unemployable and difficult to govern.
Maybe that’s why the government response has been so incoherent? In the past week:
“Cocaine Mitch” McConnell suggested that states pay for their coronavirus response efforts by entering bankruptcy.
A barrel of oil went from costing less than a pepperoni pizza to costing less than a pinch of salt.
The President of the United States touted the health benefits of drinking bleach.
There’s also a speculative boom in virtual turnips to talk about. And — oh yeah — a pandemic.
We’re going to start this season of the podcast by talking to an expert on that last thing.
Ben Oppenheim is a senior director and senior scientist at Metabiota, a computational epidemiology startup. We’ll ask him about which variables our collective futures are most sensitive to, what it means to be “prepared” for such an epidemic, and whatever you’re curious about. So send us your questions by replying to this email or writing to freemoneypod@gmail.com. We’ll be back to you in a week. Stay distant!