What can we do to survive the mental pressure of living in a time of pandemics?

My first rule here is: this is not the time to search for some spiritual authenticity, to confront the ultimate abyss of our being. Without any shame – assume all small rituals, formulas, quirks, etc. that stabilize your daily life.

Everything that may work is permitted here to avoid a mental breakdown. Don’t think too much in long terms – think of today, what you will be doing till sleep.

If it works, play the game of Life is Beautiful (the movie): pretend the lockdown is just a game in which you and your family freely participate with the prospect of a big reward if you win.

And, if we are with movies (if you have some free time for them), gladly succumb to all your guilty pleasures: catastrophic dystopias, daily life TV comedy series with canned laughter like Will and Grace, YouTube podcasts on the great battles of the past.

My preferences are dark Scandinavian – preferably Icelandic – crime series like Trapped or Valhalla Murders.

However, this stance doesn’t reach all the way – the main task is to structure your daily life in a stable and meaningful way.

Here is how another of my friends, Andreas Rosenfelder, a German journalist from Die Welt, described in an email to me the new stance towards daily life that is emerging:

“I really can feel something heroic about this new ethics, also in journalism – everybody works day and night from home office, making video conferences and taking care of children or schooling them at the same time, but nobody asks why he or she is doing it,

because it’s not any more ‘I get money and can go to vacation etc.’, since nobody knows if there will be vacations again and if there will be money.

It’s the idea of a world where you have a flat, basics like food etc., the love of others and a task that really matters, now more than ever. The idea that one needs ‘more’ seems unreal now.”

I cannot imagine a better description of what one should shamelessly call a non-alienated decent life – and I hope that some of this stance will survive when the pandemics will hopefully pass.