From Aesop:
I deal with uncertainty every day. What’s going on? Is it this? Is it that? What if that happens? Or the other thing? Or ALL the other things?
Not knowing the whole story is every patient, every day. There are hunches, and correlations, and diagnoses, and sometimes even certainty. But rarely a slam dunk, for me, for the doctors, for the patient, except when a Stevie Wonder diagnosis* is involved.
Most of you don’t live or work like that. Some of you, almost never. Life is as comfortable as an old shoe.
So now, bring a virus that no one knows anything about. (At least, not anyone who’s telling, without risking a Chinese firing squad, or 40 years in U.S federal SuperMax). Then it starts killing people. We’re only just figuring out now, months later, how that may be happening. Then panic over it crashes the stock market, to the tune of $11.5T, overnight. Then you’re laid off. Locked down. Your job may be gone forever. You might lose your house, your livelihood, your ability to do for yourself without charity handouts. You might become a refugee in your own country, like the Joads in The Grapes Of Wrath , which for most of you is pre-history from your parents or grandparents, in the misty past, like moon landings, trench warfare, and T. rex.
And after being stunned into inaction for a month or so, you’re now just starting to go through grief stages.
Denial.
Anger.
Bargaining.
Depression.
All at once, in random order, cycling every hour, or day, back and forth, through all of them. Like people do.
Which is why people still won’t accept what they see with their lying eyes.
We’re headed for 50,000 people dead by the weekend, kids. Stop clutching at straws. Those people are really dead, and they’re not coming back, and this could just be the beginning.
And then the Uncertainty magnifies it all: You don’t know how long this will last, because no one does. You don’t know how bad it’s going to get, because no one does.
No One Does?!? HOLY SHIT!!!
And you’ll clutch at anything, like a man drowning, including any slight glimmer, no matter how recockulous, that has the merest twinkling shot at making things Go Back To The Way It Was Before.
Ah, a breath of fresh air!