The Key to Managing Your Late-Pandemic Frustrations
How to turn short-term compassion into long-term empathy
These days, I don’t have to scroll very long before coming across a long-winded rant about pandemic restrictions or a sunny vacation photo with nary a mask in sight. These are people I know, people who have shown me kindness and care through low times in my own life. Each time, the cognitive dissonance makes my head spin.
I recently came across a Twitter thread from the editor Sigrid Ellis that put words to what I’d been feeling: “Americans are really good at acute compassion, but pretty bad at chronic empathy,” the thread begins. “We, without question, haul strangers out of a raging flood, give blood, give food, give shelter. But we are lousy at legislating safe, sustainable communities, at eldercare, at accessible streets and buildings.”
We’re lousy, too, at sustaining empathy enough to let it guide our personal actions over the long term. Nick Bognar, a California-based therapist, explains it’s much easier to be compassionate in the short-term because we can usually imagine ourselves in a similar plight.
For example, it’s easy to identify with an exhausted nurse talking about how draining her days are because we’ve all been overwhelmed by circumstances outside of our control.
Chronic empathy, on the other hand, is usually required to stay engaged with broader, bigger societal problems — like, say, staying vigilant about a pandemic a year after it started. “We can be so generous on a face-to-face basis but so much less generous in a macro sense,” Bognar says.
I get it: I feel for friends who have confessed their anxieties about the vaccine, for example, even if I don’t agree. But when I read a story about widespread vaccine hesitancy, I want to tear my hair out.
Living through a pandemic is already miserable. In the home stretch, you can make it suck less by coupling short-term compassion with chronic empathy. Here’s how to shift your mindset for the long term.
