All that trial-and-error crashing around is enough to make you want to stay inside, where the codes are known. Inside, you are the code. Recently, I spoke with Arthur Bregman, a psychiatrist in Coral Gables, Florida, who has been using a new phrase to describe our desire to stay at home: “cave syndrome.” Bregman has been seeing patients for more than forty years. As covid vaccinations have become more commonplace, he has noticed a reluctance to venture out again among his patients, even the fully immunized. “People can’t shake the anxiety,” he told me. “They feel fearful and insecure about the uncertainty of the situation. So they’re very kind of timid and uneasy. And they have excuses. Some of them, more excuses than Campbell’s has soup.” They worry over stilted conversation as much as new variants. “I have people coming by saying, ‘I had trouble before, I think I forgot how to do it,’ ” he told me. “ ‘I don’t know how to socialize.’ ” Bregman has theorized that people experience cave syndrome at different levels of severity, with mild queasiness at the thought of a trip to the grocery store on one end and full-blown withdrawal from friends and family on the other. “For some, it is caused by panic, anxiety, and other comorbid disorders,” he wrote in a blog post on his Web site. “For others, it mirrors Stockholm syndrome where captives develop a troubling bond with their captors.” Much of what Bregman was saying made perfect sense. We have been told for a year not to socialize in groups because of a deadly virus about which little was known. We have honed our habits and defenses accordingly. I thought of a man in my neighborhood who would hold his arms out, hands balled into fists, whenever anyone passed, to make sure that they maintained their distance.