The question is really two questions: one about the victims of future catastrophes and the other about the observers who will watch those catastrophes play out from a safe remove. The first question, at least, has a fairly straightforward answer. After surviving a disaster, Taylor told me, a minority of people become more resilient, so that, should another disaster strike, they are better able to cope. For most people, though, the stress compounds: Surviving one crisis puts one at greater risk of having an unhealthy psychological reaction to another. In California, a state that now burns on an annual schedule, wildfire survivors I’ve spoken with have described feeling “haunted” by subsequent blazes.

“There is a sense in which people’s coping reserves are sort of finite entities,” says Joe Ruzek, a PTSD researcher at Palo Alto University. “So if you have to cope a whole lot”—as so many people have over the past year and a half—“you can kind of diminish your resources.” In this way, the pandemic has left everyone more vulnerable to the psychological effects of tomorrow’s earthquakes, mass shootings, and pandemics.

The second question is trickier. For those of us lucky enough to observe a disaster from afar, the experience of having lived through one before could make us more empathetic toward the survivors. Or it could leave us fatigued to the point of inurement, like the people who said at Taylor’s get-together that they found the Afghanistan videos funny. At this point, psychologists told me, which of those effects prevails is anyone’s guess.