Our brains want the story of the pandemic to be something it isn't

From the beginning, a narrative that many people latched on to was, as Fletcher described it to me, one of interruption. “What if you were watching a movie [at a theater] and someone got up in front of you and started having an argument with his partner on his cellphone? I think that’s really what’s happened—the virus is [that] guy,” he said. “I think we’re impatient and angry with it because it’s disrupting what we think is our real story.” Fletcher said that this idea—that we’ve been deprived of the life story we wanted to be living—stresses us out because it implies a loss of authorship over our personal narrative.

Meanwhile, Pasupathi has found in her research that students who treated the pandemic as an opportunity to grow—like that budding public-health scholar—tended to have lower levels of anxiety and depression as it unfolded. That lines up with previous research indicating that identifying more redemptive narrative arcs in your life is linked to being happier.

This doesn’t mean that the key to happiness is to immediately put a positive spin on terrible events. McAdams told me that cultivating an optimistic outlook can indeed improve people’s well-being, but that we should be cautious about the cultural pressure to land on a happy ending. Some events just aren’t redemptive material.