Pandemic Lesson #8

We have short attention spans. When this all started we were all on board. "Batten down the hatches!" But that got old quick.

There's a lot said about our short attention spans; we even have disorders now, for the very distractible. It's a real failing if you can't sit still in a airless classroom while the undead drone on about ideas they've read about.

These short attention spans are a defense mechanism, a gambit to survive the perpetual assault of life. We ridicule the goldfish who forgets the dimensions of his bowl in the course of one aquatic loop around his suffocating kingdom. But imagine his despair if he could recall it all. Forgetfulness is a small mercy.

Our gift for memory might be part of our ongoing emotional pandemic. Anxiety stalks so many humans even as we enjoy the safest existence of all the species and longer lives than any of our forebears. We linger over every slight, any indignation suffered at the hands of an indifferent world. How fucking stressed would we all be if there were lions and tigers on every city corner.

Oh shit. Now I see it.

But still, forget about it and get on with it.

Also, this is the lesson of the animated movie "The Croods" starring Nicholas Cage as a Neanderthal helicopter daddy.