Two Years Into the Pandemic, We’re Suffering From “Narrative Fatigue"

By all accounts, the pandemic has been exhausting to live through for the past two years, with some experts attributing this to the fact that it has defied our natural impulse to turn reality into a coherent story.

Mark Freeman, Holy Cross Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Society and professor of psychology, recently told The Atlantic that he calls this condition "narrative fatigue"—"an exhaustion born not only out of the relentlessness of the pandemic, but the relentlessness of the ever-changing narratives that have accompanied it."

Basically, we find meaning in life partly by making stories out of it, so one reason the pandemic has been so hard might be that it resists all the stories we've tried to fit it into, according to Freeman.

Freeman, who joined the College as a faculty member in 1986, serves as editor for the Oxford University Press series "Explorations in Narrative Psychology." He recently received the Joseph B. Gittler Award from the American Psychological Foundation for his scholarly and transformative contributions to the philosophical foundations of psychological knowledge.

To read the full article, go to TheAtlantic.com.