Why do we meme Omicron and laugh at COVID-19?

Humour is one way of dealing with overwhelming anxiety. (Photo by Elīna Arāja)

In the last few days since the Omicron wave really exploded on the national scene, bringing with it a slew of disruptions, friends have been sharing memes on common WhatsApp groups. Two of these I particularly liked. 

One has three panels, the first with a wave that panics people, the second that engulfs them and in the third panel people are surfing the wave. The second sounded a little ominous – it said the next wave will be discovered on March 14 and that it will come in many variants. Terribly ominous. But read again and you realise people are punning on the date–March 14 is 3.14 in some date formats, that is Pi which is the next letter in the Greek alphabet and sure, pies come in all kinds of variants.

Whether you found either of them funny or not, you would have seen dozens, if not hundreds, of such attempts at humour about Covid-19 and this particular wave though anyone actually suffering from it or worse, have lost people to it, will tell you there is little that is actually funny about it.

We reach out to humour when things are really not in our control and there is little we can do about it. It is a very uniquely human way of dealing with anxiety. We do it in all sorts of similar situations. Bombs might be falling all around outside their home, and inside, a parent might be putting on a mime act for the kids. An avalanche might be burying us any second, and we will find someone pulling a funny face at it. 

Humour is such an irrepressibly human way of dealing with anxiety – it immediately drops our stress levels, our bodies relax, our eyes lose the wide-eyed look and we can focus. We can literally feel the relief flow through us and help us find ways to cope with the situation, rather than just feeling overwhelmed and helpless. Crying helps in a similar way, and even other actions such as dancing or running.

The most vulnerable

This is a particularly anxious time for pretty much all of us, but some suffer more than others. The urban poor, people without access to consistent electricity or internet, people living in areas where internet keeps getting turned off or fast data is just not available, children who just may not have developed the language to express and deal with the emotions they might be experiencing in all this, people in abusive homes and so on. There are young adults who are graduating college with barely any real-time interaction with peers, teachers or others, and people joining work virtually with very little opportunity to understand company culture, people postponing essential health checkups and treatments for months and years.

So many who had never really experienced long periods of anxiety are seeing themselves going through it now.

Thing with anxiety is that unless one recognizes it as anxiety and learns to manage themselves in their anxiety, it tends to generalise and deepen. What starts as anxiety over CoVid could generalise into an overarching germophobia, or a fear of crowds and that can start to limit one’s regular life. 

With wave after wave of CoVid, some people might not relax their vigilance for a long time, and the anxieties could deepen into ongoing compulsive behaviour.

We already see young children who find it difficult to socialise in groups of peers, or even with new adults. We see people who do not want to eat out at all. We see reactions to the anxiety in extreme denial, explosion of conspiracy theorists and so on.

Don’t let anxiety deepen

Mental health is subtle. Sometimes, what seems healthy in the short run might actually hurt in the long run. We need a certain degree of healthy fear and anxiety to be safe with CoVid around, and yet, if we let that fear and anxiety generalise and deepen, it can cause long-lasting problems. We need to be able to watch out for each other, recognise signs of distress in one another and take help when needed.

Being able to slow down enough to observe ourselves and our mental state is the first step. Guided journaling can help. So does working with your body through yoga or pranayama. Controlled breathing and such exercises can go a long way in easing the physical signs of anxiety such as breathlessness, heightened vigilance, quickening of one’s heart rate etc. Talking about what one is really feeling and thinking, without worry of being judged is important and feeling that we are fully heard and validated helps a lot. 

Sharing memes and laughing out loud will help, but we certainly need more than that.