Welcome to the New New Normal

FOGO is More Normal Than FOMO, And That’s Okay

I am officially vaccinated!

As I eagerly daydream of things finally getting back to normal, I’m left pondering how different “returning to normal” will actually be—how foreign will “old normal” feel?

According to the WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus:

We will not be going back to the ‘old normal’.

Thanks for the ominous outlook, Ghebreyesus.

But honestly, I don’t think we’ll actually be going back to old normal either. The level of apprehension and anxiety I feel imagining doing old normal things is beyond my regular old social anxiety. I’m accustomed to WFH and zoom and takeout and being a homebody 24/7.

Basically, after over a year of living in the “new normal” of the pandemic, it isn’t the new normal anymore—it’s just normal.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Source: @thefinancialdiet

So really this whole vaccinated life is the new normal, or the new new normal. The old new normal is now just normal, and we are entering into the new new normal phase that is returning to just plain old normal but with the big asterisks of a year surviving new normal.

Sidenote: God, I’m already confusing myself with this new normal vs. old normal vs. new new normal vs. old new normal mess. Apologies in advance for the rest of this blog post.

But what does this jumble of normals actually mean for us right here, right now? What does present normal and all its mixed emotions look like—and how are we supposed to be dealing with it?

We lost our grip on reality sometime last year…

Welcome to the Jumble

Normal for me has always had a good dose of anxiety, but now that I’ve had both doses of vaccine that anxiety is starting to invade the feeling of excitement to return to old normal life. But it turns out I’m not alone in that jumble of feelings.

Source: Valdas Blog

Vaile Wright, Senior Director of Healthcare Innovation at American Psychological Association (APA), explained, "I do think there's this part of us that feels like:

‘I've been wanting this for the last year and now it's here and I don't know how to handle it.’

And an APA survey found that nearly half of Americans are hesitant about “getting back to normal,” regardless of vaccination status—49% of respondents said they feel uneasy about adjusting to in-person interaction once the pandemic ends.

Some physicians are seeing extreme cases of this hesitation with people downright scared or unwilling to re-enter post-pandemic society, even after being vaccinated, because they have grown too accustomed to isolation. The term “cave syndrome” was coined by psychiatrist Dr. Arthur Bregman who noticed this increasing phenomenon in his Miami practice earlier this year.

But on a less extreme scale, this anxiety has been dubbed the inversion of FOMO (fear of missing out), aptly called FOGO (fear of going out).

Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, summed it up by saying:

Later this year, new infection numbers will decline, restrictions will ease, and we will slowly begin to leave the house again. But whereas before we left the house in fear that staying home would cost us, now we will leave the house in fear that going out will cost us.

So how did we go from pre-pandemic FOMO to post-vaccine FOGO?

FOMO to FOGO

Obvious answer: we’ve been under some semblance of lock-down with the coronavirus lurking innocuously outside for over a year now. That’s some scary shit. Of course, we’re going to be hesitant to dive headfirst into that old normal go-go-go culture we all tried to keep up with pre-Covid.

Even though surveys conducted by The Harris Poll found that 60% of those ages 18-34 reported an increase in social media usage since the pandemic began—the prime driver of FOMO in most people—other research found an increase in the number of people presenting with mental health conditions such as agoraphobia, similar to “cave syndrome” where individuals fear and often avoid new places and unfamiliar situations and sometimes resisting leaving their homes altogether.

Source: starecat.com

Hence, FOMO to FOGO.

"We do know from previous pandemics like SARS and Ebola that some people did experience agoraphobia following a period of social isolation," says Senior Director Wright of APA.

So despite the urge to reclaim the lost year of our “Roaring Twenties,” the Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine explained there are generally two groups of people who experience re-entry anxiety:

• Those who have a "lurking fear" that they will contract or spread the new coronavirus strains

• And those who feel their social skills have atrophied and find it challenging to re-engage in social interactions

While both reasons justify the nervousness we may feel about attempting to return to the old normal of pre-2020, the second one can go against the assumptions we held throughout 2020 that once we were all vaccinated we’d be clamoring to get back out there. But after a year, we’re out of practice of many aspects of that old normal way of life.

As Celeste Headlee, journalist and author of We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations That Matter, succinctly puts it:

Social skills are, after all, skills.

So maybe the new new normal will level the socially awkward playing field. I guess that’s kinda something nice for us already socially-inept folks?

Don’t make me leave my cave.

So This New New Normal Anxiety Sounds Normal—Now What Do I Do?

There are plenty of articles out there from experts far wiser and more qualified than myself with tips and tricks and strategies, as well as critical dos and don’ts for the health and safety of everyone, to re-enter the world as a vaccinated person.

Therefore, I will not copy & paste and link to a million sources to tell you how to deal with the jumble here in the present. I trust that you, dear reader, know how to use Google, and I encourage you to do so in your own time (but please finish reading this first).

But I will share one key point that I personally am doing right now as I daydream anxiously about this new new normal:

I am not going to set myself up to burnout immediately or in the long term.

Before quarantine, I was hitting mental and physical exhaustion almost every single day. From my job to my aerial training to my freelance work to my volunteer work to my hobbies to being a supporting partner—do I even want to get back to that normal?

Source: @morganharpernichols

When we all first went into lock-down a year ago, I actually felt an unexpected sense of relief at being forced to slow down, let my plans cancel themselves, and just relax inside my stay-at-home bubble. Pre-pandemic I was terribly guilty of FOMO and had set unrealistic expectations of how much I could juggle, not realizing how incredibly off-balance my life had become. Quarantine made me refocus my priorities, and I won’t lose those lessons.

So as we enter the new new normal, let’s try to accept that we aren’t actually returning to old normal and we don’t have to try to recreate it. We can be both excited and anxious. We can admit that FOGO replaced FOMO, and maybe we’ll find a balance between the two. There’s plenty of strategies to get over our fears, but we can tackle them in our own time.

As the vomitrocious cliche goes, we’re all in this together so don’t worry if you have a few worries—it’s totally normal.