There it sat, on the kitchen floor near the entrance to our home. From seemingly every corner of it an air of danger oozed. Approaching it would mean playing Russian roulette but without a bullet, only the merciless spread of pestilence.
For three days I tried to avoid it. It was a dangerous portal to something terrible — something potentially disease-ridden.
And inside, it contained a delightful pack of Play-Doh.
Before the spread of COVID-19, I couldn’t wait for the arrival of Amazon packages and relished opening them. Those days are over. Now I treat every delivery box as if it contains toxic waste.
After the cardboard box arrived at our door, I put it on the kitchen floor, then proceeded to wash my hands like a doctor prepping for surgery. No one in our household was allowed to touch it because I was terrified it might have had traces of the coronavirus on its surface, whether from the Amazon warehouse or the delivery woman.
Keeping our children away from the box would have been impossible, especially if they’d known that Play-Doh was inside, so I told them the package contained cockroach poison.
But I soon found our 2-year-old pretending to sleep on the kitchen floor, his face melted into the package. I screamed like a wounded moose.
There’s a term for all this: moral fatigue.
In a May 2018 article in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology titled “Moral Fatigue: The Effects of Cognitive Fatigue on Moral Reasoning,” Shane Timmons and Ruth M.J. Byrne assert that “moral fatigue effect occurs when people make a judgment that focuses on a harmful action.” A March 2020 Rolling Stone story titled “The Reason You’re Exhausted is ‘Moral Fatigue’ ” puts it more clearly: “Every small decision feels like it carries the weight of life and death — and it’s starting to take a toll.” The article captures the burden of our anxiety-ridden actions:
“Even the most mundane activities have turned into moral dilemmas. Whether it’s trying to decide if you should visit a sick family member, order delivery, take public transit, or take a trip to the grocery store, we now have to think through the potential implications of many of our totally normal, everyday actions and decisions in a way we never had to before, because of how they could affect others. This is called ‘moral fatigue,’ and it’s exhausting.”
I’m tired of treating every trip to the supermarket as a visit to a leper colony.
Yes, I’m tired. I think we’re all tired.
I’m tired of treating every trip to the supermarket as a visit to a leper colony (leprosy isn’t even that contagious); tired of swearing I can feel the potentially infectious breath of a passerby on my pores from 7 feet away; and tired of not being able to scratch my face without a deep sense of regret.
I feel like a crazy person. A morally fatigued crazy person.
And worst of all, our kids are beginning to mimic me.
Last week, during a chilly day’s walk, our youngest son dropped his knit hat on the pavement and screamed “No!” as if it’d fallen into a cauldron of manure. “Mama! It’s dirty! It’s dirty!” he sobbed. This is the same boy who, before COVID-19, enjoyed spending time on our balcony eating handfuls of dirt out of my potted plants.
And then, during an afternoon walk, our oldest son asked why everyone in the street was wearing a mask. I told him that this year, some people had forgotten to get a flu shot and needed to be extra careful. When we ran into my father, my sons’ beloved “Babachi,” on the street, wearing a bright green mask and gloves, our son scolded his grandfather for not having had the “courage” to have gotten his annual flu shot. “Babachi,” he said, “I got my shot. It’s important to … to … to protect your body.”
And then, in a telling reminder that not all safety precautions need to make one feel crazy or fatigued, our 4-year-old, who cries at the sight of a needle, asked when he can get his next flu shot.
Tabby Refael is a Los Angeles-based writer, speaker, and activist.
