Vices in Quarantine: What Bad Behavior is Excusable in Isolation?
I took this past semester off from teaching due to personal issues that only worsened with COVID-19. However, I felt this gnawing pain and emptiness from not being able to help another as I did in the classroom.
Regardless of teaching or not, I always get emails, texts, and calls from friends asking for my advice on resiliency. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and mass shelter-in-place orders, these messages from friends, colleagues, and former students have only increased, with many of the questions being the same.
While I plan to reach out to each of them with advice just the same, I figured that these questions must be pervasive, with more and more people asking them each day longer they spend in quarantine. So that is why I created this blog: The Resilience Journal. A guide on how to survive and thrive in these troubled times.
P: What bad behaviors are acceptable in quarantine, and how much is okay before it is a problem?
This is definitely a unique question. Most people engage in their guilty pleasures and attempt to justify them, and then pose the quantity question alone. It isn’t until something gets out of hand that we wonder if the quantity AND content are acceptable.
“Bad behaviors, vices, and taboo” are some of the most loaded words I have ever encountered in my training and practice. One culture’s norm is another culture’s taboo. A deeper dive into that shows that even household to household is different in how they regard culture due to their experiences with others.
I can give a prime example of this: I had my first real alcohol consumption in my first semester when I went to a retreat and was given a hard cider. I was only 18 at the time (3 years under the drinking age for my international readers). Still, I knew that it was something I enjoyed. When my grandmother, who raised me, found out that I had begun to consume alcohol at even such a small level--she.was.furious. Not merely because of her native Thai culture, but because of the chance of me becoming like my alcoholic father. Was this bad behavior in the eyes of society? Legally: yes, culturally: meh. In my eyes? It wasn’t bad behavior in moderation. To my grandmother? Unacceptable.
What I’m trying to say with this little story is: one must balance their perspective on bad behaviors with culture and nurture. Alcohol consumption in American society is not necessarily frowned upon, black-tar heroin, on the other hand, is another story. My advice to P and all of you reading this is to consider the behavior in question holistically. How does this impact your physical, social, and mental health? How does this affect the health of others? If this behavior does more harm than good in the long run, I recommend moderating participation for the sake of the parties at risk.
However, these are quite trying times. Alcohol consumption has drastically increased, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. I have certainly increased my intake from a bottle of wine a week to a gin and tonic every night. Hell, I’m drinking a G&T as I write this (shhh don’t tell my grandmother).
Who can blame an alcohol enthusiast for enjoying an extra beer (or 3?) when the expectations for the coming days are so much lower? Society has lost its ability to point the finger and shun as we learn how to cope in these unprecedented times. It is now our job to do that very task to ourselves and ourselves only.
I define resilience in my class as the ability to successfully cope with change or misfortune. With these unprecedented times, the standards for healthy forms of resilience have been lowered. However, if your bad behavior and frequency hinder your ability to successfully cope in the long term, you are treating the symptoms instead of the disease itself.
Ergo, P and readers, I advise you to check in with your support system. Talk to your relatives, friends, and spouses about your habit. By getting a wide array of opinions from those, you trust you can overcome the culture and nurture bias and gain insight into whether or not your behavior is detrimental. Once that has been determined, you will be available to decide on quantity moderation. Whether or not you need to cut down on playing Minecraft, baking brownies, or drinking. Despite the varying levels of innocence in each activity, I have seen each lead to problems in resilience for the practitioner.
Any habit can be a bad habit. Use this time to figure out what will be the best for you. We don’t know when this pandemic will end, but all we know for now is that we won’t be returning to normalcy anytime soon. Use the resources that make you happy to help you bounce back for now, but ensure you have a plan for long-term sustainability.
Continued strength,
DPLM