1.

From business closures and frustrated dreams to the deaths of dear ones, and general loss of trust in institutions, what will be the emotional impact of COVID-19?

2.

I grew up listening to a French rock band called ‘Rita Mitsouko’. They were quirky punks, with funky clothes and philosophical lyrics. One of their songs accompanied my teenage years. It went: ‘On n’a pas que de l’amour, ça non, on n’a pas que de l’amour à vendre, ah ouais, y a de la haine.’ For non French speakers out there, the translation goes something like ‘we don’t have only love, oh no, we don’t have only love for sale, oh yes, there is hatred’. Later in the song (still in translation), it goes ‘hatred needs to spread as well, of yes, without brakes… we have to put it somewhere after all’.

That song came up in one of my feeds during a phase of deep lockdown, and triggered reflection. I holds some wisdom in its lyrics (wow, I grew up on good music, haha).

3.

I’ve been working in start-up and innovative environments for about eight years now. In my experience, those tend to be toxically optimistic. Founders look ahead, and have little capacity to process ‘the dark stuff’. Meditators invite to focus on the positive. Others would rather negativity stay away from the workplace, thank you very much.

Over the years, I have accumulated quite a bit of negative feelings, which positive psychology certainly doesn’t help me deal with. So, I had to figure out how to handle my own shadows, and all the weight of darkness I took on by proxy.

4.

As part of lockdown 2.0, I tried a little personal project: learn to rest and relax. Part of it, involved a return to meditation. One of the tracks I listened to, ‘deep healing’, invited me to breathe in negative feelings, then breathe them out. This way, they would no longer saturate my body. The process worked for me, but as I let those negative feelings out, I couldn’t help wondering. Where did they go? Who would look after them?

5.

I found one rather sinister answer. The founder of 8Chan was born with brittle bone disease, and grew up accumulating resentment. He created a space for hatred to grow. If all hatred goes to the same place, it ends up concentrated, and explodes arbitrarily. Service providers have reacted, blocking the site – but it just popped up back elsewhere.

6.

All the negative emotions triggered by the pandemic and government response, where will they go? Our world is saturated. Positivity, technological development, new ideas, none of this is enough. The dark side encroaches.

One proposal is to look for more space, by flying off to Mars, reducing the global population, or expanding the built and digital environments. But can we get out of our predicament simply by creating more storage space for emotional junk? And is there a risk that we just create vulnerable points, ready to explode?

I wonder though, is there an alternative? Could we create an ecological model for hatred management – one where we learn to digest it, decompose it, recycle what we can – and safely lock away whatever hard nugget remains?

7.

If you’re curious – here is a link to the song!