by Don Hall

As a two and half year resident of Las Vegas, I've learned to enjoy the odd bit of gambling. I know people who do it as a means for additional income. I've seen people play desperately for the month's rent. I try to play for the fun of it. Very controlled, on a strict budget, solid rules for my spending or cashing out for wins.

Once in a while, I find myself playing to win. It takes all the joy out of it and I become one of the angry, desperate crowd, vainly chasing the dragon. 

I try not to gamble and leave as soon as I can when I recognize the addictive compulsion that is a part of my fabric.

We all have a baseline. A factory default setting. As an Irish, southern, Chicagoan, my default tends to be impulsive over-consumption. I stare at the empty pizza box and case of beer I just jammed down like I would never see food or booze again and disgust myself. I angrily gaze at the slot machine and feel its reluctance to give me a win is somehow personally against me.

It ain't pretty so I try to back off of it when it crops up.

The pandemic brought out the factory default settings of everyone. The paranoid became more paranoid. The needy became more needy. The anxious became more anxious and the optimistic became more optimistic.

The common understanding is that adversity brings out the worst in some, the best in others but it seems that crisis resets each of us to a baseline default without the Good/Bad binary attached.

Adversity seems to bring out not necessarily the best or worst in people, but the very essence of people. 

Thrust into a pandemic and perpetual lockdown some people fell into a need for moral authority. Like the foxhole conversion to Christianity, in a situation of uncertainty and imminent demise, seeking something or someone to clarify moral integrity and hope is a strong pull for a lot of folks. 

Some converted in their foxhole to a unprovable and unverifiable secular religion known as QAnon. Others dove in head first to the anecdote-based, likewise evidence-free Critical Race Theory. Their default setting is based in a desire for easily digestible Right and Wrong morality as well as an embrace of groupthink. The idea of punishing evil to ensure one's status as saved from annihilation is as sexy to some as that pizza is to me.

"The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience—this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats." — Aldous Huxley

Remember that rush on toilet paper? Those who bought palettes of ass-wipes were thrust into a default setting of fear and survival. Self interest at all costs. Same for the idiots filling up plastic bags of gasoline.

Unfortunately, the baseline setting for most people in times of crisis is a grasp at any answer that seems to explain it and most will listen and follow just about anyone they see as credible if what the expert says fits their already skewed worldview.

I had a friend in Chicago who was constantly having epiphanies. Every month or two, he'd drop some knowledge that we were all missing the truth and that Ruth usually came in the form of a book espousing solutions, self help tapes, or Big Philosophy boiled down in a nutshell for ease of consumption.

He believed because he wanted to believe. He wanted something that explained his lost and stranded feeling. Funny that he rejected religion wholesale yet jumped onto every new thing and decided he was a new man. Each new thing resembled nothing so much as another quasi-religious explanation of why the world was what it was. His default was to find answers without verification.

I used to couch these predetermined settings in terms of negative and positive but the binary simply refused to hold. No good guy is 100% good; no bad guy is 100% bad. Likewise, no behavior is easily categorized as a negative or positive—it is in the individual and specific results that bear out the qualifier.

As I said, my default is an addictive over-consumption. This is a net negative when it involves gambling or carbohydrates but somehow manages a net positive when focused on exercise or reading nonfiction books.

What default did the pandemic bring out in you and how does your self reflection turn that into a positive? 

Strip away social interaction, recognize you need it like a plant needs sunshine, spin it so that your social interaction combines with something altruistic might be better than simply jumping into the soup of drunken idiots on the Las Vegas Strip or in a nightclubs in New York City.

Strip away finance via a layoff or outright job loss, spin it so that it forces you to reevaluate your living situation and daily materialism, figure out how to squeeze a bit more blood from the stone or look for a gig that pays less in cash but more in self satisfaction. Probably a better set of choices than wallowing in misery with bills you can't pay and feeling helpless.

Rather than shame yourself for your standard baseline behavior, first be aware of it. Unvarnished, no bullshit, complete honesty with who you are on a fundamental level. Second, accept the loss of so much you have become accustomed to, see what you're left with, and then work with it rather than beat yourself up over it.

"Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men." — Martha Graham