Let me give a slimmed down version (because that's all I understand anyway - and apologies to L. A. if I get it a bit wrong.)
So, when you make a decision between two options, what you tend to do is imagine yourself in those two scenarios. A long time ago, I had a big life-changing decision to make: 'Should I go back to university to do a Ph.D. or take a job in TV?' And I did exactly as is predicted: I thought of a 'me-as-I-then-was' prancing about in front of a camera and earning money in contrast with a 'me-as-I-then-was' in a library, focusing on the finer details of Middle English Romances. I knew what being at university as an undergraduate was like. I'd done it - and loved it. But the TV? That was a thrilling mystery. Other factors played in - my mother's health, the family's finances - and I opted for the job.
In retrospect, I think I'd have preferred the Ph.D. (and I might not be out of work now) but, who knows?
The thing is, what makes it really complicated is that by virtue of working in TV, I became a different person, with different values and different preferences. I am not the person I would have been had I gone back to university. In fact, whatever big choice I make, over time, I will become a different person from the one who made the decision.
So, when we make a decision, our present-self is making choices for a future-self who may (probably will) think very differently about life the universe and everything.
This is more acute and apparent when the decision is a truly life-altering one. Like having a baby. Before having a baby, a person might think, 'I cannot deal with dirty nappies. I cannot deal with sleep deprivation.' And so on. But that person does not then know what it is to be a parent, to experience that love, to be immediately transformed by looking into those newborn eyes. I'm taking this on advisement, as I have not experienced this.
Now, the reason I'm bringing this up - as I imagine you've guessed - is because we are going through just such a transformative experience now.
Did all the people clearing out the shelves of the supermarkets as soon as they opened this morning think that, given a pandemic, they'd become rapacious hoarders of toilet roll, pasta and cat food? Presumably, none had considered beforehand that they would feel so driven by circumstance to behave in a way that appears, from the outside, both self-seeking and irrational. Indeed, if you asked any person with a stacked trolley what they were doing, I am sure they would have a logically consistent argument - albeit based on the (hopefully) false premise that all supermarkets would bolt their doors in the next 24 hours.
In a related, but morally distinct way, did the doctors and nurses in China and Italy know they'd ever be capable of triaging as they have been forced to do by circumstances? Perhaps a training in medicine guarantees that one has the rational capacity to do that, but, even so, would they have been able to imagine what it would feel like - or not feel like (given the pressure, sleep-deprivation and emotional burn-out)? Will they be more different still as they try to come to terms with what they have had to witness, endure and do?
None of us knew what we'd be like in a crisis of this scale. None of us knew how our fear and love would play out in the face of job loss, uncertainty, existential terror.
We didn't know. And maybe we're changing purely by virtue of circumstances, as a mother seeing her newborn's eyes for the first time, feeling his peach-soft skin, is immediately transformed in a way that bypasses will and consciousness.
But wait. We are conscious beings. We can pause before elbowing someone aside to take that last tin of black beans. We can consider not just what this is doing to us but who we want to be. We can put before our eyes an image of the ideal self, whom we will never fully realise, but to which we can strive.
We can still, in a pandemic, assert some control. We can, I am certain of it, transform into something which would not shame our past pre-Covid selves. We can. We can. We can.
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