When cancel culture extends to social life, we are learning to adjust

Down at our supermarket, nearly everyone is wearing a mask. OK, some have their noses hanging out; in a way that’s somewhat annoying, but at least they’re having a go. People wait outside a shop, obeying the sign advertising a “four-customer limit”. They sanitise their hands.

This sort of widespread compliance has been seen in many countries. It’s why people in Britain are so angry with Boris Johnson, a prime minister who participated in parties held in defiance of the rules he himself had set. The anger comes from the fact that most people – from the Queen down – faithfully followed the rules, often at great personal cost.

People have pared down their lives, obeyed the rules and tried not to focus on how tough life has become.

Go back two years and it would have been hard to imagine that Australians would do this well. Try telling someone in January 2020, that, two years on, we’d still need to log in every time we entered a store. That we’d be wearing masks in workplaces and shops. That we’d need to constantly queue for testing, vaccinations and test kits, and that we’d do it all, mostly cheerfully, as a way of caring for ourselves and others.

“Oh,” someone would have said, “no way will people put up with that. They just won’t do it. Not for that long. People are too selfish, too disorganised, too ready to believe disinformation …”

But we did it all. Most of us. In NSW, despite a clunky booking system and a hopelessly delayed roll-out, close to 95 per cent of those 16 and over have now had at least two doses of a vaccine.

Even when governments stood in our way, we found a way to do the right thing.

That sort of resilience wouldn’t surprise those who study the ups and downs of human happiness. Psychologists use the phrase “hedonic adaptation” to describe the human ability to navigate a path through both bad and good luck.

A disaster – the loss of a limb is the example sometimes given – will bring a sharp decline in the happiness of the person who has suffered the loss. But then, surprisingly, their happiness returns to something close to its previous level. It works in the opposite way too: a huge lottery win brings an upwards spike in happiness, but the spike doesn’t last.

Resilience has been built into humans by our evolution. Survival required an ability to experience fortune and misfortune without being buffeted off course. A failed hunt doesn’t mean you should give up all hope; a success doesn’t mean should stop planning future efforts.

Humanity so often falls short – the failure to supply vaccines to the developing world is just one example among many. Yet, just sometimes, we can surprise on the upside.

For all our idiocy, we’re quite good at coping with tough times, at putting one foot in front of the other. And this despite a pandemic which just goes on and on and on.

It makes me want to hum an old margarine advertisement. “You oughta be congratulated.”

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