If you’re one of the lucky modern humans, you don’t lack food or water, you’ve got access to primo health care, and you don’t have to worry about a predator eating you. That’s a historical oddity: For the vast majority of our species’ timeline, people’s lives were filled with constant crises and impending death.

Yet here we are in 2020, and even lucky modern humans can’t help but think the world is coming to an end. And really, the hints are there: the climate catastrophe, plagues of locusts, the Covid-19 pandemic and the attendant economic recession—a little more than a decade after the 2008 crash—all of it the subject of cable news and social media reports, day in and day out. It’s enough to make a person give up caring. “Why not, if we're going to hell in a handcart? Let's just enjoy tomorrow,” says Matthew Flinders, founding director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics at the University of Sheffield.

Of late Flinders has been exploring the notion of “crisis fatigue,” or the idea that after years of constant bad news, perhaps we’ve grown numb to warnings from politicians of yet more bad news. In particular, he was worried that the British public would balk at shelter-in-place orders during the Covid-19 pandemic—finally issued in late March after the UK government, led by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, initially dilly-dallied in its response.

As the crisis drags on, might that fatigue set in across societies? And now that scientists have been thrust into the spotlight during the pandemic, might the distrust spread toward their leadership as well? What happens to society when so many crises collide? WIRED asked Flinders for his thoughts on how we got to this point, and how we might chart a path forward.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

WIRED: To begin, go over your thinking during the pandemic about the potential for crisis fatigue—where it comes from, and how we might combat it.

Matthew Flinders: I would say that the phenomenon of crisis fatigue can exist at a number of different levels. For me, crisis fatigue is a very natural human response: The whole nature of crises is that they're new and shocking. And inevitably, as soon as you've thought about and lived with the crisis for a while, it becomes the new normal.

Originally, I started thinking about crisis fatigue specifically in relation to lockdown, because there was a big debate about how long realistically you could expect the British public to abide by very strict lockdown and social distancing rules. There was a strong perception coming from the behavioral sciences that you could only really expect the public to be in lockdown for two or three weeks. And this assumption was very critical, because it meant that the government tried to avoid going into lockdown for as long as it could in order not to use up that period too early, but almost to save it to flatten the peak.

Now, of course, what's happened is that it looks as if that strategy was not only wrong, but also the British public haven't fallen into crisis fatigue in quite the way I'd originally expected—because, if anything, the British public have been overwhelmingly compliant with social lockdown. The latest social surveys bizarrely show that the public is still so fearful they don't want to come out of lockdown.

We live in a media-saturated context, where catastrophizing is the common denominator. If there's a molehill, it will become a mountain. And this degree of social amplification, driven by 24/7 social media, driven by the fact that now everybody can be an expert, the low cost of access to mass global platforms—it means that the noise level is constantly at a very high volume. So I think there is a big issue out there around almost the layering, or sedimentation, of crises upon crises upon crises, that risks eroding our sense of social achievement, actually, and resilience.

WIRED: I think this is particularly interesting from an evolutionary perspective. We spent our entire evolutionary history worrying about escaping a tiger, finding food, those kinds of tangible crises. We are bombarded with this constant stream of intangible crises, but at the same time, we're living a much more comfortable life than we were 20,000 years ago.

Flinders: In the past, as you say, most of the fears that people had about life were solid. They were tangible. It was poverty, squalor. It was dangerous animals, disease. What's interesting about the 21st century—and many people will say that the Enlightenment has failed us—what we've managed to do is to create a whole swathe of new risks that tend to be far less tangible to the individual.

They’re far more threatening in many ways: If you're fearful of wild animals circling your tent, at the very least you know what you need to shoot at or run from. When the fear is intangible and hanging over you, you feel trapped. And I think that sense of feeling trapped is a very powerful way of understanding how a lot of people feel today. They feel trapped within the precarity of modern economic work practices. They feel trapped by environmental concerns, which are very hard to deal with from an individual perspective. They feel trapped by political systems that feel unresponsive and very remote from them.

The opposite of the trap, for me, is the promise of modernity and the Enlightenment: to free individuals from the trap. And actually, we've got more material goods and material safety than we've ever had, and yet we feel more trapped. That's the paradox of modern life.

WIRED: Previously we've looked to scientists, and politicians who listen to scientists, to guide us through our problems. And now we have in both of our governments, in the UK and the United States—you might call them chuckleheads. I feel like we're treading water, looking for somebody to tell us what to do.

Flinders: I think that’s a really important point, and I’m going to take away this phrase chuckleheads.

What is going to come out over the next few weeks is the simple fact that the experts were never giving unequivocal advice. They were giving very, very carefully caveated opinions on a range of possible scenarios that might then rationalize a number of different responses. But at the end of the day, somebody has to make a decision, and it was the politicians.

There's some very good shots of Trump and Boris now, where every briefing they are flanked physically by the experts. And that is very important. That is a very performative strategy of both leaning on the scientific credibility and independence of the experts, while also preparing the scapegoats.

What I often say is the public tends to get the politicians they deserve. The public don't want normal politicians. What they want is Superman and Superwoman, who can deliver everything with no pain. And what you're finding now in Covid is, obviously, they can't. Now, my worry is that they might have thought that the scientists were Superman and Superwoman, and they're not.

So there's a whole issue here around public understanding of both science and politics, about the management of public expectations, about how rapid the flow from hero to zero can be—the vast deification of politicians post-election or in times of crisis. We've had the rally round the flag effect. And then how quickly deification can turn into demonization. Which takes us back to this whole notion of increasingly choppy and uncertain seas—wave upon wave crashing down.

WIRED: So, given all that, what do we do? How as citizens do we avoid crisis fatigue, but also what does the way forward look like in general for our societies?

Flinders: Well, I think you could adopt as always the sort of the positive, maybe slightly naive view, and a skeptical realist view. The realist view is that this is all part of a pattern that is unlikely to be broken, unless you get a real crisis that brings the dominant economic model that we currently have to its knees. However, I would like to suggest that there is a far more positive interpretation because maybe, just maybe, what Covid has shown is that it is impossible to address collective social challenges and social risks as individuals. If anything, although this might be heretical to say, what Covid has actually underlined is the value and capacity of collective action and some level of state intervention.

I'm talking very much off the top of my head here, because we simply don't have the research or data on this, because we're too close to it. But my sense is that actually a lot of the people that have studied social capital for decades might be very surprised that what Covid has revealed has been a latent underpinning of the social fabric and social bonds, where communities, neighborhoods, families, have come together and have done things and have rallied not around the flag, but around each other, in ways that probably you simply wouldn't have predicted just six months ago.