By skyforbes 
Isolation and the psychology of storytelling in the age of pandemics — with a UX twist
When the world shut down, the most profound wound wasn’t just the loss of routine — it was the dislocation of self.
Freedom of movement, of presence, of interaction — all vanished. What remained was suspended time, haunting silence, and the realization that we were not built for solitude. And when our bodies couldn’t roam, our minds began to spiral — into stories, screens, and pixelated mirrors.
Isolation as existential shock
The real crisis wasn’t just medical. It was ontological.
We didn’t know who we were without others reflecting us back. Zoom gave us faces, but not presence. Screens offered connection, but not communion.
“When rituals dissolve, so do identities.”
Thucydides saw this in Athens. Camus framed it as ethical resistance. Saramago stripped it to animal impulse. Ibn Khaldun warned that cities collapse not just from illness, but from the decay of social glue.
UX wasn’t built for this.
No designer set out to build systems for existential containment. And yet — Slack became the office. Instagram the lifeline. Zoom the new eye contact.
As Erving Goffman wrote in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, identity depends on performance — and performance needs an audience. Without one, the self becomes… pixelated. On Zoom, we saw our faces — but not ourselves.
And as Foucault reminds us in Discipline and Punish:
“Quarantine isn’t just health — it’s surveillance.”
We turned the camera on ourselves and called it connection.
But in truth, we became our own panopticon.
Storytelling as survival
When everything else collapsed, we returned to the oldest interface we know: story.
From Boccaccio’s Decameron — where nobles spun tales to stay sane during the plague — to TikTok’s 15-second identity loops, narration became our immune response.
Boccaccio understood what modern UX often forgets:
“When you can’t change the system, change the story.”
Make it funny. Make it strange. Make it erotic. Laughter and fantasy are immune reactions.
Lucretius, in On the Nature of Things, imagined plague as chaos at the molecular level. Centuries later, our brains dissolved in TikTok spirals, grasping for shape in randomness.
Toni Morrison’s A Mercy teaches us that in times of fever, we must narrate ourselves anew.
And we did:
— Through banana bread.
— Through skincare rituals.
— Through 15-second confessions in bathrobes.
Pu Songling’s ghost tales remind us that plagues collapse boundaries between the sick and the spiritual.
So did TikTok — haunted monologues, duets with strangers, spectral dances in digital limbo.
Walter Benjamin called storytelling sacred in collapse.
Carl Jung might have called TikTok a collective dream — an archetypal flood.
Duets and stitches became a digital midrash: fragmented commentaries on a world we couldn’t make sense of.
The fragmented self and the collapse of attention
Our attention didn’t just suffer. It shattered. Doomscrolling wasn’t distraction — it was ritual. An incantation against entropy.
Gabor Maté says addiction is pain relief. If so, infinite scroll was a digital opiate — temporary numbing from suspended reality.
Winnicott’s “false self” became prophecy.
We presented. We logged off. We cried. We repeated.
We filtered our loneliness — and got 143 likes.
“All that remained was a muted silence.”
Murakami’s After the Quake describes what buffering feels like — not stillness, but ghost-noise. A dull hum beneath every call, every mask, every feed.
UX design, obsessed with engagement, didn’t design for grief.
It designed for dopamine. Auto-play. Infinite scroll. Algorithmic hooks.
No grief protocol. No “how are you really?” modal. No off-ramp.
We built emotional architecture — without exits.
Who gets to tell the story?
Not all stories got seen.
Adichie warned us about “the danger of a single story.”
Fanon showed us that colonization isn’t just exploitation — it’s erasure.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o equated plague with corruption — a silence imposed by power.
Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West imagined border collapse as migration through memory.
Attar’s Conference of the Birds said truth requires a journey. But how do you take a pilgrimage during lockdown?
bell hooks said,
“Visibility is survival.”
But digital visibility is not the same as voice.
You can go viral without being heard.
You can perform your pain and still be invisible.
Algorithms are gatekeepers.
They trend some pains, and they erase others.
Design is not neutral. Curation is power.
UX and the emotional interface
We need to ask the hard questions:
What did TikTok, Zoom, Instagram, and Twitter become during lockdown?
Mental health tools — by accident.
Were they built for emotional processing?
No, not at all.
Were people livestreaming breakdowns because they were unwell — or because no one else was listening?
Yes.
During the pandemic, our interfaces became confessionals.
Stages. Therapists. Altars.
And if we’re designing the last place someone might connect to the world — we have to do better.
As a UX designer, I believe we’re not just building screens anymore.
We’re building ritual architecture. Grief architecture. Memory scaffolding.
The question is:
Do our platforms hold space for that?
Where’s the empathy map?
Where’s the ritual flow?
Where’s the opt-out?
Do we dare design emotional infrastructure with spiritual consent?
Conclusion: still buffering
Even without pants — we showed up. We danced for strangers. We cried between meetings. We told stories — not because we were healed, but because we needed to remember we existed.
Now the urgency has faded. But many of us are still buffering.
Still waiting for the next self to load.
Still caught in Murakami’s muted silence.
Design isn’t neutral. Platforms aren’t passive.
How we build digital worlds shapes how people survive them.
So if storytelling helped us make it through the storm…
What are we building now to help us heal?
If this piece resonated — share it. Not for the algorithm, but for the people still buffering, spiraling, or surviving through ritual.
I write at the intersection of UX, mental health, and digital storytelling. Follow me on Medium for more essays on how we design emotion, culture, and resilience into the tech we live with.
Designers, researchers, misfits —
Have you seen platforms become emotional lifelines?
What grief rituals do you wish tech would support?
Let’s talk in the comments — or reach out.
References
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Danger of a Single Story (TED Talk)
bell hooks, Visibility is survival (from various works)
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah
Mohsin Hamid, Exit West
Carl Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller
Toni Morrison, A Mercy
Haruki Murakami, After the Quake
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things
Boccaccio, The Decameron
Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts
David Winnicott, False Self / True Self
José Saramago, Blindness
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood
Farid ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds
Pu Songling, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio