Stages of Grief

I love taking patterns from one arena, and applying them to another. For instance,

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross detail five steps of “grief acceptance”, for instance learning you have inoperable cancer. (And yes, I know its more flexible and less precise and not necessarily in this order or experienced by all people):

denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance

Denial: This can’t be right.

Anger: God Dammit! I never smoked, ate my veggies, exercised and you’re saying it was all bullshit???

Bargaining: “God, I’m sorry I cursed. If you’ll get me off this hook, I’ll tithe 25% for the rest of my life”

Depression: Its all meaningless. The universe is gray goo, and we’re all fools for believing anything matters…

Acceptance: This is the cycle of being. It is my time. Nature is just what it is. I’ve had a good life.

But It is also telling to apply this to other arenas. Apply this to “Don’t Look Up” and you’ll see people who couldn’t get past “denial” in time to act. Others who tried to bargain: “we can all get rich if we just let maybe a billion people die.”

You could probably map the different characters onto the pattern rather neatly. I’ve certainly seen people do the EXACT same thing when confronted with information that violates their world view (“its just not happening”) , political position (“we don’t do things like that”), love of a celebrity (“she was just a victim”), and so…