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The Psychology of Cicada Fever

Cicadas remind us of the passage of time, particularly this year.

Cicadas are everywhere. Both literally and figuratively—they seem to be all over the news and minds of everyone lately. While the cyclical 17-year phenomenon is nothing new, it is happening at a particularly fraught time in the world and perhaps is a way to distract ourselves from the traumatic pandemic year.

It is also occurring during a time where social media and the internet have more “buzz” than ever. After a year of unprecedented isolation mitigated by advances in communication technology, more of us are ready to chat online about communal events. During the panicked early days of the pandemic, and the more recent news cycles about vaccinations and variants, people readily turned to social media to discuss what information was out there and process it rapidly.

Sometimes this medium worked against us, with misinformation campaigns and anti-vaxxer, anti-masking diatribes. But in other ways, it helped reassure some of us with up-to-date information, crowdsourced from other experts like epidemiologists and physicians, to arm ourselves with the best protection even before established institutions made official pronouncements (as in the case of earlier stories that airborne spread was going to be a significant concern for COVID-19, and that masking was the best way to mitigate this risk).

As America slowly adjusts to the next phase of this pandemic, with a significant number of vaccinated populace and reopenings occurring, the cicadas are perhaps a symbol of our own slow, unusual re-emergence from our quarantined lives. People online, in neighborhood groups and personal pages alike, are eagerly posting every photo of the early cicada pods and the initial starter wave of critters stirring to life. Very shortly, the expected hordes will be everywhere, covering trees and lawns and pavement in many rural and suburban areas (but not so much the recent hard-hit cities). In a recent email thread at work, where my division has been work-at-home since the pandemic started, one mention of cicadas led to a chain of almost 100 mass emails of people sharing jokes and anecdotes about them.

There is also some gallows humor involved as people in the thread and in the media have readily discussed ways to eat the cicadas, calling them “tree shrimp” and more. I have no recollection of similar discussions during the past two cicada waves I have lived through. Perhaps after a year of tense survival, where even venturing to the local supermarket was fraught with fear and peril and toilet paper shortages made us feel feral, our focus on cicada cuisine is a strange way of both joking about and feeling comforted by the idea that we can literally eat our way through this new invasion, and use it to sustain ourselves if needed. We can ingest this “threat,” even if realistically cicadas are rather harmless bugs as far as bugs go (damage to some trees/plants aside).

The long time cycle is also part of the cicadas’ allure, as their periodic renaissance serves as time posts for our lives and the passage of years. As I have reached solid middle age, with white hairs no longer tweezable and reading glasses necessary, this third cicada cycle for me confirms that fact. I effectively missed the last cycle, living in Manhattan in 2004 during another sensitive time, after 9/11 in 2001 and a mass blackout in 2003, but with no cicadas to muse or munch upon.

But I clearly remember my first cycle, during middle school in 1987, with the chunky glistening red-eyed cicadas carpeting the street beside the bus stop we waited at. Normally terrified of bugs, I lost all fear of cicadas due to massive desensitization; they were plainly everywhere. We would play with and poke at them and toss them at each other, and the loud chirping-buzzing sound still reminds me of a torrid summer of transition, moving into adolescence.

The earliest photos have surprised me because the shiny jet-black cicadas of my memory are a pale yellow so far, although I’ve heard those are the early-phase ones, as we closely document each step of this latest Brood X. So hopefully, this event will help all of us feel more collective amusement and serve as a virtual water cooler topic while we try to restore some sense of post-pandemic normalcy. After a year of unspeakable loss and strife, maybe the cicadas are the perfect “soft” pandemic to regain our confidence and restoration, to remind ourselves that after all these 17-year-cycles, we are somehow still here.

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