Samuel Pepys Already Wrote Your Pandemic Memoir — He Just Did It in 1665

Somewhere around March 2020, a lot of Americans discovered sourdough starter, canceled their travel plans, and told themselves this would probably be over by summer. If you were one of them, you were in excellent historical company. The citizens of Florence said almost exactly the same thing in the spring of 1348, right before the Black Death killed somewhere between a third and half of Europe's population.

This is not meant to be alarming in retrospect. It's meant to be clarifying. Because the psychological arc of a society moving through an epidemic — the specific sequence of emotional stages, the social behaviors, the ways people treat each other when they're scared and then exhausted and then just done — has been documented across centuries with a consistency that should stop us cold.

Human beings in a crisis are running the same emotional software they've always run. And we have the receipts.

The Diary That Predicted Your Timeline

Samuel Pepys was a naval administrator in London who kept a detailed diary from 1660 to 1669. He wrote about everything: his work, his marriage, his finances, the theater, the food, the politics. He was not writing for posterity. He was writing in a personal shorthand cipher, for himself, the way people now compose voice memos they never intend to share.

In 1665, the bubonic plague returned to London. Pepys kept writing.

What he recorded is, in retrospect, an almost clinically precise map of how a modern society — and 17th-century London was, by the standards of its time, a sophisticated urban center — processes a catastrophic epidemic. Reading his diary now, knowing what you know about 2020, produces a specific kind of vertigo. The details are different. The sequence is identical.

In June of 1665, Pepys noted the plague was killing people in the suburbs but the city proper seemed largely fine. He went to the theater. He had dinner with friends. He was aware of the plague the way most Americans were aware of COVID in January 2020 — as a real thing happening, somewhere nearby, that hadn't yet become his problem.

By July, he was noting the red crosses on doors — the mark of a house under quarantine — with increasing frequency. He began avoiding certain streets. He started carrying a roll of tobacco in his pocket, which he believed (incorrectly) offered some protection against contagion. He was improvising a personal risk management strategy based on incomplete information, exactly as people in 2020 improvised with masks, outdoor dining, and careful decisions about which friends were in their "bubble."

Boccaccio and the Older Playbook

Three hundred years before Pepys, Giovanni Boccaccio survived the Black Death in Florence and wrote about it in the introduction to the Decameron, one of the foundational texts of Western literature. His description of Florence in 1348 is so vivid and so specific that historians still use it as a primary source.

What Boccaccio describes in the early stages of the Florentine outbreak is a city in active, creative denial. Authorities issued proclamations. Sick people were expelled from the city. Physicians proposed theories. None of it worked, and for a while the city's response was to try harder versions of the things that weren't working — more proclamations, stricter expulsions, more confident theories.

Then, when the scale of the dying became impossible to deny, the city fractured into recognizable factions. Boccaccio describes three distinct responses: those who isolated completely, those who abandoned all restraint and spent every waking hour eating, drinking, and pursuing pleasure on the theory that they were going to die anyway, and those who tried to maintain something like normal life, walking a careful middle path between paralysis and recklessness.

If you were on social media between March 2020 and the summer of 2021, you watched this exact fracture happen in real time. The isolators. The "it's just a flu" crowd at the bars. The careful middle-grounders trying to figure out whether it was safe to see their parents. Boccaccio catalogued all three types in 1348. They haven't changed.

The Scapegoating Window

Both Boccaccio and Pepys document what comes after denial with an uncomfortable precision: the search for someone to blame.

In 14th-century Europe, the scapegoating of Jewish communities during the Black Death was systematic and catastrophic. Accusations that Jews had poisoned wells spread across the continent with a speed that, given medieval communication infrastructure, is itself a testament to how urgently frightened populations need an explanation. Pope Clement VI issued papal bulls explicitly stating that Jews were dying of the plague too and therefore couldn't be responsible — a remarkably empirical response for the 14th century — and was largely ignored.

Pepys's London was somewhat less murderous about it but not more rational. Blame attached to Catholics, to foreigners, to the poor, to astral configurations, to divine punishment for the licentiousness of the Restoration court. The specific targets varied. The psychological function was constant: converting the terror of a random, invisible threat into the more manageable terror of a specific, identifiable enemy.

The 2020 to 2022 American version of this — the targeting of Asian Americans, the political weaponization of origin theories, the mutual suspicion between communities with different risk tolerances — followed the same template with modern production values. The software is old. The interface just gets updated.

The Hedonism Phase (Pepys Was Very Honest About This)

One of the things that makes Pepys's diary so useful as a psychological document is that he was honest in ways that were only possible because he thought no one would ever read it.

As the worst of the 1665 plague began to recede in late autumn, Pepys — who had spent months being careful, avoiding crowds, and sending his wife to the country for safety — went to the theater. A lot. He had affairs. He spent money. He threw dinner parties. He was, by his own account, making up for lost time with an intensity that he occasionally noted, in the diary, seemed a little excessive.

This is the phase that public health researchers, when they finally had the language for it, would call "pandemic fatigue" collapsing into compensatory behavior. You saw it in the United States in the summer of 2021, when vaccination rates climbed and restaurants filled and people who had been careful for fourteen months suddenly threw parties that were, by their own later admission, maybe a little much.

Pepys would have understood completely. He lived it. He wrote it down.

The Exhausted Return to Normal

The final stage Pepys documents — and the one that feels most familiar to anyone who lived through 2020 to 2022 — is not recovery. It's not triumph. It's a kind of worn-out resumption of ordinary life that carries the weight of everything that happened without quite being able to articulate it.

By 1666, Pepys was back at work, back at the theater, back to his routines. The plague was over. He almost never mentioned it again in the diary, except occasionally and obliquely. He didn't write a reflective entry processing what London had been through. He just... continued. The Great Fire of London burned the city to the ground that same year, and that got more diary space than the plague that had killed roughly 100,000 Londoners — about a quarter of the city's population.

Americans largely did the same thing. The cultural processing of 2020 to 2022 has been thin, scattered, and weirdly reluctant. There was no definitive moment of collective reckoning. People went back to the office, or didn't, and argued about it. They stopped wearing masks, mostly, and argued about that too. The grief was real and enormous and largely unprocessed, because the machinery of ordinary life resumed before anyone had the bandwidth to do the processing.

Boccaccio, who lost most of his close friends in 1348, dealt with it by writing a hundred stories about people who were very much alive and funny and human. The Decameron is, among other things, a document of someone refusing to let the plague be the only thing that happened.

Why You Should Read Pepys Before You Read Another COVID Retrospective

The argument here isn't that history is depressing or that nothing ever changes. The argument is the opposite: understanding that you just ran the same psychological program that Florentines ran in 1348 and Londoners ran in 1665 is genuinely clarifying. It means that what happened wasn't a uniquely American failure or a uniquely modern pathology. It was the human response to a specific kind of threat, playing out with the same structure it has always played out with.

Pepys's diary is available free online through Project Gutenberg. The Decameron is widely available in paperback. They are, in the most literal sense, more clinically useful for understanding what happened to American society between 2020 and 2022 than most of the contemporary analysis that has been published since, because they show the full arc — including the parts that come after the part we're currently in.

The past is the largest study ever conducted on human behavior under pressure. Pepys and Boccaccio are your primary sources. They were taking notes the whole time, waiting for you to catch up.