Victory Over Pandemic Day, but it's just...Thursday again
April 10, 2021 6:14 AM   Subscribe

"Everything feels so close that I fear I’ll miss the instant when this is over...one day I’ll look around and find the moment of catharsis never happened because life isn’t a movie and it just chugs along with its assortment of thrills and sorrows and longueurs and I’ll have to wrest that big moment from looking at lines on a graph, lines I yearn for with all my soul but can’t actually feel in my body. What if the pandemic ends and I’m just my same little garbage self?" (Lydia Kiesling, The Cut; part of the Wild Speculation series.)
posted by MonkeyToes (56 comments total) 32 users marked this as a favorite
 
Embrace your garbage self, and never forget: it's garbage can, not garbage can't.
posted by acb at 6:30 AM on April 10, 2021 [106 favorites]


I see a lot of people preface statements with "well we're in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic, so ..." and I strongly suspect there's going to be a non-insignificant number of them who continue saying that, like, forever. Precisely because either they have yet to identify this cathartic moment, or because they don't have one to identify in the first place yet keep hoping one happens them. And that makes me kinda sad.
posted by ToddBurson at 7:17 AM on April 10, 2021 [3 favorites]


I love this piece. It makes me sad to see people taking the whole ordeal mostly as an opportunity to find new ways to feel bad about themselves, and a lot of blame for this belongs to this notion that one is obligated to use the last deformed year to do great things and transform into a new and better person. I wish everyone could just feel proud about doing the best they could and making it through, whether they spent the time writing an opera or watching "Hogan's Heroes" reruns. If you managed to grow as a person from the experience, or take inspiration to change your life, have better relationships with people, quit your salaryman job and find meaningful work, anything like that, that is goddamn wonderful and I am happy for you. but if nothing like that happened and there you are with the garbage self still, that garbage self has much better things to do than to self-punish over this.
posted by thelonius at 7:39 AM on April 10, 2021 [46 favorites]


It's good to be reminded, occasionally, that there's a possible upside to being constitutionally pessimistic and depressed - it never occurred to me that I wouldn't be exactly the same kind of garbage person after COVID was over.

Or is it going to be more like, millions of people died and in my country, they died so gratuitously, and there was no school because everything was open and my 5-year-old said “I wish I wasn’t alive” so that people could breathe on minimum-wage employees of a Bath and Body Works and Donald Trump was the president and the election took decades and my grandmother’s funeral was on Zoom and we couldn’t do for each other when it counted most and side note I look like shit and now I’m here in the grocery store with this asshole and we’re just sipping on the poisoned chalice of American life?

QFT, because that's exactly what it's going to be like.
posted by ryanshepard at 8:10 AM on April 10, 2021 [48 favorites]


Such optimism! I’m quite certain that IF the pandemic ends, I will be in worse shape physically, mentally and financially than when it began.
posted by thedamnbees at 8:29 AM on April 10, 2021 [12 favorites]


That last paragraph reminds me of something Roger Ebert wrote after attending a funeral: "We exist in the minds of other people, in thousands of memory clusters, and one by one those clusters fade and disappear. Some years from now, at a funeral with a slide show, only one person will be able to say who we were. Then no one will know. "
posted by perhapses at 8:39 AM on April 10, 2021 [32 favorites]


Four weeks since my second shot, virtually my entire family got theirs last week. Flew up to spend a week with them before starting my new permanently remote job. I'll continue wearing a KF-94 for the next several months as a middle finger to Texas, but... my pandemic ends now. I hope that most people experience a similar family reunion after 12~16 months apart, a particular event that marks a clean break with over a year of unrelenting dread and awfulness.

My last surviving grandparent is now fully vaccinated, saw her yesterday and while plowing through 16 months of desperately needed system updates and scouring malware off her PC we talked about how much we missed each other, how the pandemic had changed all her grandchildren and our shared relief that Trump did not, in the end, recapitulate the Nazi Germany of her childhood. How it came far too close. I watched her and my retired dad spend five full minutes arguing over whether she was going to pay him $35 or $40 for mowing her lawn. After waiting that long I just started laughing "this... this is actually recreational for you two, isn't it? In fact it probably always has been and I'm only realizing it now." The whole visit has been a solid confirmation that not giving in to a year of near-daily suicide ideation was, in the final analysis, the right decision.

Much is lost: those who are gone, the damage to our institutions that will probably never be repaired before the American Empire finishes crumbling into dust, and so, so many people have lost their livelihood or homes or family members. I don't think we repair the collective psychological damage - like Seattle after the great fire we just declare the first floor of every structure to be the new basement level, pave over everything and build the next story of who we are on top of the shared trauma and grief. We offer Tours of the Underground in the form of retrospective movies and documentaries after some time has passed and we can laugh about it or at least look at it without immediately breaking down into tears. We canonize Julie Nolke as a saint.

There's nothing to do but square our shoulders and resume beating on, boats against the current. Maybe taking our loved ones a little less for granted and being a little more empathic with those who need it and a little more resolute in opposing the bigots and assholes. Going on ALL THE DATES with my wife. Being more willing to listen when people need to be heard and quicker to simply walk away from toxicity that is going nowhere. More determined to fix our healthcare nightmare. We can hope, and we can fight for something better and more gentle than what we had before.
posted by Ryvar at 10:33 AM on April 10, 2021 [37 favorites]


I really liked this piece. As someone privileged enough to work from home, get groceries delivered, etc. a lot of the joys of interacting with humanity disappeared but so did all of the friction. Not seeing precious relatives has also meant not seeing relatives I don’t give a hoot about. When one comes back the other will.
posted by rogerroger at 10:35 AM on April 10, 2021 [9 favorites]


Speaking of Julie Nolke, and from KQED folks...'This Will End': A Message to My Pre-Pandemic Self
posted by MonkeyToes at 10:39 AM on April 10, 2021 [1 favorite]


a lot of the joys of interacting with humanity disappeared but so did all of the friction.

In my experience the human friction was replaced by an endless and unpredictable technological friction. A couple of weeks ago I was able to purchase a thing that I needed with no trouble. I needed it, I bought it, I had it. And I realized how extremely rare that exchange had become--no "well they don't have [thing i need] but they have [mostly good replacement]". No "well it has shipped but it is delayed and they cannot predict when it will arrive." No "the app screwed up and now the thing isn't coming at all." No arguing with an endless phone menu loop or an AI chatbot to try and resolve the thing. Just...needed a thing, found it, bought it, took it home.

I am sure at some point I'll take that for granted again but I legit think it's going to be a while.

a solid confirmation that not giving in to a year of near-daily suicide ideation was, in the final analysis, the right decision.

This is what I am waiting for; on some level I am just so very sorry and sad to have survived. I wonder if that part will ever change. But then again I probably won't get my first shot for another month, so there's still plenty of time to not survive.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:54 AM on April 10, 2021 [4 favorites]


The other day, in a fit of depression, my internal critic informed me that "well, I guess the entire last year has been a referendum on how worthless you are.” JFC. Thank heavens I had the wherewithal to shut that down and immediately reach out to friends for support.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 11:01 AM on April 10, 2021 [11 favorites]


This hit me so hard. As shitty as I feel in the pandemic about so many aspects of my life, there has been one silver lining: not having to schlep my kids all over the place, parenting out in public with witnesses. I haven't missed it! It is way easier to be a mom when it's just us. No play dates, no parties, no lessons or classes, no getting them all into the car in a crowded parking lot, no public meltdowns, no restaurants where they're all being noisy and throwing food on the floor, no being late to parent-teacher conferences, no having to figure out what to do with them on a random day off school...

I don't know. I want regular life back but I'm also feeling such a way about just...going back one day and trying to act like it's normal again. I feel like we should all just take August off but capitalism demands we carry on. I'm actually planning to interview for a new job over the summer and maybe just...not start it till October.
posted by potrzebie at 11:16 AM on April 10, 2021 [16 favorites]


I don't think this will ever end. It will just be constantly opening too soon, just in time to have a new variant, and then clamping back down, forever and ever. Plus pockets of people who think the vaccine will give them 5G or something, and just have a constant reserve of reinfection.

The last five years of Donnie's administration and the clownshow that we've been living with have annihilated any optimism I had about the future.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 11:49 AM on April 10, 2021 [19 favorites]


That last paragraph reminds me of something Roger Ebert wrote after attending a funeral: "We exist in the minds of other people, in thousands of memory clusters, and one by one those clusters fade and disappear. Some years from now, at a funeral with a slide show, only one person will be able to say who we were. Then no one will know. "

This in turn reminds me of a very beautiful quote from the late philosopher Derek Parfit:

When I believed [that personal identity is what matters], I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.

When I believed [that personal identity is what matters], I also cared more about my inevitable death. After my death, there will be no one living who will be me. I can now redescribe this fact. Though there will later be many experiences, none of these experiences will be connected to my present experiences by chains of such direct connections as those involved in experience-memory, or in the carrying out of an earlier intention. Some of these future experiences may be related to my present experiences in less direct ways. There will later be some memories about my life. And there may later be thoughts that are influenced by mine, or things done as the result of my advice. My death will break the more direct relations between my present experiences and future experiences, but it will not break various other relations. This is all there is to the fact that there will be no one living who will be me. Now that I have seen this, my death seems to me less bad.

posted by thelonius at 12:09 PM on April 10, 2021 [20 favorites]


We're nowhere near out of the woods yet. The vaccine rollout is slowed down by poor yields and supply-chain crunches in manufacturing, and new mutations arise which show increased vaccine resistance. This will probably be socioculturally equivalent to a world war, in terms of being a number of lost years (more than two, probably more than three) with entirely different worlds on either side of it.

And the key thing is that the After Times will not be a seamless continuation of the Before Times. Some things are not coming back. I suspect that the sort of cheap travel that existed in the Before Times will not return, with its infrastructure having atrophied (i.e., airline bankruptcies and such) and the risk of borders snapping shut at a moment's notice being on the books for decades, even as its probability recedes, along with ecological considerations being factored in. A long-haul return flight may go from something one saves up for a year for to a once-in-a-lifetime experience, for example. Perhaps slower travel will replace this, with zero-carbon cylinder-ship ocean liners crossing the Atlantic and the Trans-Siberian Railway competing with a new Chinese high-speed line through the 'stans for cross-Eurasian traffic. The upside may be that flexible working may allow people to not need a month's leave to go from, say, London to Tokyo and back; with fast internet access and appropriate accommodations, travellers could work remotely in their regular hours as their ship crosses the Equator or the Siberian tundra scrolls past outside, taking the actual leave once they arrive.
posted by acb at 1:00 PM on April 10, 2021 [4 favorites]


want regular life back but I'm also feeling such a way about just...going back one day and trying to act like it's normal again.

That's how I feel. We're supposed to do regular things again? And work? And play? All the same? Like nothing happened? I'm realizing I am more traumatized than I imagined I was. A lot more.
posted by tiny frying pan at 1:02 PM on April 10, 2021 [30 favorites]


I'm afraid that we are going to go back to "normal". I'm afraid that the necessary transition to a post-pandemic world is going to be too much for governments and industry to stomach, that the admission that yes, a lot of people can work remotely and from home effectively is going to break the psyche of the management class. I'm already seeing it in my workplace - too many people in middle and upper management being confronted with the fact that they are providing nothing of value, and that the workers are productive without them. They're fucking terrified that their jobs have been demonstrated to be largely irrelevant, that they spent their days walking around lording themselves over others. I'm afraid that government and industry are going to try to force the old normal back into place, and kill people on the way, sacrifices to the twin gods of capitalism and profit.

And I don't think there's really, truly going to be a "post-pandemic" world. The 1918 influenza just kept mutating, and we have flu season now. Covid-19 is following a similar path. Masks *should* be normal. There's no "regular" again like it was before.

And I'm betting this won't be the last pandemic I see in my life. I don't see us collectively learning the right lessons. I think Covid-19 is practice. Buckle the fuck up.

And will I be the same garbage person I was before pandemic land? Yes. That much at least, will stay consistent.
posted by mrgoat at 2:20 PM on April 10, 2021 [23 favorites]


Some things are not coming back. I suspect that the sort of cheap travel that existed in the Before Times will not return, with its infrastructure having atrophied (i.e., airline bankruptcies and such) and the risk of borders snapping shut at a moment's notice

One of the things I'm dreading about the immediate post-COVID period is the orgy of gleeful fossil fuel consumption that's going to accompany it, and the months-long stream of social media posts about people's far-flung vacations.

As soon as that door opens again, capital is going to flood in and do its best to recreate the beforetimes as if nothing had happened.

I think pretty regularly about the movie adaptation of Children of Men and how right it got the look and feel of "the future" - it's not really any different from what we have right now, just progressively drabber, dirtier, and more randomly and incoherently dangerous. That's the world I'm betting on, not some "after" in which we suddenly become capable of seismic shifts in our collective thinking on a scale that isn't measured in generations.
posted by ryanshepard at 2:30 PM on April 10, 2021 [14 favorites]


I work for a huge energy/finance info and tech firm, and while they are firmly in bed with the capitalist and extractionist world view, it may make you feel a little better that even the giant fossil fuel dinosaurs are spending most of their time talking about the transition to renewables. For example look at the focus of this huge annual energy conference we host : CERAweek. Better than nothing? I don’t know.
posted by freecellwizard at 2:50 PM on April 10, 2021 [4 favorites]


even the giant fossil fuel dinosaurs are spending most of their time talking about the transition to renewables

I should hope so. The first megacorp to get off their asses and pivot full on to climate-friendly renewables is going to make fucking bank.
posted by mrgoat at 3:10 PM on April 10, 2021 [3 favorites]


Just chiming in to say there's some next- level doomsaying in the replies, and I don't think it's based in reality. Coronavirus doesn't mutate nearly as fast or as drastically as Influenza. Some mutated strains are more resistant to the vaccine... slightly, but vaccines are still effective.

I'm old enough to remember threads from 5-6 months ago that were full of people certain that America was going to descent into full-on fascism or civil war. I know it can be tempting to treat your free-floating anxiety like it's a Palantir that lets you see into the future, but it isn't. The most likely outcome is that things go more or less back to normal, like they did after the Spanish Flu. We'll have to deal with some ugly ramifications but life as normal will mostly return, for better and worse.
posted by Green Winnebago at 3:33 PM on April 10, 2021 [45 favorites]


I haven't done anything. There has been no real growth on my part in the last year. Just isolation, but also a keen awareness that few of the people I know are actually isolating. Hell, in Japan, life is almost exactly normal, except that bars and restaurants can only stay open until 8 (or 9, and, in some cases, it literally depends on which side of the train station the bar or restaurant is). The new school year started yesterday, and I'm back at school. The head foreign teacher proudly explained that he'd been the person to convince the school that we no longer needed the students to put the plastic shields on their desks (at a school where, at the end of last term, two students were diagnosed with covid). I'm stuck with the realization that my continued health and well being are no longer in my own hands, that I'm at the mercy of the most careless person I happen to run into on any given day.

The trains are utterly and completely packed in the morning. The only sign that there's anything not normal is that (sigh) nearly everyone is wearing a mask. Numbers are spiking again and the vaccine rollout is being so utterly bungled that I'm daydreaming about special commissions being formed, inquiries, and charges against members of the government for how badly it's going. Medical professionals were (originally) supposed to have been already vaccinated, yet the news last night mentioned there was an entire ward of Tokyo where not a single doctor, nurse, orderly, or anyone connected to healthcare had been vaccinated yet. Vaccinations for the elderly were supposed to start last month, but now they're supposed to start next month. When vaccines were first announced, plans called for vaccination of "normal" folks to start in June and be finished before July, but all I feel about that now is anger at the version of me that felt hopeful that I might be able to enjoy some form of the end of summer after all.

I'm more and more certain that the Olympics will actually happen, that there is cynically too much money at stake for too many of the companies that actually run this country (seriously, the head of the ruling party called for a resumption of the travel voucher program that has been identified as a key part of the spread of covid around the country, and he's also the head of, get this, a consortium of tourism companies) to actual give a shit about the human cost of life. There was so much air time given to denials that there were ever discussions of prioritizing vaccines for Japanese Olympic athletes over the elderly (who, you know, still haven't had theirs) that I'm reasonably sure those discussions not only took place, but were probably pretty close to being finalized before someone leaked it so that the overwhelming bad press of the last week caused some long dormant organ that operates shame to awaken in the people doing the planning. Meanwhile, I'm looking at, what, maybe September for a shot? At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't happen this year, and meanwhile, the explosion of cases in Osaka seems to be almost entirely the UK variant.

The joke about saying they'll hold the games without foreign spectators was met with derisive snickers, I mean, the people coming from other countries will be the only ones vaccinated...

All that's happened to me over the last year is that I am angrier. I'm angry at the incompetence, the laziness, the selfishness that I see every goddamn day. I'm angry at people who handwave away even one goddamn death because they're just tired of mild inconvenience. I'm exhausted by the anger that has built up inside of me with each and every example I see of just how little people actually give a fuck about the health and safety of others the second it comes down to just one more second of waiting, just one small measure of thoughtfulness.

I know the anger isn't new, and I know I've had it in me for a long time, but my worry is that the rage filled trash monster I've become is just never going to stop being this angry. It's poisonous. It's literally exhausting. But when it comes down to it, my general reaction to this whole year is that I've always known that out there in the world there are people who couldn't be fucked to care about their fellow humans. I've known that there are people too apathetic or just plain ignorant about how to care for others. It wasn't until I could see who these people were (it's pretty damn simple: they don't wear masks) that I was just utterly overwhelmed by how many of them there are. Just, so damn many, and all I'm left with is anger, and internalized browbeating of myself for ever being hopeful enough to think that it wasn't all already this bad all along.
posted by Ghidorah at 4:32 PM on April 10, 2021 [32 favorites]


There's an entire cohort of management that trained on seeing butts in seats and they CANNOT WAIT to force people to shuffle back into the office. I'm already seeing this in my job. "Everyone wants to get back into the office..." Really? Everyone? Check again.

We could have learned something, but instead we will retreat back into the Before Times ways. The very definition of insanity.

As for free-floating fascism, the more we learn regarding the events of January 6, the more I realize we were probably three minutes shy of Pence being strung up in front of his children. And there are over 150 bill restricting voting in the future. We came so fucking close and they want to make it easier next time.

So yeah, I'm not really banking on our ability to recover from this, either.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 5:12 PM on April 10, 2021 [12 favorites]


Just chiming in to say there's some next- level doomsaying in the replies

Hopefully this doesn't come off as bragging or anything but to inject some good vibes here because I too am a little bit tired of doomposting: the pandemic has been one of the best things for my mental health in years. In a sorta "accelerationism but my mental health" or maybe integer overflow fashion, so it got real bad before it got real good, but if it happened to me maybe it can happen to others and the future will be a better place? Personally I'm pretty optimistic.
posted by ToddBurson at 5:52 PM on April 10, 2021 [4 favorites]


Spotted just now: A Report from the After Times. Normal is never coming back. We’ve got to be gentle with each other, by Laurie Penny.

"Here in Australia, I’m a traveller from another planet. It’s psychosocial jet-lag, where I got on a twenty-hour flight and woke up with a time difference of two years between me and everyone else I know. It is desperately strange, deeply uncomfortable, to walk down the street and be so misaligned with the mood of a city. A part of me wants to yell at people to put their masks on and stop touching things, because while my brain knows it’s safe, my body hasn’t yet absorbed that message. I’m a visitor from an emotional universe where everyone is grieving and the future seems to rush towards you like the tarmac six stories below."
posted by MonkeyToes at 6:04 PM on April 10, 2021 [17 favorites]


The most likely outcome is that things go more or less back to normal, like they did after the Spanish Flu.

What happened after the Spanish flu is about the worst historical evidence I can think of for things going back to normal. Things in the 1920s were among almost every dimension dramatically different from conditions in the 19-teens, even if you completely subtract WWI from the equation.

History argues that things are gonna change. In ways we can’t hope to predict. Some changes will please us, some not.
posted by Miko at 8:35 PM on April 10, 2021 [4 favorites]


Historically, most people don't come out of year-plus disasters like wars as "better people." Continually sustained trauma is harmful to most. As the American survivors of our last war of conscription age, we may have been forgetting this.

Some people do look back on war years with a certain nostalgia and excitement. That's because, for some, they provide a sense of working together towards a shared goal, dramatic change, opportunities that would ordinarily not be available, heightened geographic mobility. Being marooned in your apartment whilst idiots argue that your, or your loved one's, life is not worth sacrificing to save gives most people few or none of those things.

I'm better at reading Homeric Greek than I was at the start of all this, and that's gonna have to do.

(Personally, I say we all take turns on fully-paid vacation: Team July Off and Team August Off. Everybody.)
posted by praemunire at 9:03 PM on April 10, 2021 [15 favorites]


I'd be interested to read about societal discontinuities traceable to the 1918 pandemic, but I would think they'd be difficult to disentangle from the aftereffects of the Great War and the ongoing technological transformations of industrialized society. Indeed, from what I've read, one of the notable aspects of the 1918 pandemic was how it faded from historical consciousness compared to memories of the Great War, at least until this year. The 1920's certainly have a mixed set of historical narratives through which we remember them: On the one hand you have the "roaring 20's", flappers, jazz, woman's suffrage, and radio; on the other hand you have the omnipresent KKK, prohibition, generalized political corruption, and a bubble economy spiraling towards eventual crash. One thing people didn't seem to do is withdraw from each other and broader society - they didn't have that option.

I think one reason the 1918 pandemic might have faded from historical memory compared to WWI despite killing more people than that conflict was because infectious diseases were still viewed as "acts of god" compared to man-made disasters like wars. The idea that we could work and educate ourselves virtually while tracking in real time and developing a vaccine for an emerging disease within the space of a year would have been science fiction as late the 1990's. Our sense of control of infectious disease has expanded, which paradoxically seems to have increased our anxieties about them. One legacy of the pandemic, which we might perhaps regrettably forget, is a repeated demonstration of the ability of massive public investment and direction to speed scientific discovery. MRNA vaccine technology might finally deliver us an HIV vaccine - if - we decide to invest in it.

For me, its been a sad discovery that everyday life and societal interaction before the pandemic was so stressful for some people that isolation from workplaces and schools is preferable to a world free from restrictions on social interaction and fear of a deadly disease. To me, that is an indictment of an atomized society filled with hierarchical and alienating institutions rife with bullying and purposelessness. I read that suicides actually went down during the pandemic, which is good from a certain perspective, but sad and scary from another. Suicide has long been a leading cause of death.
posted by eagles123 at 9:26 PM on April 10, 2021 [11 favorites]


The future is not set, so I will continue to follow my mantra that there will be plenty of time to feel despair when and if the world actually ends, so I'll do it then. Procrastination has its uses.

In the meantime, I veer between appreciating that I've grown a lot and feeling bad at how more lucky and sheltered I was than so many others. I really don't know what to do with my privilege guilt (is there a German word for that) other than the small amount I'm doing by donating to worthy causes.

I have no expectations about returning to anything. I have some hope and plenty of fear. Which isn't all that different from before.
posted by emjaybee at 10:43 PM on April 10, 2021


Holy shit that Laurie Pennie essay is not stopping the being relevant to my aaaaaa. Read it if you would.
posted by away for regrooving at 11:52 PM on April 10, 2021


If I've learned anything from the pandemic, it's to try to be more tolerant and understanding of neurotypicals. When the lockdowns first kicked off, people's main concerns were things like 'when can I go out with my friends again?' and 'when can I hug my grandchildren?', which seemed so shallow and selfish.

It turns out that these things are real, important, fundamental instincts for most humans. It's all been so much tougher for them than it has been for me. I too veer between gratitude and Vorrechtsschuld.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 1:58 AM on April 11, 2021 [7 favorites]


> It will just be constantly opening too soon, just in time to have a new variant, and then clamping back down, forever and ever.

"On-tari-ari-ari-o!"

To add my voice to the silver-linings chorus in here...it's not sustainable and I still feel there are almost certainly worse times for my vocation looming*, but I'm a public librarian who works in a rare books/special collections department and for the time being I can say that, professionally-speaking, the past year has been the best one of my career. It's been everything I like about my job with almost everything I don't like about it removed. I don't miss dealing with the public - at all - and all of the callous disregard for others, flouting of rules that are in place for the benefit of everyone, etc. of the pandemic era is the tragedy of the commons dynamic of the public library writ society-wide.

* in a few years the library where I work will probably be a condo or the Rogers Infotainment Centre after the city sells it off to keep property taxes below the rate of inflation
posted by The Card Cheat at 4:37 AM on April 11, 2021 [3 favorites]


On a personal level, I'm coming to the realisation that my next trip from Europe to Australia may be my last. (I'm not—as far as anyone can know, at least—close to the end of my life, though with the expectation that the age of cheap travel is over, and flying in particular will become an order of magnitude more expensive, taking a few long-haul flights every few years is not going to be a thing except for the kinds of people who own private jets.) And as such that it will either consist of me going over to liquidate my storage locker and do a goodbye tour, or moving back to end my days there, in the land of runaway bushfires, slow internet access, penal-colony authoritarianism, an economy that depends entirely on mining and real-estate speculation and damn good coffee, though where my friends and family live. Which would be a tough choice, as if all goes well, I should be eligible for Swedish citizenship in a few years (it's a lot quicker than British citizenship was, which took me 9⅓ years to get), and Sweden would be, in material terms, an excellent place to stay, except that I don't have many friends here (I have some acquaintances, though when going out to drink was a thing, they generally talked among themselves in Swedish about cultural reference points I was not privy; this was like the London experience at the start plus a language barrier).

Complicating things, I adopted a cat last year; she's an anxious middle-aged lady cat whose original owner died and who would not cope well with 24 hours in aircraft cargo holds and 10 days in a quarantine facility. She is also essentially my social circle here.
posted by acb at 5:10 AM on April 11, 2021 [2 favorites]


> For me, its been a sad discovery that everyday life and societal interaction before the pandemic was so stressful for some people that isolation from workplaces and schools is preferable to a world free from restrictions on social interaction and fear of a deadly disease. To me, that is an indictment of an atomized society filled with hierarchical and alienating institutions rife with bullying and purposelessness.

Perhaps this Washington Post piece "Meet the introverts who are dreading a return to normal" provides some additional perspective. I think for a number of people, the pandemic provided a respite from forced or obligatory social interactions that wouldn't be classified as bullying. The restrictions on social interaction allowed people to engage with others to the extent they felt comfortable, and retreat when necessary, without needing to make excuses or worry about the impression they were making on others.
posted by needled at 6:13 AM on April 11, 2021 [12 favorites]


For me, its been a sad discovery that everyday life and societal interaction before the pandemic was so stressful for some people that isolation from workplaces and schools is preferable to a world free from restrictions on social interaction and fear of a deadly disease. To me, that is an indictment of an atomized society filled with hierarchical and alienating institutions rife with bullying and purposelessness.

Or, you know, it could just be that some of us find social interaction difficult at the best of times. I'm an autistic introvert, and aside from my preexisting depression and anxiety spiking due to there being a global pandemic and all that, I've been thriving being 100% WFH instead of having to deal with commuting to work and then being surrounded by people all day. And I like my coworkers, so it's not that. It's that as an autist, dealing with people is draining, even the nice ones.

Once it's possible to go back to the office, I'll probably go to a schedule of two days in the office and three days WFH. I imagine I'll like my coworkers even better when I'm not surrounded by them 40 hours a week.
posted by Lexica at 10:33 AM on April 11, 2021 [5 favorites]


I read that suicides actually went down during the pandemic, which is good from a certain perspective, but sad and scary from another.

That is really interesting. I can speculate a couple of ways that might work, but I don't feel ok claiming that I understand why or why not people who are at risk escalate to attempts, especially after the death a couple of years ago of a friend, who I had thought was out of trouble.
posted by thelonius at 10:40 AM on April 11, 2021


For me, its been a sad discovery that everyday life and societal interaction before the pandemic was so stressful for some people that isolation from workplaces and schools is preferable to a world free from restrictions on social interaction and fear of a deadly disease.

While I won't say this describes me 100%, it probably gets about 95% of the way there. Being able to work from home full-time for the past year meant that I didn't have to put on my "I'm not an extrovert, but I play one on TV" persona, which can be exhausting at the best of times. No chit-chat, no small talk in the break room, and no weird looks when I would avoid the chit-chat and small talk because I just wanted to get back to my desk and work.

Whenever I read a post on the blue or the green and people are talking about how much they miss hanging out with friends or going to the bar or just being around other people, all I can think of is wow, that doesn't describe me at all. I can't imagine missing those things, and I'm glad I've had an excuse to not do any of those things without some kind of repercussions.

I do hope that for the people who need that kind of interaction that things get back to a place where they can have that as part of their world. I also hope that space still exists for those of us who found this year of isolation to be exactly what we needed.
posted by ralan at 11:13 AM on April 11, 2021 [7 favorites]


I'm not returning to online dating because I know Pandemic Achiever Guy is about to drop.
posted by fluttering hellfire at 11:50 AM on April 11, 2021 [5 favorites]


I'm not returning to dating, because during the pandemic, I've come to the realisation that I've probably aged out of all that, and I'm surprisingly fine with that.

I suspect that, for a number of people (average age, about 40, standard deviation, ~7 years), the Rona will serve as a sort of great dividing range between an overly extended adolescence and accepting that one is Old and owning that.
posted by acb at 2:00 PM on April 11, 2021 [5 favorites]


I’m not returning to online dating because it didn’t work before the pandemic, so it’s not going to work afterwards.
posted by Melismata at 5:20 PM on April 11, 2021 [1 favorite]


Just about the day my state switched from requiring everyone who could work from home to do to only "strongly encouraging" it, my boss declared we must show up at work 2 days a week starting immediately. No explanation, no notice. I'm surprised at how upset I am by this, even though I don't really enjoy working from home and we all were vaccinated. I'm just not ready to reemerge. I miss my friends but the thought of being visible to people for long stretches of the day...ugh. That invisibility might have been what was getting me through.
posted by sepviva at 8:54 PM on April 11, 2021 [6 favorites]


My wife's employer offered to prepare on-site offices for her team (she provides academic and admissions support for a mostly online professional college; her student contact had always been mostly through videocalls, telephone, and email), and received deafening silence from the entire team, who apparently haven't much missed commuting. Hopefully this "offer" will not be rephrased as a directive.

I really hope that we come out of all of this with a lot less commuting to work which doesn't need to be done in an office. We are not good at learning lessons, and a lot of the things we should have learned about mutual aid and the fragility of our social support systems seem not to be taking, but it would be nice to learn at least this one.
posted by jackbishop at 7:47 AM on April 12, 2021


The reason the 20s epidemic faded from memory is that people wanted it do. It was terrible. They wanted to forget it, and we will forget this one, with intention.

And as a public historian who recently did some work on this period, it’s unfair to say their virus control measures were primitive. They knew how it was transmitted and how to prevent it. There was a massive public health campaign almost identical to our current one - see the Library of Congress for the posters and the pamphlets. The one thing they couldn’t hope for was the vaccine - but even though we have a mostly-death-preventing vaccine now, it doesn’t really change the ultimate destination of this virus, which is to become endemic, just as the 1918 flu did.
posted by Miko at 8:29 AM on April 12, 2021 [8 favorites]


There's an entire cohort of management that trained on seeing butts in seats and they CANNOT WAIT to force people to shuffle back into the office. I'm already seeing this in my job. "Everyone wants to get back into the office..." Really? Everyone? Check again.

I keep thinking about this. My office building, I suspect like many, is laid out where 70% of workers have private offices and maybe 30% work in open lobbies or cubicles. It doesn't seem like mask-wearing in open spaces is going away anytime soon.

So what happens when you tell people that indefinitely, most of you in the office get to close your doors and work unmasked, but the rest of you have to wear one all the time? My building doesn't even have an enclosed break room. Our spaces weren't built for this.
posted by nakedmolerats at 12:23 PM on April 12, 2021 [3 favorites]


I suspect that, for a number of people (average age, about 40, standard deviation, ~7 years), the Rona will serve as a sort of great dividing range between an overly extended adolescence and accepting that one is Old and owning that.

Setting aside that I don't think dating is particularly adolescent (especially in a culture where marriage is not particularly expected before one is in one's late 20s-30s)... if anything, this has made me more inclined to keep doing the extended-adolescence things, because it turns out not doing them suuuuuuuuuuuuuucks and is super boring.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 12:35 PM on April 12, 2021 [2 favorites]


My work is bribing people to show them a completed vaccination card for an extra personal day. I'm assuming this will then allow them to say well now you can be in office without fear, vaccinated person, so get back here.
posted by tiny frying pan at 12:47 PM on April 12, 2021 [3 favorites]


> if anything, this has made me more inclined to keep doing the extended-adolescence things, because it turns out not doing them suuuuuuuuuuuuuucks and is super boring.

I for one am doing as little work as possible and squeezing as much fun out of my job as I can, because that's how I'm going to roll if I'm going to be forced to come to work in the middle of the worst (in my neck of the woods, anyway) of the pandemic by managers who are, of course, mostly "working" from home.
posted by The Card Cheat at 1:41 PM on April 12, 2021 [1 favorite]


[in 1918] infectious diseases were still viewed as "acts of god" compared to man-made disasters like wars.

Not really. Microbiology and epidemiology were established in the mid-1800s (Pasteur, Semmelweis, Snow). It had been 75 years (!!) since Florence Nightingale famously demonstrated that disease was more deadly than bullets (still a better infographic than 95% of covid-related graphics I've seen). And this stuff was being taught in schools from a young age; the 8th grade test in Olympia WA in 1910 included a question on the germ theory of disease.

The public health advice in 1918 was basically the same as the public health advice in 2020: wear a (well-fitted) (cloth) mask, wash your hands, don't spit randomly on the street, avoid crowded places-- and use governmental authority to close places where people tend to congregate. The pushback in 1918 was also the same as in 2020; that article quotes OG anti-masker "Dr. Bracken, of the State Board of Health... did not wear one himself, saying, “I personally prefer to take my chances.”" Not to mention the "nationalization" of the disease ("Spanish flu," "Chinese virus," "UK variant").

There was also rapid development of vaccines (against pneumococcus which is often a secondary bacterial infection that accompanies influenza; the flu virus had not yet been identified [I think no viruses had been identified by 1918? they are nasty little buggers]; that pneumococcal vaccine is the great-grandpa of the one you should all get when you're 50), and a rush of people hoping to get vaccinated, and people taking bribes to vaccinate others.

The past is a foreign country, but it's populated by the same types of people as today. I think the reason the 1918 flu faded from public consciousness when the war did not is because the the enemy was literally invisible. It's really hard to process a trauma when you can't even see the thing that caused it. And because then as now, people were eager for a "return to normalcy" (the slogan of the winning ticket in 1920); at least the Biden campaign went with the slightly more nuanced "build back better."
posted by basalganglia at 2:19 PM on April 12, 2021 [2 favorites]


The reason the 20s epidemic faded from memory is that people wanted it do. It was terrible. They wanted to forget it, and we will forget this one, with intention.

The great forgetting has arrived, jump-started by all of the people who continue to deny the severity of COVID, to minimize it, to assure the rest of us that we're hysterical and blowing all out of proportion. Who sell and wear masks made of mesh or with big vents. Who don't wear masks and tell their children to make fun of those who do. Who scream "This is bullshit!" as others breathe by ventilator. Who question case numbers and cause of death classification. And who continue to act like there's nothing out of the ordinary happening to their neighbors and fellow citizens. The foundations for their forgetting are already laid. As one who's taking pandemic precautions seriously--and whose family kept showing up at their places of public-facing work--I am incandescent with anger that they'll never have to face up to the way that their actions affected others, and that their minimizing will go hand-in-glove with the greater forgetting. Where will the space be, if any, to remember and process? Or will the trauma and grief and sacrifice be memory-holed too?

"...where the unscathed can’t quite believe the wounded..." (Teju Cole, NYT, Wayback version). Almost a year later, I am still thinking about this.

"Almost everyone I know who lived through this year in one of the worst-hit countries had a moment or many or more when ‘just about coping’ flipped over into ‘fuck no’," writes Laurie Penny. "It could have been better, if we hadn’t been so roundly betrayed by the systems of state and social care that some of us still had a shred of faith in." Are...are my neighbors OK with half a million people dying? Are they OK with government just being missing in action as far as helping up cope with all of the fucked-up consequences of the virus? They're angry with public health measures, with the idea of public health? And it feels unsafe to be angry about that, here among the mask-non-compliant, some of whom are getting vaccinated now, grudgingly, after their performative disobedience has already put others at risk. The forgetting means that I will have to swallow this and Be The Bigger Person and Work to Understand Other Perspectives and that will be my new, post-pandemic self, I guess, right back to being annoyed that people don't use turn signals or put grocery carts in the cart corrals and calling it victory that my garbage self has survived to think Christ, what an asshole. Let us now bow our heads and forget so we can go on.
posted by MonkeyToes at 2:36 PM on April 12, 2021 [9 favorites]


My work is bribing people to show them a completed vaccination card for an extra personal day. I'm assuming this will then allow them to say well now you can be in office without fear, vaccinated person, so get back here.

Mine is asking us to report so that "we can better contact trace when there are COVID exposures! That way we'll know if you were already vaxxed!"

Yeah no how about you either require it or don't.
posted by nakedmolerats at 3:35 PM on April 12, 2021 [1 favorite]


if anything, this has made me more inclined to keep doing the extended-adolescence things, because it turns out not doing them suuuuuuuuuuuuuucks and is super boring.

There's also the problem of continuity. If you go to, say, bars or clubs catering for a youthful crowd through your 20s, 30s and into your 40s, you don't notice yourself ageing, members of your age cohort dropping out and being replaced with a constantly replenishing crop of twentysomethings, with increasingly different aesthetic sensibilities. You're the frog in the saucepan, feeling the warmth of the water though not finding it uncomfortable. If, however, you take a forced break of a few years and then come back, you may as well have stepped into the Mos Eisley Cantina. Everybody's really young, the music is all weird and so is the fashion. Someone young enough to be your nephew/niece rolls their eyes at your skinny jeans and rejoins their conversation, which you are not party to and can't understand half of. You're an outsider and feel like you've just been defrosted after a few millennia trapped in ice. In other words, the frog you are has just hopped into a pot of simmering water, gotten badly scolded and needs to get the hell out of there. From now on, “extended adolesence” will have to take the form of staying in your room, where time stands still, and listening to your Pixies CDs or emulating the video games you played in your teens or something.
posted by acb at 12:49 PM on April 13, 2021 [2 favorites]


Setting aside that I don't think dating is particularly adolescent

Dating isn't adolescent. Snogging is adolescent.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 2:20 PM on April 13, 2021


Not to mention the "nationalization" of the disease ("Spanish flu," "Chinese virus," "UK variant").

Just as I thought
You've been and caught
An Asiatic flu –
You mustn’t go near dogs I fear
Unless they come near you.

-- Spike Milligan (1918-2002)
posted by Cardinal Fang at 2:24 PM on April 13, 2021


Everybody's really young, the music is all weird and so is the fashion. Someone young enough to be your nephew/niece rolls their eyes at your skinny jeans and rejoins their conversation, which you are not party to and can't understand half of. You're an outsider and feel like you've just been defrosted after a few millennia trapped in ice.

I feel like you are goin' to the wrong bars? In the bars I frequent absolutely nobody is EVER young or cool, even the people who are objectively young and cool. But it's true that not every city has as healthy a crop of Old Man Corner Bars as Chicago; in this way we are truly blessed.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 3:59 PM on April 13, 2021 [1 favorite]


(Also my nephew and niece are 3 and 5, respectively. They are only allowed into bars in Brooklyn and have no opinions on jeans.)
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 4:01 PM on April 13, 2021 [1 favorite]


"Most service journalism is a workaround, a way of rendering specific and material failures as issues of personal choice. There’s no life hack that gets around the knowledge your government was happy to let a vast swath of its population die, no radical acceptance of such a monumental chain of loss. Reading pages filled with recommendations on navigating a slightly altered future feels like receiving a missive from another world—a final and devastating cruelty that we’d all have to soldier on pretending the loss isn’t collective and omnipresent, that in the end not so much has really changed." (Molly Osberg, Jezebel: There Is No After)
posted by MonkeyToes at 1:52 PM on April 18, 2021


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