A prediction for post-pandemic life
Very little, if anything, will change.
That's my prediction. Let me clarify what I don't mean, before I say what I do.
What I don't mean is that there won't be personal, economic, structural, and political consequences. There will be, in all kinds of ways we can and can't predict. Many people will have had Covid-19 symptoms and lived to tell the tale; many more will know someone, or know someone who knows someone, who died as a result of the virus. The U.S. and other Western nations may indeed pursue "conscious uncoupling" from the Communist regime in China; that spells uncertainty and international friction for decades to come. Supply lines, products, and consumer convenience may grow volatile and change substantially in only a handful of years. Perhaps most lasting of all, individuals and families forced into joblessness will have had to live (and may continue living) on a combination of unemployment benefits, stimulus checks, and private charity. Whole institutions, such as higher education, may be utterly transformed as a result of the global pandemic and economic shutdown. Many of my friends will be out of a job and devoid of prospects. I might be among them.
Those features are sufficient to describe a world objectively changed in the interval between "before" and "after." And perhaps this is what writers mean when they speak of how "nothing will ever be the same" or "there is no going back to normal" or "everything will be different on the other side of this."
But when I read pieces that assert variations on that theme, I discern something else. The meaning is both more specific and more general. Something like: Each of us will never be the same; the world as experienced by all of us will be utterly different. And though understandable, I think this is one of those moments that, because we cannot see to the end of it, much less beyond it, our imaginations fail when they attempt to reach forward to "life afterward."
It is true that what we are experiencing is unique. But that uniqueness won't last. Unless the death rate were to unexpectedly and rapidly spike, or the economic shutdown were to last half a decade, life will return to normal in two or three years. Again, that won't mean the conditions of our common life will be good. The financial aftershock may be devastating—but lack of jobs, awful wages, and a bad economy are, unfortunately, mundane features of ordinary life.
What I mean is that you and I won't be different. We will remember what it was like to shelter in place. But life will simply resume, mostly the way it was. The virus hasn't forced us into digging bunkers or sleeping on rooftops; neither the electric grid nor even the internet have gone down; we're not piling ten families into a single domicile, rationing scraps and burning books for warmth. We're living our lives at home—which may be bad or good, claustrophobic or monastic, abusive or supportive, lonely or bustling with multiple generations—but still home, the place to which we retire to eat or sleep on a normal day. And what we're doing when we're not working is cooking, streaming, teaching, cleaning, reading, building, going stir crazy, forming pacts with like-minded neighbors, whatever—we're not hiding in our bathrooms, or tearing down the walls for wood, or boarding up the windows out of fear.
I predict, and it's only a prediction, that in a few years this will have become a strange and somewhat surreal memory. If the economy recovers quickly, that will make it recede into the past even faster than it otherwise would. Either way, we'll be the same people we were before we quarantined ourselves. Our attention will be drawn to the next thing, however smaller or less interesting by comparison to our current moment. This will be this, and that will be that, and we'll move on. We ourselves, and the world we experience around us, will for the most part prove unchanged.
That's my prediction. Let me clarify what I don't mean, before I say what I do.
What I don't mean is that there won't be personal, economic, structural, and political consequences. There will be, in all kinds of ways we can and can't predict. Many people will have had Covid-19 symptoms and lived to tell the tale; many more will know someone, or know someone who knows someone, who died as a result of the virus. The U.S. and other Western nations may indeed pursue "conscious uncoupling" from the Communist regime in China; that spells uncertainty and international friction for decades to come. Supply lines, products, and consumer convenience may grow volatile and change substantially in only a handful of years. Perhaps most lasting of all, individuals and families forced into joblessness will have had to live (and may continue living) on a combination of unemployment benefits, stimulus checks, and private charity. Whole institutions, such as higher education, may be utterly transformed as a result of the global pandemic and economic shutdown. Many of my friends will be out of a job and devoid of prospects. I might be among them.
Those features are sufficient to describe a world objectively changed in the interval between "before" and "after." And perhaps this is what writers mean when they speak of how "nothing will ever be the same" or "there is no going back to normal" or "everything will be different on the other side of this."
But when I read pieces that assert variations on that theme, I discern something else. The meaning is both more specific and more general. Something like: Each of us will never be the same; the world as experienced by all of us will be utterly different. And though understandable, I think this is one of those moments that, because we cannot see to the end of it, much less beyond it, our imaginations fail when they attempt to reach forward to "life afterward."
It is true that what we are experiencing is unique. But that uniqueness won't last. Unless the death rate were to unexpectedly and rapidly spike, or the economic shutdown were to last half a decade, life will return to normal in two or three years. Again, that won't mean the conditions of our common life will be good. The financial aftershock may be devastating—but lack of jobs, awful wages, and a bad economy are, unfortunately, mundane features of ordinary life.
What I mean is that you and I won't be different. We will remember what it was like to shelter in place. But life will simply resume, mostly the way it was. The virus hasn't forced us into digging bunkers or sleeping on rooftops; neither the electric grid nor even the internet have gone down; we're not piling ten families into a single domicile, rationing scraps and burning books for warmth. We're living our lives at home—which may be bad or good, claustrophobic or monastic, abusive or supportive, lonely or bustling with multiple generations—but still home, the place to which we retire to eat or sleep on a normal day. And what we're doing when we're not working is cooking, streaming, teaching, cleaning, reading, building, going stir crazy, forming pacts with like-minded neighbors, whatever—we're not hiding in our bathrooms, or tearing down the walls for wood, or boarding up the windows out of fear.
I predict, and it's only a prediction, that in a few years this will have become a strange and somewhat surreal memory. If the economy recovers quickly, that will make it recede into the past even faster than it otherwise would. Either way, we'll be the same people we were before we quarantined ourselves. Our attention will be drawn to the next thing, however smaller or less interesting by comparison to our current moment. This will be this, and that will be that, and we'll move on. We ourselves, and the world we experience around us, will for the most part prove unchanged.
