I just got my second Moderna shot, so I blocked out a little time over the next day to recover. I’ve been meaning to write a post reflecting on my personal feelings towards pandemic life and the road ahead. So this seems like the perfect time. This isn’t supposed to be grand and comprehensive, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about recently.
I took my older daughter to school right before my shot and shared with her that I have some reservations about life getting back to “normal” after the pandemic. As much as I’m so ready for things to be “over”, I’ve gotten pretty used to not having a commute, not traveling much, and seeing my kids around the house frequently over the course of the day. That found time has been precious, and most of it is almost certainly going to slip away.
I’ve also gotten pretty used to being a bit of a hermit. I’m pretty naturally introverted, so not having external pressure to be around other people has been somewhat of a relief. Going to a social gathering is fun for me, but only after I overcome some meaningful activation energy to put myself out there. It’s going to be tough to get back into this rhythm over the next months and years. I see tweets from some of my friends saying things like “it’s so good to be back in place X” and I think to myself “oh man, I’m kind of dreading that. Can’t I just stay behind a screen and keep going for walks around my block or in the woods?”
But what I’ve also been thinking about is how much this social isolation has hurt our sense of togetherness. Even though the planet is going through this insane shared experience, our lives have become completely separated. We have stopped colliding with people who don’t look like us and who don’t think like we do. Have you noticed how angry everyone seems to be when they are driving on the street these days? I’ve never been honked at so much in my life, and that’s with a fraction of the traffic that we normally see. And when it happens, my mind goes to a very dark place quickly in response to the other person in a way that wouldn’t happen if we weren’t separated by a couple panes of glass.
This was something I experienced before when I lived in the South Bay and worked in Silicon Valley. Our life was about going from my apartment to my car to my high-tech job and then visiting Nancy on the Stanford campus. I socialized mostly with people who lived the same life and we went to places where everyone around us had more or less the same existence. This is nothing against the Bay Area itself, it was mostly about my own life choices. But during that time, I realized how much I missed public transportation, walking in a crowded city, and having chance encounters with a broader range of people. I understand that closeness with other humans isn’t all rainbows and unicorns, but it seemed good for my psyche.
This Pandemic has taken that effect and dialed it up to 11. Sheltering in place and local safety policies did this physically, and our social and news platforms have done it intellectually and ideologically. Our economic system continues to do this as well as the divide between the rich and poor grows more and more staggering. I mourn for the countless incidents of violence against Asians, and the apathy of so many who feel like it’s not their problem. But boy, that apathy is everywhere about many many different groups of people. And I’m more guilty of this apathy than I have ever been because of the separation that this pandemic has created.
So, I’m looking forward to things getting back to normal. I want to travel, do things with and around people, and see the economy and local businesses spring back to life. I’m not looking forward to the unpleasant parts of being around people. The crowdedness, odors, unpleasant interactions and inconveniences. But I do think that the unpleasant things might end up being the most important things.
