Our world is becoming smaller and flatter as the virus threat, its impact on our lives and work, the response and the tools we use to adapt to it are similar across countries. The gap between countries, rich and poor, is shrinking, as are our options in dealing with the pandemic.
Where once we clamoured for our freedom from authority, now we look to the same authority figures to protect us by locking it down.
Our homes have become our hubs and we are deeply entrenched in technology. Work and life have merged in confusing and confounding ways. We are now dependent on our smart phones for most of our basic requirements.
The pandemic has forced a re-evaluation of our priorities and given us a chance to identify and edit out the unnecessary. It feels like we can make our lives simpler and cosier if we choose. Not just on social media, but in the reality behind the camera.
We are using video calling apps to create intimacy in those relationships where we have physical distance and are perhaps testing the endurance of those where we don’t.
Cabin fever has set in and we are yearning for a return to ‘normal’. But, what is this imaginary destination that we all seem to want? Normal is something no one has experienced truly. It is a fleeting childhood from idyllic memory, a momentary dream or an impossible ambition. We’ll know it when we get there, we think, but will we be able to hold on to it even if we do?
Life has always been and will continue to be a constant flux, where we seek to find our balance on the shifting surface.
Context matters and how we understand and react to it determines the consequence. Judgements, however, can only be made with hindsight. So we may be able to judge the generations who came before us but we cannot judge ourselves. Later generations may decide if we did the right or wrong things in coping with the Covid pandemic. It is impossible for us to know, even as we struggle to find the right answers and actions in our small, everyday decisions.
Our discomfort with this uncertainty has increased our political polarisation to the point that our affiliation determines what we think we know about the virus, how we react to the pandemic and even which, if any, vaccines we will put our trust in.
Some of our biggest differences, of income class and gender, are widening the gaps we tried so hard to fill. Women are the majority of job losers as employers rush to cut costs and they are the ones most quickly absorbed in the quicksand of home and family responsibilities.
It is the more protected and privileged of us who are paranoid about the virus. We insist on face-masks, hand sanitisers, temperature checks and social distancing. Perhaps, we feel we have more to lose from Covid and yet, we are the most likely survivors, given our financial safety nets and medical access.
The economically disadvantaged need to get back to work. They will wear face-masks if we tell them to but they will never feel our desperation over the risks. The risks they have been facing all along were never any less dangerous. They are as likely to suffer the same mortality and economic stress from the treatable tuberculosis or even a more common infection. Dying from hunger versus dying from the virus is not much of a choice.
We would like the economy to open up so we can enjoy the lifestyle luxuries we have had to put on hold. We would like the vaccines to be fool proof so we can rid ourselves of the constant worry. We would like the virus to disappear so we can be free from the constraints we are living with.
The uncertainty remains. We do not yet have a starring role in the big picture of what is to come, but we can play our small bit parts and hope for the best, as have the generations before us in good times and bad.
