There will be no hot dogs or hamburgers for me this Memorial Day. Not because I’ve gone vegetarian or vegan. Life just won’t allow time for it, holiday or no. Vaccine shots secured, the habits of the last year are not easily abandoned. I’m still bulking up on groceries once every two weeks — early morning, when few customers are in the store. My neighborhood eateries are still doing contactless take-out and no dine-in. It’s reflex anymore to don a mask when entering a local business. Still, the other night there seemed to be only one employee wearing one at (not my preferred) neighborhood pizza joint, and not the guy who ran my card.
Writer and columnist Tim Kreider knows what it’s like:
“For the last year,” a friend recently wrote to me, “a lot of us have been enjoying unaccustomed courtesy and understanding from the world.” When people asked how you were doing, no one expected you to say “Fine.” Instead, they asked, “How are you holding up?” and you’d answer, “Well, you know.” (That “you know” encompassed a lot that was left unspoken: deteriorating mental health, physical atrophy, creeping alcoholism, unraveling marriages, touch starvation, suicidal ideation, collapse-of-democracy anxiety, Hadean boredom and loneliness, solitary rages and despair.) You could admit that you’d accomplished nothing today, this week, all year. Having gotten through another day was a perfectly respectable achievement. I considered it a pass-fail year, and anything you had to do to get through it—indulging inappropriate crushes, strictly temporary addictions, really bad TV—was an acceptable cost of psychological survival. Being “unable to deal” was a legitimate excuse for failing to answer emails, missing deadlines, or declining invitations. Everyone recognized that the situation was simply too much to be borne without occasionally going to pieces. This has, in fact, always been the case; we were just finally allowed to admit it.
My former profession was a leading economic indicator and workload tended to tank months ahead of the rest of the economy. Seemed like a good time to bail in the spring of 2019. The move seemed prescient a year later when Covid hit: good timing for once in my life. Life took on a different rhythm. Actually watched TV (aside from cable news and movies) for the first time in decades. How do people find the time to follow episodic TV even if it’s good?
Quarantine has given us all time and solitude to think—a risk for any individual, and a threat to any status quo. People have gotten to have the experience—some of them for the first time in their life—of being left alone, a luxury usually unavailable even to the wealthy. Relieved of the deforming crush of financial fear, and of the world’s battering demands and expectations, people’s personalities have started to assume their true shape. And a lot of them don’t want to return to wasting their days in purgatorial commutes, to the fluorescent lights and dress codes and middle-school politics of the office. Service personnel are apparently ungrateful for the opportunity to get paid not enough to live on by employers who have demonstrated they don’t care whether their workers live or die. More and more people have noticed that some of the basic American axioms—that hard work is a virtue, productivity is an end in itself—are horseshit. I’m remembering those science-fiction stories in which someone accidentally sees behind the façade of their blissful false reality to the grim dystopia they actually inhabit.
Even post-apocalypse, some people want to recreate what was lost rather than deal with what is. They want to go to the beach, have a barbecue, and pretend everything’s back to normal when, clearly, it isn’t.
Many probably feel like they’ve joined the French Underground.