The thing that strikes me every morning when I wake in Covid America is how we are all just marching towards the death of life as we know it. I don't mean that for the majority of us that we won't be alive, but in that way that whenever we talked about the real effects of climate change, we won't be living in the same life as pre-2020.
Some people are often excited about some of the obvious changes like less of a stigma to work from home or increased food delivery from the "best" restaurants. Although, I think we all acknowledge most of the changes have been bad no matter your walk of life. Unless you totally don't care, in the last 5 months you probably:
- Haven't been to a shitty concert you think you're too loud now that you're nearing your 30s.
- Haven't had a birthday party that isn't oscillating between the awkwardness of trying to talk about how monotonous your days are and the understanding that you are no longer bound by too many social cues so anyone and everyone can leave at any time
- Had a haircut that was learned 20 minutes before in YouTube and performed by your the family member you trust the most / willing to adopt risk.
I don't think all those things will stay around; for good reason, we all need to attend awkward birthday parties till the day we die.
However, I think the first set of things: how we work and how our consumption influences others will. It seems like we'll just continue to accelerate the fact that there really are two America's.
One America is the one that if you're reading this blog, you're probably in. This America (me included) is wrestling with the unfortunate problem that we have to figure out how to expense an ergonomic chair to our multitrillion dollar multinational corporation without stirring up any ruckess. The other America is, however, making sure that you're Pad Thai gets delivered on time just enough to make minimum wage.
I sit in my house and worry about the totally optional trip I took to the supermarket to make tacos today was risky to me. While I'm there, I think about how all the stress I have for contracting Covid-19 and bringing it home is what any of the people stocking the shelves at the supermarket, cleaning the bathrooms and checking me out have. The difference is it's not really a choice for any of those people. They all have to come to work to be able to pay down their student loans, take care of their families and try to have fun. This is all buttressed by the fact that the most common ways people have fun are just really taken away from them.
I don't really have a sense of how to solve morality with the current economics of the world (pre or post Covid), but I do feel like there is something with American invidualism that forces us to want to forget that every one of our actions isn't really just made anonymous by money, but it also made anonymous by ones own choices.
You are the one living your life and making the choices you are. In the extreme, this results in active harm where you argue with having to wear a mask or complain to the manager. Here, you are probably really trying to justify that your world view is right. I don't really have any sense of how this works. You have a set of ideals that you must value so much that you don't even see the human in front of you.
In the more common case, it's just willful ignorance. It's acting like you're better because you've acknowledged the world is hard and unfair. You do see the person standing there while you go into Macy's to buy a shirt you don't need, but you justify that you really do need that shirt. In some sense, you really do need it. You feel it really deep inside that a new shirt is how you can attain happiness and that's why you have money. I get that, and it really is a Pavlovian response to how everything works now.
I write all this because I feel this guilt. I see the same type of pattern not only in Covid, but in the more recent Black Lives Matters protests. I sympathize with everything everyone has said about police, and I went protesting and posted on social media. But, it really does feel like the performance of doing somethign is almost valued as much, or more, as the actual thing. That's the type of invidualism I mean. It's all for self-gratitude and never for the whole.