Farewell to Covid Culture 👋
RIP. What should we gather around next, you guys?
Hi friends!
I feel like I learned so much this week. Who knew that Robert DeNiro is the Nick Cannon of old, white men? Or that Trader Joe’s has such delicious honey roasted peanuts? Or that, according to this TikTok politician who looks like the dad from a KIA commercial, the US might run out of cash in less than a month? Canada (my homeland) still has money, but soon King Charles’s spooky-ass mug is about to be on too much of it. And sadly, this wild looking old man at the coronation has been confirmed as not Meghan Markle in disguise so our last glimmer of hope for that cursed event to entertain us has been extinguished.
But I digress, as I actually come to you today with many, many thoughts that have been brewing since my guy Tedros announced an end to the Covid global health emergency last week. The pandemic has been receding, and with it, the absolutely bonkers culture we created around it. I have no nostalgia for the past few years and have indeed been actively erasing them from my mind one vape puff at a time, but I do think there was something comforting about the mores we created, a swiftly changing culture I enjoyed observing, anthropologically speaking, while trapped on my couch.
Before we really get into it, if you are one of those people who likes to pretend that Covid isn’t a real virus that has killed almost 7 million people and at one point made us so insane that we washed our takeout as instructed by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, I guess this is your trigger warning. Just know that you are MY trigger — in 2020 I spent somewhere in the ballpark of $200 USD for my therapist to explain denial as a coping mechanism to me over Zoom and I still don’t understand you head-in-the-sand types. In times of great stress, I, in the style of my Jewish ancestors, like to obsessively hone in on things, upset my entire digestive tract, then have a good laugh with one foot in the grave.
I made the mistake recently of reading the comments below an instagram post about Covid — an action that can only be described as self harm — and couldn’t help but wonder how many of those anti-vaxxers would shoot up off-label diabetes medicine to lose weight if they could only get their hands on it. In the spring of 2021, I was so excited (desperate) to get my vaccine that on a hot tip from a friend I took the California food handler exam online and posed as a restaurant employee. That escapade involved way more lying than anticipated when I lined up at Dodger’s Stadium and I would do it all over again in a heartbeat. I still remember the sense of relief. Though it was short lived, it was divine.
Covid shaped our lives but we shaped its culture and it was so many things — that one week when everyone jogged, inventing new ways and reasons to shame each other, people losing their minds on airplanes, an opportunity to further disconnect from material reality, and a screenshot of Mary-Kate Olsen’s Zoom divorce. It was social injustice meets online shopping meets “everyone tested” meets facing your mortality. It was sitting in a park several feet from friends and it was having a bubble where at least one person was in another bubble. It was mascne treatments and worrying about your grandparents who were way less worried about everything than you. It was pretty much every couple you know having a baby, some you wouldn’t have expected, and it was breakups and divorces and new, quick moving love. It was shifting identities and callings and too much time alone to think.
There are some behaviors from Covid culture that I insist we keep. Top of my list is not interacting with food delivery people. I much prefer darting in and out like a hungry little goblin to snatch my evening’s treats. We’re obviously also keeping “working from home” although I do personally miss the adult playgroup vibe of working in an office with other spirited creative types. The best friends always came from the worst jobs, though, and scary ladies who only blink 3 times an hour are easier to deal with on Slack.
I had a job interview earlier this year with a man who delivered a monologue, via Zoom from his bedroom, on the importance of being in the office. I mean, I could see his nightstand. I feel like that should be illegal, having to keep a straight face while seeing a potential employer’s nightstand against your will. Let’s also keep our bad attitude about work in general, I loved that era when the media took the idea of “quiet quitting” and ran with it. Now everyone’s just “loudly laid off” and on LinkedIn.
I know there’s a faction out there who still wants us all masked up because they live with a higher risk of the consequences. For them, a different Covid culture persists. I think these times we’re in feel shaky in some way for just about everyone. How could they not, the ground is shifting beneath us. But onwards we go to whatever catastrophe awaits us next, in bad behavior and good. I can’t wait to see what we make of it, together. I’ll be right here taking notes.
Less Lessons More Blessin’s™️
Liz