Happy and grateful in these troubled times

Of course, there are reasons for the coronavirus pandemic to make you sad. Maybe you’ve been laid off or precluded from working because your job is at, for example, a mall, hotel, or restaurant. Or the closing of schools has made you responsible for childcare 24/7. Or you might have been okay with StayHome for a while, but cabin fever has hit. Or you contracted the coronavirus, and even if your case is mild, it isn’t fun having a flu-like disease nor being quarantined. And merely hearing of the pandemic-sized death toll sobers even a Pollyanna.

But among the not-so-vulnerable people who will, at some point, have the option to resume life sort of as we knew it, many— surprising to me, many—people I’ve spoken with say they’re, net, happier now.

It’s been said that we’re social animals and that we crave freedom. So how can anyone be happy with less human interaction and less freedom? We can’t go to work, restaurants, concerts, ballgames, bars, nor nightclubs. In certain jurisdictions, we can’t even invite friends to a picnic in the park, and no matter how wild our hair, we can’t get it cut.

Sure, there are reasons people might be happier. Now, many people needn’t, every morning, race to get dressed up and sit in strait-jacket commute traffic or stand in sardined mass transit. They may have more flexible work schedules—Get the work done and the boss mightn’t care whether you start at 7 or at 10 or whether you take a two-hour break during the day and make it up at night.

Perhaps less obvious is that Covid has, ironically, provided new reasons to be grateful. If a person doesn’t have the disease, they’re grateful. Even if they have a cough and fever, most people test negative and, even if positive, likely experience

People are grateful to the geniuses and hard workers who made technology available.

relatively mild symptoms and recover. They may be grateful that the feared supply-chain shortages—from medication to toilet paper—have, to date, not materialized, making them grateful when taking every dose and with every use of TP. While many people feel Zoomed out, they see that the secular miracle of videoconferencing enables them, for free or near-free, to see and hear people anywhere in the world. People are—or at least should be—grateful to the geniuses and hard workers who made such technology available.