The way we once lived is now redundant. We need to reinvent ourselves
The infantilising of the people by our leaders is horribly revealing of the English psyche. “Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday – but never jam today.” Only it is not jam in this case, it is life-saving personal protective equipment. I specify “English” because Nicola Sturgeon addresses her nation as grownups and Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel pay their people the same respect. Now, armed with the knowledge that our prime minister bunked off Cobra meetings as this crisis unfolded, we are being told nothing can really be decided until he comes back from his convalescence. So we are stuck with ministers in supply teacher mode.
Everything has changed and we need to prepare for the new normal. Lockdown isn’t ending any time soon. There is no simple choice between saving lives and saving the economy; the two are intertwined. There is no going back to BC: before corona. Some of us knew this from day one, others are still in denial. There is the unmistakable feeling that a monumental shift in how we live is coming, one way or another, a shift that has long been latent. Those of us in rich countries have been intent on pushing the climate emergency into the future, but now our money won’t save us. Our vulnerability just might. But this requires humility. The idea that Boris Johnson will “bounce back” into his job is as ludicrous as thinking the economy will “bounce back”.
Macron articulated this sense of shock last week when he said: “This is not a time for falling back on comfortable ideology. We need to get off the beaten track, reinvent ourselves, find new ways of living, not least of all me.”
Some of the new ways of living are starting to emerge, but there is a deep resistance to the fact that they may be permanent. Daily we see how Covid-19 has made visible existing inequalities of space, class, ethnicity and gender, but daily we see newer divisions, too. There is the divide between those who can work at home and those who can’t, whether surgeons or hairdressers.
There are those who find solace in their inner worlds and are able to treat this time as leisure, even on limited incomes, and those who are lonely and completely adrift.
There are signs of renewal or reinvention from many young people whose lives are on hold, but who are coping incredibly well in the circumstances, and from small and local businesses that have adapted very quickly where they can. But rigidity is found in nearly all big institutions – from government and the EU to big business and much of our cultural establishment. There is little agility here, just a hankering for the fantasy return to “normal”.
Many seem to hold on to a cherished concept of work that is increasingly meaningless. Some people are still working long hours while as a society we face mass unemployment. Whatever people are doing on Zoom all day, it seems they are still being productive, so surely they never need to go to an office again? A lot of pointless commuting can stop; people will have to admit they mostly go to work to escape home. There is nothing wrong with this, but reinventing ourselves requires a degree of honesty.
Indeed, one of the hardest things about this crisis is that we all have to live with the choices we have made, whether we are on our own or with partners, with or without children. The everyday – untempered by other distractions – is the atomised existential crisis. Is this my life? What happened?
If we work less, we consume less, and we have long known that this is what we need to do to avert the climate crisis. Do we need all this stuff? Clothes and shoes? Do we need people to tell us next season’s colour? Do we need tantrum-y chefs on our TV screens? Do we need endless lifestyle tips from celebrities? Well, no.
We need smaller supply chains when it comes to our farming. We need contact with other people. Better tech. We need to disband the nuclear family, which appears no longer fit for purpose.
We have long been warned that almost half of us would lose our jobs because of the rise of AI; for a very different reason, this future has arrived. This will clearly be hard. The pandemic kills some people fast, but it will kill others slowly, through poverty.
In 1930, as the Great Depression got underway, John Maynard Keynes wrote in his lovely essay Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, about “the painfulness of readjustment between one economic period and another”. I look to culture to guide us, but see only a rush to stream everything amid mourning for the loss of live performance. This is the same paralysis that