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Originally Posted by Replaced_Texan
Damn. I hope it remains as it is. Scary shit. I'm still breastfeeding, so I'll have to observe from the sidelines. I'm glad you have a good outlet.
I'm also hoping this new status quo sticks around for awhile.
I find it amusing in a fuck-you-assholes-for-being-such-assholes sort of way that the same people who are bitching about people "not wanting to work" are also pissed at people coming across the border who probably would be more than happy to take any job that was offered.
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I don't see this new status quo abating. Pre-Covid, we believed that things could not significantly change. This always seemed, to the astute among us, a largely untrue but nevertheless deeply internalized narrative. Things couldn't change radically. We would not shift from capitalism to collectivism overnight. But to a significant extent beyond just the margins, things could be modified. Things like hustle culture, consumerism, and keeping up with the Joneses could be jettisoned. They could be shown to be counterproductive, inefficient, and significant sources of unhappiness and lack of meaning in people's lives.
We could become reacquainted with the notion that time is the most important resource.
Consider commuting by run of the mill office workers. They drive or train into a city, unhappily, burning fossil fuels, where they then occupy cubicles next to each other in open space offices, doing that which they could do from anywhere. The whole time, their empty homes are consuming energy to heat and cool, and the building they are in is doing the same, needlessly doubling a fossil footprint. Their productivity is sapped by the commute, which adds an hour or more to the day, and the exercise of getting dressed in a silly corporate casual uniform. Their wages are eaten into with the cost of parking and/or transportation.
This exercise benefits no one. And yet it persisted because, well, real estate departments in companies had always carried commercial office space, and so assumed they always would. And people had been coming to big buildings in cities for decades, and so it was assumed that would always continue because people just do what's been done before and, despite many industries allowing WFH (insurers have long done it), most just did what came before and didn't think about it.
Don't rock the boat, just go through the motions. File in with the herd and assume, assume, assume, this is Just How Things Are Always Done.
This buildup of stagnant behaviors is tolerable because no one can imagine a situation in which things are different. We get caught in systems that seem so ingrained, so essential, and so complex, that modifying them in any significant regard is an impossible task.
It is. Unless you're a pandemic. If you're a pandemic, it's very easy to shine a light on every inefficiency and counterproductive element of a society, culture, and the economic system underpinning them. Covid was a klieg light. In an instant, all that was superfluous and wasteful was segregated from all that wasn't.
Once priorities have been reshuffled so radically, I don't see any way of returning to 2019. Hence the desperation in the voices of those who insist on resuming what came before exactly how it was before.
The reality is, things were broken, very badly, before. And we all knew it, but the task of sabotaging the systems that rendered most of society unhappy seemed impossible. They were too strong.
But not too strong for a pandemic.
Where does it go from here? Beyond my pay grade. Best guess would be we see a hybrid future, where some of the elements of the world pre-2020 mix with some of the elements of the post-Covid world, which is still not fully formed.
ETA: But what's most important, what I think is the biggest mind-altering aspect of Covid, is the recognition that the Protestant Work Ethic is a scam. It's a lie. And it's always been a lie. A lie as pernicious as the Catholic Church's lie that by staying poor but giving them money and dutifully pumping out huge families of poor Catholics who'll do the same, one gets into Heaven. Life is not to work. The hardest hustler is not worth of some special respect. Success isn't sacrificing more hours than anyone else to get $$$$$ but finding the balance at which you sacrifice just enough hours to retain a life while acquiring $, $$, $$$, or $$$$ you need to live in a manner you deem comfortable. It's agreeing to come in where you want to come in across the finish line of the rat race. In this regard, the Millennials are wiser than us. Maybe that's why Boomers hate them so much.
