Two Years
We inhabit two realities. The first is the world of bright lights and hard surfaces, the one we can see and hear and taste. We call it the “real” world. The second is the more subtle reality of assumptions and working theories. We expect the sun to rise in the east and our car to be parked where we left it and our favorite pub to be open when we arrive after work. It’s really just a predictive mental model, but we treat it as though it were as solid and tangible as the real world. Most of the time, we mistake the second reality for the first, or at least blur the two into one.
The timelines varied depending on where you lived, but in the US, on March 11, 2020 both our worlds crashed. The NBA shut down its season, and the NCAA took the first step in cancelling March Madness. Tom Hanks announced he’d contracted Covid—which at that moment, had only infected 1,200 people in the US. We all know what came next. When we recount the events of the last two years, we trot through events and statistics, as if they somehow capture the rupture in our lives. In retrospect, though, Covid’s most potent legacy is the way it messed with our understanding about how the world is supposed to work. It showed us that second reality, how much we relied on its stability, and how false that stability was in the end.
It has been an exceptionally hard two years. The virus has caused real, profound harm, starting with the million lives it’s taken, and the jobs, the businesses, and all the other tangible things we’ve lost. The less visible losses are just as real, but much harder to accept. Fundamentally, we expect things to be the same, and they haven’t been. We have struggled to gain control of an uncontrollable situation, and to find routine in an unpredictable storm of events. When we wake up and the sun doesn’t rise in the east, we are left without mooring.
I had hoped this anniversary would arrive with a bit of hope, as the latest wave subsided as the warm weather promised to return. Yet as March approached, a shocking war came, plunging us into more death and uncertainty. Watching the news and seeing photos of Putin at the far end of absurdly long tables with advisors, one wonders how much that second-world uncertainty contributed to the invasion. It seems like no matter how hard we try, stability remains elusive. Putin’s not the only deranged one—historians looking back at the US response will wonder why we handled it so badly ourselves. If you didn’t experience the confusion firsthand, it’s a bit hard to explain it.
These years—however long this lasts—are going to leave deep, generational scars. We can’t really guess how today’s children and young adults will internalize this trauma or how it will affect society in decades to come—except to acknowledge that it will. The generation who came of age in the desperate thirties behaved very differently than those raised in the calm, prosperous fifties. We older folks are already set in our ways, so we have adapted to Covid based on habits developed over a lifetime. The future belongs to the young, though, and their habits are being formed right now. No doubt they have far less confidence in the firmness of the earth beneath their feet than we did. Somehow, that will shape the future they inherit.
Breweries sat empty for weeks.
Deserted city streets.
Two empty breweries. The Rogue site closed.
For my own part, I have been spending more time with people lately. Following last week’s cask crawl with Patrick, I met people twice last week for pints. I recommend it. Sharing a couple hours with a friend is healing. Humanity has confronted hard times before, and moments of private communion were how people survived. I often think pubs exist because it’s where people have always gone to connect and heal during hard times.
I don’t think the hard times are over yet, either, and it could be many years before they are. That’s why we can’t delay the healing moments when we can find them. Omicron is receding, but there may be another variant behind it, or another virus altogether—or anything. Covid, for all its terrible suffering, has taught me one valuable lesson—hold that second reality of assumptions lightly. It can change in a moment. So in the meantime, call a friend and go have that pint soon. Take care of yourselves.