The pandemic is over! Long live the pandemic!

There is a shift, back toward the way things used to be along with a deep, bodily conviction that nothing can ever be the way it was before.

President Biden made headlines this week declaring the pandemic was over. This was followed by a chorus of epidemiologists scolding him. Epidemiologists have spent a lot of time scolding people over the past three years and I’m not sure how effective a strategy it’s been, but that’s another matter.

The pandemic is over. Or it isn’t. The pandemic isn’t a war. It will never have an official ending. Bells will not ring.¹ There will be no end day to commemorate. The pandemic will end differently for everyone. For some people it will never end.

But there is at least a feeling of ending-ness. There is a feeling of a shift. Kids are back in school without masks or testing. Companies are at least attempting to pull their employees back, kicking and screaming in some cases, to the physical workplace. People are flying and traveling and going to concerts and shows.

There is a shift, back toward the way things used to be along with, for me at least, a deep, bodily conviction that nothing can ever be the way it was before. That nothing should be the way it was before.

Nothing should be the way it was before first because the way things were before sucked. And yet, I have the creeping sense that we learned nothing from the last three years. That the great shift so many people predicted would happen in our values and our norms just didn’t come about. There were a lot of predictions about how the pandemic would transform work life and family and inequality and leisure and on and on. I don’t much see it.

At the simplest level, though, I thought at the very least we’d get better about letting go of that Great American Ideal of just pushing through illness or fatigue. I thought there might be the slightest chance we’d ditch that whole ‘suck it up’ and ‘tough it out’ ideology as it applies to sickness. At least from where I’m sitting, we’ve snapped right back.

‘Covid is over,’ I hear of my colleagues telling students. Being sick isn’t an excuse to miss class anymore. I got an e-mail from a student who both claimed to have almost thrown up and vowed that she would try to ‘push through’ and come to class anyway. “Please don’t,” I told her. “Rest. Recover.”

The pandemic brought home to me a lesson that was slowly dawning on me as a college professor—nothing is more important than the health and well-being of my students. Nothing. Not their attendance. Not their grade on a paper. Not their grade in the class. Not whether or not they pass. Not whether or not they end up dropping out of college altogether. My job is to teach them, but one of the things I’d like to teach them is to take the very best care of themselves that they can. Insisting that they ‘tough it out’ is not consistent with that lesson.

I thought after the pandemic we’d maybe emerge into a world where there’s no virtue anymore in pushing your body to its limits and beyond. I thought we’d finally acknowledge we are all of us fragile bodies, in need of tenderness and care. It doesn’t look that way so far.

So part of my sense that we shouldn’t go back to the way things were before is that that status quo wasn’t really working for us. But to go back also just feels like such a letdown. There was this huge rupture in the fabric of our lives. So many of the norms we’d known disappeared and it was hard to figure out what we were supposed to be doing.

As I discussed with students last week, one of the hardest things about the pandemic was that there was no right way to do it. Someone could find fault with your every action. People were mad if you wore a mask and then mad if you didn’t wear a mask. Outraged if you went to a restaurant and then, why aren’t you going to restaurants? You should, of course, get the Moderna vaccine, but, no, no, you idiot, Pfizer is best!

As sociologist Emile Durkheim told us ages ago, not knowing what you’re supposed to do is deeply uncomfortable. No one likes anomie, a state of normlessness, and that’s exactly what the pandemic was.

But when the pandemic ends, the old norms don’t magically reappear. They don’t rush in to fill the vacuum. Sure, you remember what they were. But they don’t feel quite right anymore. They’re like clothes that no longer fit. Or like wearing a winter coat in July.

I think this is why you see so many people moving across the country. Or quitting their jobs, quietly or for real. Refusing to go back to work. Selling their house and becoming a nomad. There are a lot of people making a lot of radical life choices because going back to the way things were is just too much to ask.

I feel this in my own life. In a lot of ways, my job is back to the way it was before. No social distancing. No masks. No mandatory testing. I’m back in the classrooms I used to teach in, all of us in a square, facing each other in a way that hadn’t happened since March of 2020.

I’m grateful for that, but also disoriented. I wanted so badly to get back to this and now I feel like, really? I’m still doing this? Why? The urge to blow everything up is always there, lurking under the surface. Maybe we could move to a new city! Say fuck it and quit right now. “Burn it all down,” some small voice inside me whispers.

Photo by Nishaan ahmed on Unsplash

Everything else about my job is back to the way it was, except for me. I’m not the same. Neither are my students. Neither is the world around us. Pretending to go back to the way things were feels dishonest. A performance of a life rather than an actual one.

I have no idea what to do with these feelings. I have no idea if they’ll fade with time. I don’t even know for sure that this is about the pandemic or just being burned the fuck out, which is also, let’s face it, about the pandemic.

I suspect I’m not the only person feeling this way, though. And maybe the different world is already there, bubbling up in this vague sense of dissatisfaction. Maybe we’re already moving in a new direction and it’s just hard to see. Maybe this is the pause, the big breath, before we figure out what we want the world to look like now.

What do you think? Does it feel hard to slip back into our “normal” lives?' Are you struck with the desire to blow your life into tiny bits or is that just me?

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1. Bells don’t ring anymore in a collective way in the United States and that’s a sad thing. A statement on our collective lives, I think. Couldn’t we have at least rung them when the Queen died? I know, she’s not our queen, but it’s not like ringing bells for a president feels at all the same.