covid-19 limited everything — embraces, personal space, community, jobs, incomes, sex — and it did not take long for us to realize how circumscribed our lives had become.
the limits the pandemic imposed upon us proved to be a litmus test of our personalities, too. some thrived in this atmosphere — those singular souls whose lives went on as before, or the perennially miserable who took comfort in seeing that their misery was now shared. but most of us, perhaps for the first time, came to appreciate how much we hungered for simple human contact. the hug. the kiss. the shared laugh that made the funny funnier. we saw how much we needed each other, and how each other’s company amplified joy.
covid robbed us of that, of the spontaneity in our lives we had taken for granted. the virus forced us into masks, and ushered us down one-way routes through grocery store aisles, and flung us into wide orbits around each other like charged particles that never collide. every foray out the door had to be planned and weighed for risk. we feared everyone — strangers, friends, family, spouses — because we all carried the potential to kill.
4. we lost our confidence.
has there ever been a crisis we didn’t believe we could solve through science or diplomacy or war? have we ever doubted our mastery over the world, that our humanity was the answer to the problems humanity caused? has our faith in modernity ever been so shaken?