In January, we were planning to have my in-laws visit us. They are both from Wuhan. This did not happen.
My wife was seeing the effects of the virus on Chinese social media, and was getting worried about the virus making its way here and whether our Western governments would be able to handle it. When things got bad in China, Xi Jinping clapped his hands, sent a few messages on WeChat, and ten days later a new hospital appeared in Wuhan. If Canada were in the same situation its response would be comparatively drowsy. I told her not to worry. The virus wouldn’t make it’s way here, and even if it did I was sure it wouldn’t be that bad. She told me I had no idea. I bought the overpriced Purell on Amazon to make her feel better, not because I thought we needed it.
Today is Saturday March 21. Flipping her hair back with freshly sanitized hands, her eyes shine sassily behind a yellow surgical mask. She’s always right, and she knows it.
I believe in every social pool there is a finite amount of anxiety, and as the gravity of a situation is understood by more people the anxiety spreads across evenly and everybody shares the collective mental burden. One week ago, it didn’t feel like the Western world really understood or was taking the appropriate actions, so the anxiety was mine and mine alone. By mid week, the stock market had crashed, our workplace was managing an overloaded VPN from the newly instituted work-from-home policy, and various emergency relief packages and travel bans were announced. Many pennies had dropped this week, as well as public sentiment, my net worth, and ironically many of my worries. Everybody out there was freaking out just enough and roughly in the right direction for me to start to feel a little bit better. The situation is still extremely bad, North America is still not ready, but at least now most people know about this curve that needs flattening. Next week presumably is when we really start to find out how unprepared we really are.
In 2008, 2 days after Lehman Brothers imploded I liquidated my stock portfolio at what seemed at the time like a large loss. This past Monday, Mar 16, which would soon be known as the worst one day drop since “Black Monday” in 1987, I did the same thing. Eating a loss now is easier if you expect things to get much worse later, albeit this time around it’s centred on life and death instead of a stack of bad mortgages. Waking up in the morning and checking the Stocks app hoping the markets have crashed is somewhat analogous to waking up in the morning and checking the News app hoping that more people have died. It’s like I’m actually betting against humanity, hoping for the best yet putting real money against the worst. This is an awkward and meta-guilt-ridden place to have put myself in. Our small box of yellow surgical masks is asking to be donated to the nearest hospital, but I close the cupboard door to block out it’s soft, pleading voice. It’s also getting harder to fall asleep at night, but I might just be sore from sitting too long in the same chair.
Transitioning to social distancing was such a non-event it really made me really wonder about my old lifestyle choices. The only difference between weekdays and weekends is which laptop I turn on in the morning. I eat lunch at the same handful of restaurants as I did before, except now a third party brings the food to me and I throw the delivery bag out very quickly. Dishes still need to be done, and podcasts still need to be listened to. I think not having children is a huge reason why this is so easy for us right now; I can only imagine the parents who are both working from home and taking care of their kids at the same time, and how they must be managing. The poop must be everywhere, on the walls and filling your shoes.
Getting together with friends had already gotten increasingly difficult. As everybody got married and started having kids the group size grew very large very quickly, making gatherings harder to organize. This virus was just another exponential growth curve that forced us to stay home. Even though I don’t see people anymore, I’m actually more engaged more regularly with my social circle than ever before; as the virus started lighting up in Toronto, so did all my WhatsApp group chats (and that one straggling Google Hangout). Friends were sharing news and gossip, expressing concern and actively checking in on one another. One guy in Richmond Hill said he was running out of garlic, and friends from across the GTA immediately offered assistance, despite the inefficiencies of delivering a clove of garlic from Whitby to Richmond Hill. The thought counted for something and the sentiment was real.
I had my first group video chat with some friends recently, on a night where meeting up would have been unlikely even in normal circumstances. We talked and laughed at each other’s increasingly unkempt hair. My friend was holding his new baby, and as I saw him for the first time peeking out from their corner of my monitor it occurred to me that if it wasn’t for the coronavirus I would likely not have seen them until much later on.
We are going to see how social behaviors change in a world that is simultaneously self-quarantined and digitally-enabled; social technologies are going to get used in joyful and unexpected ways: meeting for after-work drinks on enterprise video conferencing software instead of at the bar, and Yoga classes being taught on Zoom.
The new behaviours we develop in response to forced isolation may stick with us after this is all over, and maybe even supplement going out to meet up with people when that becomes too burdensome. There is a space for this in our culture and we have the tools; maybe this is the time where we also develop the habits. It’s also entirely possible that nothing changes once this is over, and we abandon both the grievances and learnings of the quarantine lifestyle. Until we find out I will hold onto hope, alongside other essentials like friends and family and a strong internet connection.
ian is blogging 