From my bay windows, I can see just as far as the ends of my street. If the whole world stopped existing just past this view I would be none the wiser. Beyond the stop sign flows the hot lava.
It has been 5 weeks of self isolation and working from home; excluding the odd supply run, I basically have not left the house. I get fresh air when I remember to open the window; it’s sweeter than I remember. My face presses comically against the screen.
The Truman Show is a 1998 movie about a man who grows up in an enclosed and constructed reality as the unwitting star of a reality TV show, and it was filmed with a budget of $60 million dollars. If they were to make a real show like this in current-day pandemic times it could probably be done for a fraction of the cost of the actual movie. Maybe they already have.
Perhaps a strong sedative was slipped in our food one night, and my wife and I were transported to a replica of our house on a modest Hollywood soundstage. Instead of the internet, we would be unwittingly connected to a team of actors, media experts, and AI, who would replace the content of our digital information and social interactions with scripted content from the team of writers (and the other AI). On next week’s episode, Google and group chats will tell me the pandemic has escalated. It’s zombies now. All connections to the outside world are through computers of varying size; if they tell me there are zombies just beyond the view of my bay window I have no reason to doubt them. I order a slightly stronger lock from Amazon and I stop taking out the garbage. 28 Days Later is queued up after Contagion.
It is exceedingly unlikely that this scenario is true, but it’s still within the realm of the possible; a fraction of $60 million dollars is still a good amount of money that somebody could have a lot of fun with. Not going outside in over a month means all information about the world outside the walls of my house is received digitally. This is obvious, but also strange to be actually living through. It’s the feeling of being confined, but only physically; the mind is still free to explore all the virtual spaces it had before.
In truth, this is really not too different from the world before coronavirus: We’re all still socializing the same information from the same sources with the same groups of people. Coworkers and friends with similar backgrounds and mindsets, drawing from the same pool of cultural ideas and echoing its variations to each other. We may be trapped now in containment, but how free were we to begin with?
There is a memory I have as a child, of a specific ride in Centreville on Centre Island. You drive a tiny car around a small track, with a single rail that runs down the middle of the track and under your vehicle. You have full control over the accelerator and steering (which for a child is pretty cool), except a set of bumpers under your car prevent you from deviating too far from the track. That day in my tiny car I learned about the mechanics of driving, and the illusion of freedom. This memory resurfaced many years later, driving a slightly less tiny Honda Civic to and from a job I was ambivalent about and a stifling home life. I was stuck on a track going around in circles.
We all live our lives in boxes of varying size and opacity, that grow and shrink as we move through life. Over time my box got bigger than the few blocks between home and work. When we got the mortgage for this house I glimpsed one end of my new box, in the distance in the fog, in what was once an endless green field. This is not a bad thing. We all have to do work, life is finite, and boundaries help us focus and force us to make choices.
Today the box of our lives is arguably the smallest it’s ever been. Circumstances have forced us to discard many of the things we love to fit into this smaller box, but also forced us to choose what to keep in it with us: relationships, internet, Netflix. When things get better and our boxes get a little bigger, I hope we will be thoughtful about what we choose to fill the newfound space with.
ian is blogging 