“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
- Arundhati Roy, “The Pandemic is a Portal”
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The last normal day was March 12, my wife’s birthday. It started as any day for me did back then— with a late wake up, quick shower, and easy commute. Once I got to the office, however, the mood was noticeably stressed. While we all tried to focus on our individual tasks, our minds were preoccupied with only one thing: COVID-19. Since the first case in the United States was found in Washington State that January of 2020, we all wondered if it would spread. Initially, I thought that it could be handled, much like how the United States dealt with previous pandemics like SARS and Ebola. But as time went on, I realized that this time, things were different.
We all wondered if, and more likely when, we’d be working from home. Unlike the millions of service workers across the country, I was privileged enough to have a steady office job, one that could largely be done in the comfort of my home. Despite this, I hoped that life would continue on as is, that this disease wouldn’t spread, people’s lives wouldn’t be lost, and we could devote our collective energies to more meaningful, helpful things.
I pulled out all the stops for Kalie’s birthday. I gave her some great gifts (including a countertop griddle that she loved), bought her some candy and flowers, and took her out to dinner. While we were eating at Puccini’s, one of our favorite restaurants, we both tried to put on a brave face and act like nothing was off kilter, but we couldn’t. That day, she had learned her job would switch full-time to remote starting the following Monday, and this fact put a damper on our evening. We went home and tried to relax as best as we could, not knowing what the future would hold. . . .
Over a year later, the United States is still in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic. With over 32 million cases and over half a million deaths, this is the largest public health crisis in a century. Due to lockdowns and social distancing, the country is also experiencing the largest economic downturn since the Great Recession a little over a decade ago. Millions have lost their jobs, their homes, and the livelihoods. With more than 3 million vaccine doses delivered every day, and over a quarter of the country being fully vaccinated, there’s still much to be done.
I have been working remotely or semi-remotely since March 18, 2020. I’ve tried to set up a home office as best as I can, which has gotten better since Kalie and I moved into our first home back in October. The money we used as a down payment was originally money set aside for a Seattle vacation, but as with most things during the age of COVID, that was put on hold.
Having a partner during all of this has been indispensable. We’ve been able to comfort and support each other during this extremely isolating time. However, there are many Americans that haven’t been as lucky. As John Leland wrote just weeks after the lockdowns began in the New York Times, American seniors have been dealt a devastating blow by COVID. It has limited their ability to socialize, receive food and medicines, and even celebrate birthdays. He quoted Lujira Cooper, a 72-year-old who no longer enjoyed the social gatherings at her local LGBT senior center, calling her situation a “self-imposed prison.” “I can clean my house and work on a book I’m supposed to be writing,” she lamented, “but it’s the missing of talking to people in another setting. I don’t mind being by myself. I mind being forced to be by myself. You can’t go anywhere, you can’t be around people.”
For others, the COVID lockdowns have led to new or exacerbated mental health issues, from depression and anxiety to even thoughts of suicide. As a Kaiser Family Foundation poll found in the early days of the pandemic, “nearly half of Americans say the pandemic is already affecting their mental health.” This places an enormous strain on the mental healthcare system, whose transition to the digital age has been hastened by the pandemic. In an article by Mohana Ravindranath in Politico noted:
Even with the new flexibility to practice remotely, mental health providers are still struggling on multiple levels. They are trying to adapt to telehealth visits without sacrificing the personal connection to the people they help. They are trying to navigate a maze of licensing rules while figuring out what the emergency flexibility really means. And they are trying to accommodate growing numbers of online patients facing depression, fear, panic, grief, isolation and economic distress — often on top of mental health conditions they had before the pandemic.
The rules surrounding telehealth often advantage those with higher incomes, better internet services, and more reliable health insurance, leaving poor and working class Americans scrambling for solutions.
There’s also been an uptick in thoughts of suicide, especially in young people. As William Wan recently wrote in the Washington Post, “when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently asked young adults if they had thought about killing themselves in the past 30 days, 1 in 4 said they had.” Like with telehealth, the United States’ medical infrastructure has not kept up with the needs of its people, as “funding and prevention efforts have continued to lag far behind those for all other leading causes of death.” Wan shares the story of Christian Robbins, a 16-year-old from Washington state who died by suicide one month into the pandemic. His father, Ted, recalls how his “son told him that a voice inside was whispering how worthless he was, how he was hated by everyone,” exacerbated by a lack of in-person connections with his friends. “Why aren’t school districts reaching out to students they know have problems?,” Robbins said, “Why aren’t we, as a country, doing anything about this part of the pandemic that’s killing people we love?” Love, much like human connection, often feels lost in the age of COVID.
On a personal level, I haven’t seen my grandmother in person in well over a year. I haven’t received her hugs, held her hand, or shared a meal with her. I also haven’t seen a live concert, taken a vacation, or even spent an evening with friends. Everything is now mediated by masks or screens, even this very presentation! I imagine that, like me, many are tired of social interaction via Zoom or Microsoft Teams. They call it “Zoom fatigue,” and it is very much real. Vignesh Ramachandran, writing in the Stanford News, discussed research indicating four reasons why we get burnt out on Zoom. First, “excessive amounts of close-up eye contact is highly intense,” due to people’s heads being too large on the screen which simulates a stressful encounter in real life. The second cause is seeing yourself too much, as we’re not built to see ourselves while simultaneously interacting with others. “In the real world, if somebody was following you around with a mirror constantly – so that while you were talking to people, making decisions, giving feedback, getting feedback – you were seeing yourself in a mirror, that would just be crazy. No one would ever consider that,” commented Professor Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab. Third, zoom meetings limit our natural inclination to move around when we talk, as the field of vision is static, leading to less than optimal cognitive outcomes. Finally, Zoom just takes too much “cognitive load,” since “we have to work harder to send and receive signals.”
How do we combat Zoom fatigue? Bailenson and his colleagues provide a few pointers to make it more enjoyable, or at the very least less miserable. Making the program window smaller, using the “hide self-view” function, periodically moving back or away from your camera, and occasionally turning off all video can help you avoid Zoom fatigue. I’ve tried all of these techniques and they’ve helped me a lot; I find myself not hating my computer towards the end of a meeting heavy workday. It can also make social video chats more enjoyable. I do monthly video chats with two friends from Germany, and each of us takes bathroom or snack breaks to knock the cobwebs off our brains from prolonged screen exposure. None of this will ever replace the joy of seeing people in person, but it will make our virtual lives in the age of COVID more bearable.
I’ve thrown a lot at you so far, some of which has been super heavy. This pandemic has a way of blunting your sense of humor or limiting your ability to enjoy things in life. Indoor hobbies can only take you so far. For me, reading is my ultimate joy, but even doing that for too long burns me out. Until we get back to some semblance of normalcy, we need to reconsider the roles of society and solitude in our lives, and there’s someone from 19th Century America who can help us do that.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the minister turned iconic writer and lecturer of pre-Civil War America, often grappled with the balance between society and solitude in his own life. A quiet, poor son of a widowed mother, Emerson entered Harvard University in 1817, at just 14 years old. While his academic performance never rose to the level of his elite peers, he nevertheless used his years at Harvard to study religion, philosophy, and politics. As author Carl Bode writes in his introduction to The Portable Emerson, the young Emerson's “journals reveal that moral problems were already a prime interest, something that his college exercises had previously hinted at. Is virtue based on civilization? he wondered, for instance. He prepared embryo essays on such subjects as sympathy, human nature, and providence.” To quench his thirst for spiritual answers, he continued his studies at the Harvard Divinity School while keeping a day job as a teacher.
Like many during the COVID pandemic, Emerson lost someone dear to him due to a respiratory illness. His first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker, died less than two years into their marriage of “consumption,” what we today know as Tuberculosis. As he wrote in his diary, “O willingly, my wife, I would lie down in your tomb.” This experience changed Emerson, personally and professionally. He gave up more of his traditional religious beliefs, such as immortality, and began to forge a new spiritual outlook, known to history as “Transcendentalism.” As Bode writes:
He avoided the supernatural in favor of the moral and ethical. He began to develop the idea of compensation. There is a Christian compensation, he told himself and his hearers, for many afflictions in life including the loss of a loved one. He expounded the idea of self-trust. Though he preached that self-reliance was God-reliance, there was as much self as God in it.
Emerson held a person’s individuality to be a sacred gift, one imbued with a sense of deep responsibility and reward for those who grasp it. By the 1830s, he parlayed his ideas through books and lectures, and he “earned a substantial part of his living by his lectures and did so with a minimum of compromise.” In many ways, he became America’s moral conscience, speaking out against the evils of slavery, imperialism, and the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans.
Nature was sacrosanct to Emerson. He gave it near-total primacy over everything else. As he wrote in his iconic book, also titled Nature, “every natural process is a version of a moral sentence.” To illustrate this concept, Bode explained, “we see that a fractured bone which heals well becomes stronger than before.” A healing bone, a natural process, is also a moral process, in which one’s body grows stronger through regrowth and renewal. In the era of COVID, I think this concept holds special weight. For those who recover from the disease, as a result of the natural gifts of both body and medicine, they will have persevered through great adversity and, with faith in themselves and others, hopefully are stronger than before. As our bodies heal, so do our souls.
Most folks who’ve read Emerson encountered him in middle or high school, and it was likely his legendary essay, “Self-Reliance.” In it, he praised those who blazed a trail for their own lives, never falling pivvy to the negative consequences of the masses. He also warned against blind acceptance of good luck, for life has a way of overturning our most cherished successes. He writes:
A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend or some other favorable event, raises your spirit, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.
On the surface, this might sound to you like cold individualism, but it is nothing of the sort. In reality, Emerson is pleading with his listeners to enjoy these moments of fortune but not accept them as determined. The choices that affect our individual lives as well as the lives of those around us represent a gallant struggle for our values against the cosmic forces that test them. This pandemic is one of those moments; it challenges us to do better for ourselves and others, regardless of whether the outcome is positive— or negative.
This brings us to Emerson’s 1857 essay, “Society and Solitude.” This work is classic Emerson, wherein he celebrates the need for individual space while also calling for the need of real social uplift and personal companionship. “To the culture of the world an Archimedes, a Newton is indispensable; so she guards them by a certain aridity,” he wrote, “If these had been good fellows, fond of dancing, port and clubs, we should have had no Theory of the Sphere and no Principia. They had that necessity of isolation which genius feels.” In other words, solitude protects genius from the follies of social life, engendering in them an “incapacity for strict association,” or in today’s language, anti-social personalities. Like with “Self-Reliance,” this seems a bit callous, but I think there’s a better reading. Emerson is getting at what makes humans capable of doing exceptional things, and in his mind, it’s harder to do said things when your life is consumed with excessive social functions. We need time to separate from the world, to recharge our batteries and think deeply about what matters to us. We can’t do any of that when we’re always on screens, either for work or for fun. A potential positive of this pandemic is that it’s given all of us the time to think deeply and earnestly about our lives.
But solitude is not enough, we also need society. As he explained, “a man must be clothed with society, or we shall feel a certain bareness and poverty, as of a disciplined and unfurnished member.” Just as we can be overwhelmed by too much society, we can also be overwhelmed by too little! It is imperative that we as social creatures make meaningful and rewarding relationships with others, to stave off loneliness and emotional pain. Emerson beautifully explains this dichotomy in a further passage: “Now and then a man exquisitely made can live alone, and must; but coop up most men and you undo them.” Additionally, humanity can only achieve great things when they work together on common goals, rather than as atomized subjects grasping towards uplift. “Concert fires people to a certain fury of performance they can rarely reach alone,” he wrote. This is no doubt the case during the COVID pandemic. Millions of people, in the United States and around the world, have started mutual aid networks to feed and protect the vulnerable, collaborated on cutting-edge medicines for treatment of the virus, and developed multiple vaccines that might ultimately put the scourge of COVID behind us.
We are living through history, and those of us who survive this crisis will talk about it for decades. It is one of the defining characteristics of our era. With so much going wrong in this world, it is easy to get cynical, to throw up your hands and give up. But that’s not the lesson I wanted to impart. Each of us has been shaped by this crisis, and the test of our will is in finding out how we respond to it. As such, Emerson’s insights provide us with one voice in a chorus of wisdom that will guide us forward. In the closing paragraph of “Society and Solitude,” Emerson wrote:
Here again, as so often, Nature delights to put us between extreme antagonisms, and our safety is in the skill with which we keep the diagonal line. Solitude is impracticable, and society fatal. We must keep our head in the one, and our hands in the other. The conditions are met, if we keep our independence, yet do not lose our sympathy.
All of us should keep our independence and never lose our sense of sympathy, especially during the age of COVID.
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“If you would lift me you must be on higher ground. If you would liberate me you must be free. If you would correct my false view of facts, — hold up to me the same facts in the true order of thought, and I cannot go back from the new conviction.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Eloquence”