By Eric Valentine
Any way you look at it, life during COVID sucks.
If the disease hasn’t affected you or a loved one, you still have plenty to complain about. You may have stayed healthy, but have lost your business or your job. You may have kept your job, but lost enough income that your ability to pay bills is now at the whim of a polarized Congress. You may have kept both your health and your job, but lost all opportunity to travel abroad or just attend that concert you’d be hoping to get to.
Any way you look at it, life during COVID sucks. Perhaps that means the only good that can come out of this pandemic is how we’ll do life differently once it’s over. Here’s my shortlist of personal changes in my life as well as personal hopes for changes in the larger culture.
Home Work
It never was everybody’s cup of tea, but working remotely has been perceived as a sort of work benefit during the Internet-era. In the COVID-era, it has been a work requirement. Personally, I love working from home. That’s because I love my home and the pets therein who keep me focused on what’s most important in life—love, food and sleep. With a little discipline—like not getting distracted by house chores or house pets—many workers find themselves more productive at home.
But think about the impact a significant chunk of us working at home has on the environment. In a nutshell, less traffic CO2 and less traffic jams. Think of the impact working from home has on your wallet. Less lunches out. Less gasoline in.
Less Is More
Who doesn’t love a good show? Big stage, bright lights, optimal sound … It all makes for quality entertainment. But who hasn’t enjoyed some of the COVID versions of TV entertainment this year? I think Jimmy Fallon is immensely talented, but I was never a big fan of his format of The Tonight Show. But when he let folks into his Hamptons home, which looked like it was interior designed by Willy Wonka and Ernest Hemingway, things changed. His wife was the camera operator, his two little girls were backdrop because nannies and sitters couldn’t come into the home, and his interviews and comedy bits were boiled down to the bare minimum of what compels us to watch TV.
I hope TV shows and other entertainers take a break from their norms once or twice a year going forward and bring back some of the minimal entertainment options that kept our spirits up during our downtime.
Essentials
Something I hope our culture recognizes about itself is which personnel we declared as “essential” for keeping society afloat. It wasn’t the celebrities, the sports heroes, the attorneys or the hedge fund managers. It was the people who garner some of the lowest wages and least amount of attention, the servers and cooks, the cashiers and stockers.
Perhaps it’s time to reconsider your opinion of what minimum wage, in a still-First World country, should be. And if the math of that just doesn’t pencil out for you, that’s your right to have your own opinion. But hopefully we can all agree that our treatment of those aforementioned workers elevates in the months and years to come. As a server friend of mine recently posted on Facebook: “Serving right now sucks. Please tip well.”
Hopefully any newfound respect of working-class positions doesn’t end there, but it’s certainly a good start.