We Will Be Saying “Post-Pandemic” for Another 80 Years
And that's not a bad thing.
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I was struck by one of the dozens of comments on my “human doom loop” piece that cautioned me against saying we’re “post-pandemic.” To this commenter, the pandemic is still not over. (And indeed, with a bird flu on the horizon, maybe a new pandemic is in the works.)
But while we can argue over that sentiment — the WHO did say the health emergency of the pandemic was over 615 days ago — the comment points to a bigger issue: the pandemic’s daily impacts are fading, but the trauma of this time period is still completely and totally with many of us.
As we approach the fifth anniversary of the March 2020 lockdowns in the U.S, the look-backs are coming. I think we should embrace the tendency to document and remember how life was before the pandemic, and to research and report how different it has been since 2020.
Most people want to move on from the pandemic. It can be grating to constantly see stats about office occupancy, downtown foot traffic, or population compared with December 2019. But we are truly only beginning to understand the pandemic as a significant turning point, and there are benefits to examining how nearly every facet of our society has shifted since 2020. The fact that Google Scholar finds more than 500,000 review papers exploring the COVID-19 pandemic indicates there’s a lot worth studying in the before-and-after.
Turning points matter
We are approaching the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II this year, and despite the fact that only 1 percent of the world’s population was born before 1945, we still use the words Pre-War and Post-War a lot. That’s because it was a massive turning point in human history, and like the pandemic, a global trauma.
After 1945, so much changed I can’t even do it justice in a summary paragraph: whether it was the addition of 70 million Americans in the Baby Boom; or the construction of entire cities from scratch, such as Phoenix, which quadrupled its population in the 1950s; or the way the U.S. came out of the war as a newly dominant economic and political player on the global stage. The point is that you couldn’t understate 1945 as a turning point no matter how important it was to move on from the war.
The post-pandemic era will represent a similarly distinct departure from everything that came before it. Charts like this one below that show a staggering change in remote work after 2020. Denoting this change as “post-pandemic” is useful not only because it demarcates the beginning of a new era, but also because it reminds everyone of what dramatic societal changes the pandemic produced.
The Great Recession Faded From Memory
Frankly, I think we’ve spent too little time exploring some other major turning points in recent history. It’s been 17 years since the Great Recession, and while there were plenty of reports on its impact shortly afterwards, nowadays we rarely discuss its impact.
But lessons from 2008 are still relevant today. It was a turning point in the housing market, with ongoing reverberations. Just look below at the downslide in housing starts. We’ve yet to recover normal levels of housing production since 2008. Amidst thousands of pieces that try to explain the current housing crisis, few writers other than Conor Dougherty have brought us back to this data point when trying to explain how we have such a housing shortage today.
Perhaps more importantly, many current political sentiments could be traced back to 2008.
With the 2008 financial crash and the Great Recession, the ideology of neoliberalism lost its force. The approach to politics, global trade, and social philosophy that defined an era led not to never-ending prosperity but utter disaster. “Laissez-faire is finished,” declared French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan admitted in testimony before Congress that his ideology was flawed. In an extraordinary statement, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd declared that the crash “called into question the prevailing neoliberal economic orthodoxy of the past 30 years—the orthodoxy that has underpinned the national and global regulatory frameworks that have so spectacularly failed to prevent the economic mayhem which has been visited upon us.”
Many people have known, intuitively, that things were not back to “the same old” after 2008. And yet perhaps because Democrats viewed President Obama’s administration as a positive shift, they could not see how for many people 2008 permanently altered their life’s course.
According to a Knowledge at Wharton podcast:
“One in five employees lost their jobs at the beginning of the Great Recession. Many of those people never recovered; they never got real work again,” says Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli, director of the school’s Center for Human Resources. “The spike in disability claims was in part caused by the difficulty laid-off people had in securing any jobs. A generation of young people entering the job market had their careers disrupted by it. The fact that this age group continues to delay buying houses, having children, and other markers of stable, adult life is largely attributed to this.”
And yet despite the fact that 2008 was a critical turning point, many politicians other than Trump largely adopted a back-to-normal narrative. The broader narrative wasn’t that our economy, our politics, and the generational norms of housing, jobs and marriage/kids were all disrupted by the Great Recession.
The 2024 election was decided by many issues, but my sense is that a lot of voters in 2024 wanted politicians who spoke to the trauma of the pandemic and recognized that many people haven’t moved on from its impacts yet. Portraying the recovery since 2020 as successful just didn’t ring true for most Americans.
Still Processing
We are still figuring how the world has changed since the pandemic. Imagine trying to write a Post-War history in 1950! But we can start to see some of the changes in terms of lower test scores and life expectancy. Hopefully there will be some positive indicators too! Each time we explore these changes we aren’t harping on the past — we are seeing the future more clearly.
According to the American Psychological Association’s website on PTSD, it seems that looking backward can actually help process a trauma if it helps you avoid distortions and get control over the narrative of what happened, instead of falling into a trap of overgeneralizing bad outcomes and expecting catastrophic outcomes.
And in that way, the commenter who noted we’re not post pandemic yet is right. Whether it is return to office or virtual schooling or the hyper-digitalization of life or vaccines — there’s so much disagreement about what narrative to take away from it all. We are still looking backward and getting stuck in the catastrophe.
As we continue to make sense of the pandemic's profound and lasting impacts, we must remain committed to honest reflection and figuring out the lessons from this era — not to dwell in the past, but to better understand our evolving present and future.
10 jobs / opportunities I’ve seen listed this past week:
SPUR - Housing and Planning Director
Kresge Foundation - Program Officer, American Cities
Legal Roles on Work for America Civic Match jobs board
Blue Forest -Senior Manager of Development
Resolve Philly - Director of Revenue
Lenfest Institute - Head of Development and Donor Relations
MIT - Assistant or Associate Professor in Design
MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism - Research Associate
BloxHub - International Manager
Arnold Ventures - RFP for Evaluating Social Policies and Programs
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Great post, Diana. Perhaps this is in agreement with your thesis, but I feel like Americans are on the whole not processing the experience of the pandemic at all, at least not directly. Instead they have displaced the anxiety and trauma of that time -- of some danger that we didn't see coming (in that case, a novel virus) and that we could not immediately contain -- onto other perceived threats, like, for instance, urban crime and disorder. Don't get me wrong -- these are often real issues that need to be addressed, but also ones that are wildly exaggerated. Even the media talks incessantly about "vibes", as if feelings have become the only things that matter, even if they bare little to no relation to the realities on the ground.
That's how I account for the results of the 2024 election, which should not, in my mind, be viewed as some paradigm shift in American politics but rather, as a reflection of how we're trying (or not trying) to process the pandemic years -- indirectly at best, incoherently at worst. There's a ton of denial going on: indeed, it is shocking to me how little of our national conversation even references the pandemic, almost as if it never happened. I find myself thinking about that every time I walk through an airport terminal and see countless people coughing or sneezing without even bothering to cover their mouths.
One of the greatest impacts of the pandemic may turn out to be the accelerated departure from the workforce of many older workers and the loss of decades of experience and institutional memory, leading to declines in skilled service across many industries and professions (including construction trades at a time of severe housing shortage). But this tipping point seems to have escaped the attention of the Executive Branch as they seek to incentivize mass resignations of civil servants (in the name of “efficiency”) which will only exacerbate the knowledge and experience gap in government.