Lockdown Nostalgia

I miss only caring about what really matters.

“Country Life Stories; Some Rural Community Helpers” (1938), Vernon Winslow.

Editor’s Note: Tara Isabella Burton is a leading writer of her generation, who has pulled off the increasingly-rare feat of publishing both fiction and non-fiction. She is also the author of the most popular essay on this site: “The Temptation of Peter Thiel.” Today, we are happy to announce that Tara has joined Wisdom of Crowds as a Contributing Writer. Her first piece revisits an experience most of us would like to forget: the lockdown. Tara misses it …

— Santiago Ramos, Executive Editor

---

It is easy to be nostalgic for all kinds of unpleasant things. We are nostalgic for unhappy childhoods, brutal educational institutions, unhappy relationships, noxious political regimes. Me, I’m nostalgic for the pandemic.

Caveat: I was one of the lucky ones. I eloped with my now-husband the day before New York City shut down; my work has never not been primarily freelance and remote. I lost no family members, nor any friends. The two-odd years of pandemic-tide were uncanny, to be sure, but they were not traumatic. They were, in fact, the happiest of my life.

Life made sense to me, then, as it had rarely before, and only sometimes did afterwards. I knew, with the clarity of distillation, who I was, what I wanted, for what I would risk breathing contaminated air, or touching a polluted surface. For most of my adult life I’d wrestled with an emptiness that enraged me. I was too easily bored; too easily distracted; chasing exhilaration and finding, more often than not, alienation. Then, the world stopped, and in its stillness I found not only peace, but abundance. I started noticing everything: The weeks the leaves changed, and the contours of urbans hills I had walked so many times without ever putting topography to Morningside or Washington Heights, the raccoons of Morningside Park, the difference between a brisk fall day – where you could still safely have a picnic – and the ones where you couldn’t gather at all. I felt, for two years, and for the first time, like I was living my life, instead of waiting for it to begin.

I am not alone in this. Many of my family and friends admit to similar experiences — at least, after the initial shock of the “Stop the Spread” campaign, and its shadowy yet immediate terrors. What we are nostalgic for is the strange normalcy that came after: Pantries considered and emptied, meals cooked in bulk at home, Zoom plays and makeshift outdoor socializing. For those of us without children to educate or elderly to protect, with remote-friendly livelihoods conductible from the safety of our interior rooms, with access to parks and walkable streets, it was actually — uncanny to admit — pretty nice. It was, at the very least, preferable to the seeming mania that came after: A long-heralded return to normalcy that, in New York City, at least, correlated with vertiginous inflation, a massive spike in anti-social public behavior, and a seemingly renewed, TikTok-fueled cultural commitment that everything be as content-worthy as possible.

The life I led from, roughly, March 2020 to early 2022 was, perhaps the least content-worthy life I’d ever lived. Certainly, it was the smallest, in terms of scale and scope. The tasks that concerned me most were the ones in front of me: Getting fed, staying sane. We put together a meal from pantry staples during those months that grocery shopping was still inadvisable (we did try, and fail, to make bread). The pursuit of pleasure, likewise, involved at-times manic effort: To gather, first on Zoom, and then, increasingly, outdoors, occupied the whole of our collective energies. There were the nights, in March and April, when we dressed up “for the opera” – the Metropolitan Opera House’s nightly free screening – and Zoomed with our like-minded friends during the intermissions. There was Zoom karaoke, and Zoom Dungeons and Dragons, and Zoom theatre – beautiful by virtue of its necessity. (A March 2020 production, via Zoom, of Oedipus Rex, starring Oscar Isaacs and Frances McDormand, and centering the panic of the Theban plague, remains one of the most affecting artistic pieces I’ve ever seen.)

We made it work. We let time set its own rhythms. We listened at the window to the nightly celebration of health care workers, which functioned, alongside New York’s hospital sirens, as the metropolitan equivalent of cathedral bells. Everywhere I needed to go I walked, or biked. Most of my life was lived in the open area, regardless of season. I learned about Smartwool. I wore a Snuggie outdoors. Nearly all of my time and effort, beyond the immediate requirements of my work, was devoted to making the best of life. I would have said, then, that I was making life as normal as possible, but in normal times I’d never tried so hard.

I — and most of the people I know who feel this way about the pandemic — fell somewhere in the middle between “illegal downtown Covid-parties” and “still refuse to go out without a mask.” We followed general public health guidelines while actively attempting to retain as much of life as possible within them (think: socializing via outdoor picnics in January weather, complete with thermoses full of hot toddies). With the benefit of hindsight, I find myself all the more frustrated both at those who denied the pandemic’s reality as a genuine public-health crisis and at those dismissed as mere selfishness the vital human hungers for social connection and community so many of us retained. I think, often, about the failures of public health messaging to, for example, foster and indeed encourage outdoor gathering as soon as it became evident that such gatherings were, in fact, safe. For every pandemic story like mine, there is a story of isolation, of despair, of educations ruptured and community ties severed. Many of these stories, I believe, were entirely preventable.

But what the pandemic also offered — and, it is becoming increasingly apparent — did not thereafter deliver — was the opportunity for what we might term a cultural reset. It offered the promise of a grand project, one that demanded national unity and pragmatic brotherhood even in the waning chaos of the Trump Presidency. It offered the promise of direct governmental action to ameliorate the lives of ordinary people: Stimulus checks and unemployment subsidies designed to make staying at home possible. It provided us with a glimpse of what human institutions might do, if all their funds and energy were directed towards the preservation of human security and human sanity.

On a psychological level, it offered a new model of relationship to our neighbors, one in which, regardless of political affiliation or social class, we had no choice but to be in it together, even if that togetherness could only manifest itself, on a city street or in a testing queue, as the strict enforcement of six feet of distance. At the Morningside Heights bodega – at which I allowed myself rare masked entrance for a too-sweet too-burnt coffee I came to crave – I came to know and recognize the regulars as we maneuvered ourselves into and out the cramped space, never getting too close. Later in the pandemic, I volunteered at the Bowery Mission, and there too came to know a whole new group of recurring faces.

 For a few months, for two years, we — Americans — functioned, orthogonally to our electoral politics, as a political community, or at least a potential political community. It was, in this regard, roughly analogous to wartime. We had — until the politicization of Covid rendered such unity impossible — a common, invisible enemy. Interesting times are, after all, a useful if not desirable corrective to the kind of alienation common to the professional class with too much time on their hands.

But I think my pandemic nostalgia goes deeper. Ironically, given our near-universal reliance on our Internet connections for work and socializing alike, the pandemic era was largely defined, for me at least, by its absence of what New Yorker science writer Kyle Chayka has referred to as “frictionlessness.” For Chayka, the frictionless state is the natural endpoint of our algorithmic culture: one in which smartphone apps, from map routing to targeted-product-selling, have largely taken over the business of human decision-making. In ordinary times, we barely have to decide what brand of moisturizer to order, or what music to listen to; we do not have to pay attention to our physical geography to, say, find an open restaurant, or navigate our way to a friend’s apartment. The inventiveness that the pandemic required — to daily discern and make decisions about how to live, both with one another and also, physically, apart from one another — was an inventiveness born out of necessary friction: we had to figure out how to live while not dying (or, at least, not indirectly killing anyone). Reliant by necessity upon our Internet connections, many of us treated the digital realm not as a desirable distraction, but a tolerable evil — akin to the work so many of us did through it — to be contrasted with a leisure time predicated, as much as possible, on presence. Real life was the thing we fought for.

If I am nostalgic for anything, in the end, it is for that friction: a friction that, just a few years later, seems not just surreal but quaint. I miss using Swiss fire gel to keep hot toddies warm in January picnics; I miss the night we went Christmas Caroling, in the West Village, with hand warmers in our shoes, warming up in subway stations, and the other night – the following Christmas, when half the people I knew were isolating with omicron, when I – recently recovered – went out caroling again at their windows. I miss when the only holiday we could take was bicycling from our apartment to Tarrytown, New York, twenty-five or so miles away, or else to the Rockaways, because we could only go where we could get on two wheels. I miss having fewer choices, and the fullness I experienced in making the ones I could, and the freedom of knowing we were all doing the same thing. I miss worrying only about the things that mattered most.

 The Instagram era, after all, is over; the TikTok era — and whatever comes next — have made the old modes of content cringe. And if I long for anything, it is not a return to pandemic-era isolation but rather to a time where physical presence, because of its very impossibility, seemed once more to be the most important way of being. We waited desperately for the days we could hold each other again — and now that we can, it seems we have forgotten how to want to.

We have, perhaps, missed our opportunity for the restoration of our post-pandemic humanity. But we can, albeit in smaller ways, attempt to hold onto that brief ethic of presence. We can still bake bread, even when it’s not a social media phenomenon. We can still make eye contact with our neighbors, even when we don’t have to stand six feet away. We have the opportunity — all the more so, now that “QR code menus” and other forms of digital-hygiene theatre are blessedly no longer fashionable — to divest ourselves of going out with our smartphone altogether (as I am, increasingly, trying to do).

If there is any common cause I share with the most extreme “lockdown skeptics” it is this: our social connections matter — perhaps more than anything else.  The trick is how to foster them, now that we can.

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!