What Should Change After This?

This is a deeply strange place from which we currently sit, now months into a previously unimaginable state of paralysis. But there is one thing that the volume of indecipherable days and weeks already behind us has confirmed, we cannot go back, we can only go on. It has also begged the question, even if we could go back, would we want to? We’ve perhaps had flickers of this emotion previously, that feeling when you have a really profound break from work (known in the past as a two-week holiday), that made you realise some fundamentals needed to change. But, in the end, you were sucked into the rapids again as there was no possible way to try and paddle upstream. Despite your epiphany, the world was determined to carry on regardless.

The pace of things to come

But this time it’s different. I don’t think anyone living through a pandemic would describe it as a holiday, but the protracted time it has flung us out of our previous habits and routines is one of the more profound things about it. While some of us have continued to crave routine, others have relished the fluidity of not having to be somewhere at 8.42 every morning, corralling others to catch that exact bus, scramble to haul ourselves through rush hour, to get to a point where our working day was only just beginning. Of the vast majority of us, the things we are not missing is our commute, our not always functional workplace and having to be defined by what they did, or didn’t do, that day.

While some companies, some governments and general talking shops paid lip service to the very real issues of burnout, before the pandemic, from this perspective, it was just that. Throw all the baristas, ping pong tables and hang out areas you like at it, nothing was really going to get in the way of the unrelenting hunger that a growing economy requires of our energy. Hours were continuing to be piled on to everyone’s workload, elasticated working days that we justified because it helped to give us the misplaced meaning that is our human nature to seek. At worst, it was a ‘means to an end’, and where it damaged our wellbeing, our family or our relationships, well, society told us, you are doing it for them anyway.

The Value Flip

We have been idolising overwork and an unmanageable pace. We have deified it. We have become our work to the point that what you did outside it really had little to no value in terms of society. Of all people, this has hurt mothers and carers the most. While managing the majority of the emotional and practical workload at home, it has also meant having to perform on equal terms in a career to feel seen. And it has been a real betrayal.

And ironically now, it has left many of us working outside the home feeling useless without our normal agency in the world, primarily because the tasks that now make up our waking hours are those that have been so roundly divested of any worth. This is not just conjecture. A recent piece in The Lilly found that women academics are submitting fewer papers right now than ever, while men are submitting more. This is because more women are homeschooling, cooking, cleaning, minding others. As one writer on Twitter said, no wonder women in the 1950s lost their shit.

But the truth is that many of us, women and men, feel real and palpable fear at the idea of going back to how things were. To that unforgiving pace. There are many of us who have regularly cursed it but have felt powerless against it. And ultimately, it is a question of values. Our values have become toxic to our own wellbeing. Heroising money, success, wealth. Cheapening childcare, nature, selflessness. As historian Diarmuid Ferriter said, “We do not need a new mantra centred on the idea of the best little economic recovery in the post-COVID-19 world; we need a new definition of economic decency and balance.”

And this has to be based around a new value system, and a new powerplay. And there may be only one way to start, at the beginning. That means a rip-up of the old rule book, and perhaps a literal one of the school books. We need to teach a value system, not a curriculum. The fact that our children become used to seeing homeless on the streets tells them something. That there are people who fall through the cracks, and that’s just how it is. That even their first journey is a race, a race to get the best scores, to be seen and quantified in one tiny, narrow, reductive way that will have little or nothing to do with their ultimate happiness. It is time to cut the cancer of the need for continued climbing to some better, unattainable life out of our hearts and minds for good.

It is said that a world in crisis is one where everything is up for grabs. This opportunity may not come again. We need to grab this moment.

Jessie Collins, May 2020.