Molly Osberg, at Jezebel:
The existential terror hovers to varying degrees around the edges of these stories, and the anxiety about what comes next is real. But there’s still such a lack of useful language to describe what the hell happened, and what we’re supposed to be doing now. In the place of a shared sense of reality or collective expression of mourning, I see a torrent of advice on how a person who managed to survive can feel more self-actualized once they return to the shuffle between the office and after-work drinks. To me, this looks like denial, the first tentative step towards what I’m told are seven distinct stages of grief.
It’s always been true that the advice lifestyle writers offer tends to obscure more difficult realities. Financial bloggers recommend investing early and forgoing the morning latte as if thrifty habits could combat the forces that have conspired to grant 50 people control of almost half of the United States’ wealth. Tactics that claim to combat burnout or encourage self-care rarely dwell on how, exactly, most Americans have come to work harder for less money than in generations before. Most service journalism is a workaround, a way of rendering specific and material failures as issues of personal choice. There’s no life hack that gets around the knowledge your government was happy to let a vast swath of its population die, no radical acceptance of such a monumental chain of loss. Reading pages filled with recommendations on navigating a slightly altered future feels like receiving a missive from another world—a final and devastating cruelty that we’d all have to soldier on pretending the loss isn’t collective and omnipresent, that in the end not so much has really changed.
And anyway, recalibrating towards normal implies there’s something to get back to, that the pandemic was a thing with a tidy beginning and end. Covid-19 is not a phase or an era or a series of habits to be unlearned. It was a largely preventable horror that altered the fabric of reality and there are people responsible: For refusing aid, for lying about the threat, for profiting off of suffering. They’re the people best served by a country too traumatized to keep looking clearly at the dead, a dazed and defeated group of people invested enough in their own personal journeys towards normalcy they slowly begin to forget that this wasn’t just something that happened but was done, repeatedly and intentionally, to them.