The plague years

This is an excellent long NYT Magazine piece about the Covid oral history project at Columbia University. The pandemic hit New York City harder than almost anywhere else in the country, so it makes for grim but fascinating reading:

There’s an idea in sociology that, as social creatures, we are only ourselves because we perform being those selves every day; our individual identities depend on the frameworks in which we’re embedded. But during this first act of the pandemic, the entire theater in which many people gave those performances crumbled. “Like, if I’m working in a hospital,” Milstein explained, “I think of myself as a doctor. I’m someone who can save my patients. But now I’m in a situation where I can’t save my patients. So am I still that? Or am I still a teacher if I’m not going to school?” This kind of subtle identity crisis was replicated millions of times, all across New York City and the world. Hagen and Milstein were also picking up on a separate kind of “socio-material crisis”: a breakdown in the predictability of the material world around you. That elevator button you push every day might suddenly be a vector of disease. Grocery shelves might be empty. Even the city itself seemed to be, in an experiential sense, dissolving; “New York City is right now a very abstract concept,” one woman in the Bronx explained: a disjointed set of neighborhoods that most people had ceased traveling among.

The sociologists told me about a third, more abstract crisis as well: In their view, time basically stopped working. They showed me a diagram they had worked up to illustrate this three-pronged predicament. It bore the title “Phenomenological Model of Crisis With No Resolution,” and, though it was just two blue shapes with some hot pink arrows running between them, it expressed ideas that would take several paragraphs to break down. But the upshot was: People were stuck. With everything suddenly up for grabs — with people’s identities undermined and their surroundings untrustworthy — the narrators struggled to negotiate, and find meaning in, the details of their daily lives. And without any sense of when the pandemic would end, it became impossible to break out of that malaise, to project oneself into a future that kept evaporating ahead of you.

To describe that limbo, Milstein and Hagen used the term “ontological insecurity” — a play, they explained, on “ontological security,” a well-known concept within the field. In sociology, the term is most associated with the English sociologist Anthony Giddens who defined ontological security as a “person’s fundamental sense of safety in the world” — a belief in the reliability of our surroundings and the continuity of our own life stories within them. It’s ontological security that allows us to “keep a particular narrative going,” Giddens wrote.

Of course “ontological insecurity” is an idea that resonates far beyond the over/not-over pandemic:

A nonprofit worker confessed, “I used to think that we lived in a society, and I thought that people would come together to take care of one another, and I don’t think that anymore.” . . .

One question the researchers often asked was, “What can you imagine that you couldn’t imagine before the pandemic?” When Milstein posed this to a young college student and H.V.A.C. repairman in November 2020, he immediately replied, “The end of the United States as we know it.” Milstein explained to him that this struck her as significant, because a lot of people seemed to be saying things like that, many more than expressed such concerns when they started their interviews in the spring. Back then, she told him, people were mostly just learning to bake bread.

Hagen told me recently: “We had a really interesting breakthrough this week. We are realizing just how deranged life under the pandemic actually was.”

Officially the pandemic has killed 1.1 million Americans; the true number is probably several hundred thousand higher. Millions — nobody knows how many — are struggling with a long-term debilitating illness.

In the course of the pandemic, we discovered that, as a nation, our capacity to suffer inconvenience in order to avoid killing each other was limited to non-existent. That is what the word “freedom” means to us. So we are now forgetting what happened, because that is what we do:

 Human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.