Life in the time of corona?

The title is fairly clichéd more than 7 months into a pandemic, with meme kings and queens reigning supreme. 

Also, my previous post was in August 2016, so here's to partial lockdown for bringing me back?

Life is a big 'embrace yourself', 'learn something new', video call all the human beings you've ever known, cooking experiments, gardening, DIY everything, and dusting off all the tricks in your bag that you may have forgotten existed. 

I am more fortunate than most, right now. I live with and near my loved ones, nobody I know has tested positive yet, I can still move around to breathe a little bit, and thankfully the country I call home looks like they can handle this without too many casualties. Every day I spend a lot of time counting my lucky stars (no, not out of boredom!), that my biggest problem is that I don't have much to keep me occupied. 

Having had ample time to think long and hard about pretty much everything, I was particularly enamored by the idea of 'plans'. In the rat race that was life till about November 2019, people had, or were expected to have, their lives planned. Next step in education, in your career, in your personal life, in investments, in everything! Complex calculations predicted a certain level that you were expected to achieve, and further calculations ascertained the level your dreams should be at. As we leveled up or down on the neverending highway to certain death, society got to sit around and watch us break a sweat or breeze through, and annotate our lives with their helpful (?) comments. 

All of this might not have changed for a lot of people. Yet surely there is a big community of people who are presently looking into a blank void, attempting to comprehend the murkiness of what lay ahead of them. What will the world look like, if and when this is done? When do I go back to 'normalcy'? Is my job still going to be there at the end of this? How do I explain a suspicious lack of productivity on my college application? 

Though I'm yet to make a judgment call on whether this is amusing or bemusing, a vast majority of us are so ingrained to never letting up in life (out of necessity or habit or sheer force of will), that we are beginning to openly talk about mental health issues that are coming out of not having much to do! We are living during a time when Kim Jong Un (remember the other spoilt kid with nuclear codes?) is Schrodinger's Kim Jong Un (I don't think the moon landing was a hoax, but c'mon, botched heart surgery?)! And yet. Oh yeah, always that 'and yet'. In my head, like a constantly running program (broken radio, to be en pointe), there is a myriad of permutations and combinations attempting to rererererestructure 'life'? 

I have spent months together wishing that I could spend one more minute just sitting down quietly. Well, I got my wish, didn't I? I complained about a Netflix account that was going to waste because I simply didn't have the time to watch anything. I think I might have exhausted the cornucopia that is Netflix. I complained about not getting enough time to reorganize my room or take a long shower or take long walks or laze around or sleep in. Well, what do you know, all of those wishes have come true! 

In a month, I'll turn 27. I got a driving license four days ago, something I had given up after September 2018! All the various sources of corona news and news alerts parade a world that is spinning out of control, while some of us are sitting in our houses, trying to deal with unnecessary tribulations thrown at us, courtesy existential crises and nihilist tendencies brought about by the pandemic. Do people around me suddenly think getting married is a good idea, though I am sure all divorce attorneys around the globe are going to have sprawling beach houses at the end of this? Do they want me to rethink my child-rearing prospects and policies though with every alternate breath they count themselves blessed to not be locked in with kids? As the general human population is truly realizing that it may not be the best idea to spend too much time even with the people you love the most, are people still reminding me that I may have crossed the 'best before' date? Maybe. 

While basking in the nihilistic aura caused by a legion of philosophy and philosophy-adjacent classes, I did genuinely assume that if something life-changing occurred, our markers of success and achievement would change. Like life after the Industrial Revolution. Or the baby boomer culture. We are in the biggest worldwide crisis humanity has faced in recent times, with an end to it only in farsight, and we have still refused to let go of the parameters that needed to be met in order to achieve what is socially and morally accepted as the 'good life'. Or is this some warped manifestation of Sartre saying 'life begins on the other side of despair'? Is holding onto a false semblance of normalcy, is making plans for when we come out on the other side of this, the only way to keep hope alive? 

Well, then colour me hopeful too.

I'll see you on the other side of this pandemic, readers!