Business As Usual

Business as Usual

Over the last few weeks, months, or… years? I’ve been doing my utmost to track my emotional well-being during this time of crisis, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed but things are changing in our external world. And due to these changes, those everyday experiences, which before might have been minor stressors or inconveniences, are now inflated like balloons. They don’t really seem to fit.

Job security seems out the window, and so too does the maintenance of relationships, cultivation of meaningful experiences, and separation of contexts. All-in-all, pretty much everything has increased in mass and gravity, yet we still are attempting to progress and move forward, business as usual.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I immediately felt that trying to maintain performative and evaluated roles the way we always have was not in our best interest. The mere fact that the terrain changed signaled to me that expectations and norms should change as well. After all, you wouldn’t wear winter clothing in the middle of the Sahara, or a swimsuit atop a mountain. And a similarity can be drawn with our newfound state of isolation.

Prior to the pandemic most of us had different contexts for different tasks. School was for school, work was for work, and home was for home. However, we now find ourselves in two distinct forms of overlap. Overlap within our physical spaces to be sure, but also, an overlap of what you might refer to as psychic landscapes. Don’t piss where you eat feels like a very appropriate notion during these times. We have found our different personas having to inhabit the same physical domains, and our associations related to different environments are beginning to mix like a muddy stew.

We have lost our separation, even in isolation, because we have begun to literally take work home with ourselves. And not just work, but our gyms, our children’s pre-school, the library, everything… is now in what was once primarily a living dwelling.

The problem, I feel, is quite simple… During a time of uncertainty, our negative emotions heighten, and we begin to go into threat detection, which is prompted mostly by anxiety. Everything requires more thought, more contingencies, and some things appear unworkable. Imagine what would happen if you broke your arm, chipped a tooth or got a cut on your eye… Would you want to go to the hospital? And how would you maintain your safety in doing so? Would you have to isolate for two weeks after? Wait for a test kit? Yikes… what else… what else?

These examples may seem extreme. However, normally they would be almost trivial (in terms of what you ought to do). Definitely unwanted, but most of us could rest assured that these health fiascos could be handled. The same can be said about any other, unwanted, yet usually manageable occurrence. Everything is now threatening our ability to regulate ourselves. How do you think you would fare if the power went out or the internet went down? Let’s not think about that.

My point here, besides meandering and tangentially thinking this through, is that our metrics for evaluating are normed on times when things are, wait for it… normal. Yet we are still having people go to school or work with the same expectations that we had before. This is either due to a horrendous misunderstanding of how the mind works, bottom line mentalities, or both. Whatever the reason, the demand that is usually placed upon us needs to be relaxed. The reason for this, mainly, is that we have all lost our routines, our daily expectations, a sense of novelty, and our ability to plan beyond the short-term.

Prior to this event, we rarely considered something that had with it at least a modicum of dissatisfaction, like our commutes, helpful… but I’d argue it was actually a set of time between home life and work-life… It was an emotionally abusive palate cleanser… but a palate cleanser, nonetheless. At least we knew what to expect.

(Perhaps a better example would be an hour at the gym, but I figured taking something we all were happy to be done with and showing that it was arguably beneficial might be more impactful.)?

So, what do we do? I have my opinions… We must adapt to the overlap. School time should be school time. Enough grading beyond the completion of assignments. Teachers should be working through assignments and projects during and in class. This provides distance when students are done with their learning and practical application to step away from their computers as workspaces and engage in other activities. Work, more or less, has always had a degree of overlap for many occupations with home life. However, certain projects may be better suited to a social, collaborative effort, in real-time, as opposed to divvying up individual tasks and reconvening at a later time.

These tweaks may sound silly or even simple. I realize that these are not the only ways to manage the strange circumstances we find ourselves in. But we are all getting to the point in this experience where we have spent too much time playing pretend that things are nice with our Netflixing and internet surfing when the truth is the world is not progressing forward, business as usual.