The year of "the comfy abyss"

This month marks a full year of us floating in our “comfy abyss."

It’s a weird voyage. We have access to untold amount of entertainment, and we are bored out of our minds.

Never before in human history has being at home been so easy. With the press of a couple buttons and a debit of a few dollars, I can watch nearly any movie or television show ever made. I can listen to any music from any artist, directly into my ears or played throughout my home. I can play decades worth of video or computer games, either solo or with people around the world. I can read one of the hundreds of books in our apartment, or have any of millions delivered electronically or physically. I can cook with ingredients from around the world available at the corner store, or have one of over a thousand restaurants deliver to our doorstep. I can summon up, often with same day shipping, nearly any material object you can imagine. Hell, I can even put on a virtual reality headset and pretend to explore strange new worlds. 

For many of us, home is safe, dry, warm, and comfortable. For most of human existence, these were not givens. For too many people today, it is still not the case.

On the personal level, my wife and I are lucky enough to A, have jobs, and B, have jobs that mostly don’t require us to leave the confines of a laptop. We’re fortunate to have loved ones we can call, text, email, or Zoom. In a year of nearly unfathomable human and economic devastation, neither of these are givens as well. I realize it is an absurd blessing to even be in “comfy” anything, when so many friends and neighbors don’t have such a luxury – and when so many that do are also facing increased care-giving burdens and health anxieties. Speaking of absurd luck, it's also a generational fortune to be alive in a time when all of the distractions above are even possible.

That last part is the point though. We're living in an age of technological marvels. We have instantaneous global communication, with nearly global accessibility. We benefit from industrial science and supply chains that bring riches that would make kings and emperors blush to the dollar store.

This is the easiest it has ever been to tackle the beast that we’re collectively fighting, but it still sucks on levels big and small. We’re forced to fear the sight of others. Our calendars have been largely wiped clean, with no parties or trips, weddings or graduations, coffees or dinners to look forward to. Some of us have gone months without going home, seeing far-flung (or even nearby) family, or seeing their school or classmates again before graduating. There’s a bunch of dead plants on our haunted office desks as colleagues are approaching a year of working apart.

This is the most painless it has ever been to do the right thing and tackle the beast before us. But just because we’re comfortable and distracted, it doesn’t mean this is easy on our collective psyche.

People often quote French philosopher Jean-Paul Sarte’s “hell is other people.” If this pandemic has taught us anything, it should be the opposite: life is other people.

For even the most introverted among us, we are social creatures. We need our community, our tribe, to make us whole. We’ve all lost so much in the past year, but I hope that we don’t also lose the true, unguarded interactions with others that feed our collective soul. 

As winter thaws into spring, there is a stunning amount of good news on the horizon – the vaccines work to an almost miraculous extent, and we just might get out of this sooner rather than later. When we do, and then later when this all fades further into our memories, we must remember this: what makes life full and worthwhile is neither an Amazon delivery or Netflix stream, it’s the simple joy of sharing that life with other people. 

Stay safe, stay sane – we're almost there.