Back to normal? Venting my dark optimism
By: Lucas Fava
Tags: Motivation, Covid, Mental Health, Politics, Depression

The way people usually say “how have you been?” in Brazil, where I am from, translates to “all good?”. Lately, my honest answer has been “no.”

Or even, to the English question, “terrible.”

In French, I answer the question “does it go?” with “it does not go”. I love how each of these has a different undertone, but the point is the same: My life is not okay right now.

To be fair, my life is quite great, individually speaking. But, joker memes aside, we live in a society. The moment someone asks me how I am doing, we are establishing a connection between us, getting some grasp of each others’ sense of reality, and my sense of reality right now is quite terrible. This reality is social, and political, because it is primarily about the kinds of choices we have been making together, about how we want to live and how we want to build our future. I think a lot about this, and I am both overwhelmed and scared.

We have an expectation that things be okay, and usually answering to these “how are you?” questions negatively, like I have been doing, is quite disruptive. It bothers people who wanted only a distraction rather than honest conversation. Funnily enough, the people around me can be divided into two groups: Those who react to my answer with “of course”, and those who react with surprise, asking for more details, to which I often have little to say aside from “well, everything?”.

We often have a deep belief that something about our reality is inherently stable, that there is something that is normal and safe, a something to which this worldwide pandemic only provided a minor interruption. A break for Netflix and baking, if you will. This is what I hear when I hear talk of going “back to normal”, and it scares me deeply. It scares me because I do not see that normal, safe, stable reality to go back to. What I see is all the changes going on, changes that are not for the better.

These changes are not simply happening, however, as some inevitable act of God. What is scary is precisely how none of it is inevitable. These changes are being caused and chosen by people, precisely because we believe in this stable and safe world where we can continue doing whatever we are doing and that magically everything will turn out okay. By refusing to look around, by trying so desperately to just keep up normal life, we continue reproducing everything that is leading us to a very scary future. This scares me a lot.

It scares me that without doing anything different, people believe that with two shots of vaccine we can go back to regular life and the world will magically fix itself. What crushes me is that, yes, we got vaccines, but the world is not getting any better. Whatever lesson we could have learned from this pandemic, we seem to have completely missed it.

I think of how our vaccine distribution itself is far less efficient than it could be because, at the global level, we are prioritizing the value of private patents, and the profit of huge corporations, over the value of poor people’s lives. This is the only reason we even have competing vaccines, some of which are more dangerous than others, and these dangers, in turn, help spread out anti-vaxxer ideas. I also think about how we seem to be doing nothing about climate change because we believe our three-months of profit are more important. How people are still driving their cars expecting “going back to normal” to mean for everyone to go back to hours of commuting every day. While the news show the weather is becoming progressively more dangerous each year, my local government is prioritizing building more asphalt roads over sustainable transport. Amidst all of this, with incredible wishful-thinking and blind hope, I see supposedly intelligent people expecting that solutions will come from tech billionaires who are more interested in escaping to Mars than to help society by paying taxes.

I also think about how North and South American politics seem to cycle between outright neofascism and veiled neofascism practice with liberal discourse. How police funding, children in cages, and lack of clean water for indigenous peoples seems unchallenged by the election of liberal governments. How inequality is aggressively on the rise, housing markets are increasingly more predatory, and my generation’s hope of retirement or social ascendancy without inherited wealth is dismal. I have been foolish enough to move away from a job that gave me stability in exchange for my soul in order to try something fulfilling in academia, yet the prospects of an academic career are increasingly low. The new gig economy bends universities to prioritize the values of the market, making it so non-STEM/Law/Business departments are systematically deprioritized.

Then as I try to reconnect, some of the friends I missed and wanted to see are talking about how they “don’t trust the vaccine yet”, and while I agree there is a lot about how our production and distribution is sketchy, I cannot help but feel overwhelmed by the amount of misplaced distrust and misinformation behind their opinion. I am immunodeficient and I care about understanding the science behind these things. I might even be someone who depends on herd immunity to be safe, and seeing misinformed, young, privileged people being flippant about it hurts me quite personally.

It is hard to reconnect with people while having all of this in the back of my mind. My close friends are generally already in full agreement but are rather powerless to change anything. Others are so completely somewhere else, so distant from this awareness, so alienated from politics and history, that I sound like an alien. As if we have been living in different planets.

My impression is that usually, these people have more power, more money, and more influence, so perhaps not thinking about any of this is their way to avoid any cognitive dissonance. Other times they are generally powerless like me, and they try not to think about it in order not to despair. Yet that cognitive dissonance, that threatening despair, is precisely what we collectively need to deal with.

What scares me above all is not climate change or fascism, but human inertia and stubbornness. I have no clue if my life will be long, but I would like for people in general to live good lives rather than a manmade hell. It scares me how despite knowing better, we are so stuck with our lack of imagination, our collective incapacity for action. We do what we can, often with symbolic action such as texts like these, discourses, and protests, but there is very little tangible and material action or change. We desperately need more.

We are going back to normal, but I see nothing normal, nothing safe and comforting that makes sense. I see only the madness of human selfishness and greed. I am overwhelmed and scared. We are going back to what, exactly?

I want to have hope, and on my best days, I do.

Just not a dumb, wishful-thinking, blind hope.

I want to do my damn best. I want to survive and prosper, and even enjoy my life. I want to make the most out of all my privileges, which I cannot even number. I want to do it in a way that makes the world a better place, whatever that means.

Living means managing my time, and time is such a problem. It keeps moving forward without stop, but our bodies have limited energy and we need breaks. The experience of the pandemic, particularly these last few months, has been an experience of both feeling like there is not enough time and of not knowing what to do with the time I do have.

I have been trying to rest after this very difficult year and a half. I have been playing a lot of games, while having many mixed feelings that I could be using my time better. At the same time I have also been reading a lot of difficult but important books, which, being the person I am with the tools that I have, is part of becoming the kind of person I want to be, to maybe make a difference. I am also slowly reconnecting with people, because at the end of the day, regardless how scary, people are what matter. Facing people is necessary if we want change.

This text has been to express, as we progressively “go back”, that I know I am not alone, and that for many of us it is so hard to “go back”.

Go back to what?

I desperately hope, and I want to do my damn best, for us to not go back.

I hope we go forward, instead.

Please do the same. I know very well how crushing thinking about our prospect can be, but please do not simply grow tired and selfish. Do not despair and give up, either.

We all need each other.