Pandemic lives and what it revealed about meaning

Socially, we are seeing a number of dichotomies. One type of distinction that we may not have paid much attention to earlier is the distinction between essential work and non-essential work. At the moment, some people are categorised as essential workers and are required to continue to go to work during the pandemic. Some people are non-essential workers. How does it make you feel to be told that you are a non-essential worker? Is that a problem? University lecturers, like myself, count as critical workers because the universities are to remain open, even though the campuses are closed. Some people like that idea; but others feel a bit embarrassed to be called a critical worker. You don’t really feel like a critical worker in the way that an ambulance driver is.

The distinction between essential and non-essential workers goes alongside a distinction between really basic needs and luxury items. We all need food. We all need clothes, but most of us probably have got all the clothes that we need for some time, unless one has got growing kids. Buying a new jacket is probably a luxury good rather than a necessity. Going on holiday was always a luxury. We cannot do that now. Going out in the evening was a luxury. While we can go out now, these activities now seem to take on an extra meaning. Between lockdowns, I managed to visit a gallery, and it was really special. It was a type of intense experience about doing something rarely, even if you used to do it in a very common way before. So, for friends who managed to attend a football match when it was allowed, the experience was similar to taking a luxury holiday. It was out of the ordinary. The pandemic has forced us to refocus on what is fairly basic and what is a luxury for us.

The fourth distinction that I want to address, which is perhaps the most important, is the one between the material and the social. We can cater to people’s material needs reasonably well – the supermarkets are open, we can get food, people have got shelter and so on – but what are we doing for people’s social needs? Are social needs a luxury or are they a necessity? We can link the idea of social needs with the thought about what is basic.

I would like to draw on some work that I did around poverty. One way of understanding poverty is that one does not have enough to meet one’s basic needs. Most people would agree with that understanding, but the difficult question is: what are your basic needs?

There have been many surveys asking general members of the public what they think are people’s basic needs. Some answers are obvious. Two meals a day is probably the first thing that comes up for most people. A warm, dry bed is another; as are warm, dry clothes for outdoors. Being able to have and maintain basic household appliances is another. One of the needs in this list is very poignant in the current circumstances: being able to visit friends and family in hospital. For most of the population, this is one of our basic human needs, but one of the things that we have not been able to do during the lockdown. We have been able to do it by Zoom to some degree, but that’s not really a good substitute. Social events like ceremonies, weddings, funerals and religious celebrations we’re all missing, with no way of substituting them.

One of the most interesting books that I have ever read is by the American Jane Jacobs about town planning and the principles of town planning: The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs asks: what is it that makes some cities or some areas within cities, or even streets within cities, feel comfortable, lively, safe? And what is it that makes them feel more dangerous or more alienating? She presents the viewpoint called a diversity of use of the cityscape. This idea says that it is important to have shops, schools and even auto repair plants in neighbourhoods so that people can see the same people and familiar roles day in, day out. The diversity is not necessarily to stop and talk with the people, but to just see them. Jacobs thinks that it is important for us to have chance encounters with people that we know in our lives. We don’t have to know them well, but you just get a good feeling when you walk down the street and see someone that you know. You nod at them and that can be all you do, but it makes you feel good.

Similarly, if you’re at work and are getting your cup of coffee, and you see someone else from another floor getting their cup of coffee, you have a chat. You say hi, how are you, how are the kids, or you talk about their football team for 30 seconds – this is part of what gives us a sense of meaning and connection in our lives. This possibility for chance encounters has completely disappeared during the lockdown, unless you happen to see a neighbour in the hallway or on the street. One of the great things about meetings at work is what happens before the meeting gets started, and after the meeting ends. Do you see someone in the corridor? You can have a quick chat without scheduling anything. In a Zoom world, that no longer happens. Everything is scheduled. Nothing takes place by chance. We haven’t worked out a way in which we can get this tissue of connection back into our lives. I think this is one of the things that we’re missing.

Will the changes that we have been through in the last year have a temporary effect on how we value things in the future, or will it leave a more lasting impact? The optimistic view is that we will actually start valuing things much more. Being able to go to the theatre in the evenings, sitting next to strangers and having a communal experience of the great work of art is something that we will start to appreciate rather than thinking of it as just something that we do on a Thursday night. It is possible we will find much deeper meaning and connection in cultural artefacts, in our time with others, in the enjoyment of nature and so on. That’s the optimistic view.

What do I think? I think that it is more likely that the changes from the past year will have a short-term effect, unfortunately. Physiologists tell us – and I think this is right – that human beings have a very short memory for pain, which is perhaps a part of our evolutionary survival to not dwell on bad things and to think about the normal.

In a different context, I used to be a university administrator and we were always looking to upgrade our physical facilities to improve the buildings and facilities for students. When we renovated the building, we were pleased with ourselves and thought that the students would be much more satisfied – but, of course, that just became the new normal. The students only noticed anything when things went wrong, not when things were going well. I fear that this is really part of the human condition; that we are constantly taking the good things for granted and only seeing when they fall down around us.