I’ve mentioned before that I don’t think we can go back to normal. What normal would we even want to go back to? The nineties? I was born in 1995. I have no memories of the nineties. And assuming that the birthrate in the United States hasn’t changed and that people live to be, on average, 77, about 27 percent of the population was born after the year 2000. I’ll grant you, that’s making a lot of assumptions, but the math seems right to me. More importantly, the nineties weren’t perfect. Many people think they were better, but they had massive structural problems that directly lead to the issue we’re facing today. I’ve been watching people asking to go back to normal ever since the start of 2021, and I keep thinking, do you really want to just turn back the clock?
Life wasn’t better before the pandemic. We thought it was better, because we were able to go out and do things and participate in what was viewed as normal life, but that life was mostly just an illusion. At the bottom of that life was the idea that if you worked hard and pushed yourself and did everything you could to prove to everyone that you were special and worthy of praise and your place in society. That idea consumed us. We’ve reached the point where just being normal, just doing enough to get by, isn’t allowed anymore. Because everyone knows you could be doing so much better if you sacrificed your family, your free time, your secret passions, the things that society doesn’t care about but that makes us who we are. That’s not living. That’s struggling just to get by. The way I see it, even before the pandemic we were trapped by the society we lived in, because no one wanted to be the first to say, “This sucks and I would do anything to get away from this.” And they stayed silent until it was too late for things to change peacefully. So why do we keep insisting we want to go back to “normal”? Do we really want things to go back to the way they were, when most of us just scraped by and prayed we wouldn’t lose everything? Do we just say that because we think we’re supposed to say that? Do we mean that we want things to get better, and we don’t have a frame of reference for a world that doesn’t make most of us miserable?
Whatever the answer, we can’t go back, even if we really wanted to which frankly, I don’t think most of us do. What we need to do now is try to figure out what kind of world we want to live in instead. People keep making suggestions, but nobody wants to commit. I know that the world is a scary place right now but hiding from responsibility won’t fix our problems. The truth is most of us aren’t happy, and we have an idea of what we want, we just aren’t sure how to get it.
What I want is a world where I can live happily without having to get a job. I realize that sounds crazy, but getting a job requires jumping through so many hoops that I honestly don’t think it’s worth it, especially since I have better options. Failing that, I at least want a world where I could feasibly get a job. As it is, even though I went to college for six years, I have next to no chance at getting a job because every job has experience requirements. And more and more jobs are automating the hiring process because it’s cheaper than having someone look through resumes. I honestly think that if that’s the route companies think we should go, we need to have a fail safe in place for people like me who can’t live in our current system, so that if things go wrong I don’t have to spend my days on the streets begging because I don’t have anywhere else to go.
I also want a world where our plans for the future go beyond just stopping the earth from warming. Just pushing pause on climate change isn’t enough. We need to have a plan in place to make sure we don’t make the same mistakes again. When World War One ended, everyone assumed that it was so big and awful that no one would ever try to go to war again. That turned out to be very wrong. We can’t assume that if we stop climate change than our descendants will never want to undo our progress in the name of progress. We need to have a plan in place to either stop people from warming the earth or make it so that it’s as hard as possible to change the climate.
But for me, there’s a big question that I don’t honestly have a good answer to; what happens after we stop climate change? I know there’s next to no chance of us meeting our climate goals at this point, but I think that it’s only a matter of time before we could, at least in theory, act in such a way that we could consciously control earth’s climate patterns. So, what do we do when that happens? Turn earth into the kind of planet only humans could inhabit? Leave earth and start turning planets into earthlike planets? What if we encounter other species of life forms? I know it’s not relevant, but these questions get brought up by science fiction writers all the time because, like me, they assume that someday they will be relevant. I also suspect they will be relevant a lot sooner than most of us think they will be.
The twentieth century took us from a world where almost nobody had cars to a world where high speed travel to almost anyplace on the planet was possible and phones no longer needed to be plugged into walls. I honestly think the twentieth century is shaping up to do something similar. We aren’t noticing this because we’re in the middle of these changes and everything seems normal. But it’s happening, and I think we’ve reached a point where we need to start thinking about what we want from our societies. It’s been an abstract concept that only a few of us thought about in any serious way, but in a world where we have almost seven and half billion people, all of whom have their own thoughts about what the world should look like, we can’t just stumble around blindly and hope we don’t run into anyone. We need a long-term plan. We need to be more vocal about what we need from society. We need to be more willing to talk about not just what’s normal, but what should be normal and what shouldn’t be normal. And we need to be more willing to let the world change. Everyone in America is all too aware of what happens if you don’t.
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