The pandemic has brought us to a crisis between old and young, vulnerable and resilient, capital and serfdom, death and life. It is a crisis of one person’s reward being another person’s risk.
COVID can kill millennials and zoomers. It is a savage illness with long lasting reverberations and terrifying moments - as your lungs forget how to tax the air of oxygen, as your mind goes grey, and as engulfing heat sweats from your body in torrents. COVID is brutal for many young people. But overwhelmingly we survive.
Ten, twenty, thirty years from now, will ticking the box marked “COVID” cause our physicians to suck air through their teeth as they contemplate a cascade of comorbidities? Probably. Will our risk profile sizzle upwards and our life insurance premiums triple? Probably. But only if we can ever afford life insurance...
For those born since 1981, the average net wealth is under $8,000. We are crushed, flattened, eviscerated by debt, and only eligible for salaries a full fifth lower than what our baby boomer forebears were entitled to at this stage of their lives.
The Age of Risk
Any actions involve a bewildering calculus of prospective risk. What are my chances of getting hit by a car when crossing the street? How much will smoking a cigarette reduce my life expectancy? Will I lose my job because a person will catch a virus from a bat 7,000 miles away? Will I kill my neighbor’s grandmother because I met my friend for a beer during lockdown?
In 22 US states motorcycle riders do not need to wear helmets. The rider’s life is theirs to risk. In Australia, even bicycle riders must wear helmets because the healthcare costs of a brain injury are borne by the entire community. The Australian bicyclist’s life is theirs to risk, but only within boundaries. The state intervenes to determine the calculus of acceptable risk.
On the balance, the state does very little for people born since 1981. It taxes us, it sends us to war, it incarcerates us. It sends soldiers to the streets but not to protect us, rather to protect things that we can never afford to own. It offers us jobs that don’t pay us yet which create unimaginable fortunes. It has laden us with debt for what our forebears were given freely or affordably - education and healthcare. It ravages our environment and dims our future by handing the value of the earth to the least ethical bidder.
But now the state intervenes and commands young people: Stop living. Stop working. Keep spending. Our rent is deferred but the debt keeps rising. Our credit is deferred but the interest keeps rising.
In the US - pre-COVID - about 17 million people were employed in leisure and hospitality. 7.5 million of these were millennials representing around 5% of the total workforce. COVID-related unemployment has ravaged numerous industries, but hospitality can be used as a rough proxy for the pleasure of socializing.
Socializing is a human pursuit. Yet going out, having fun, meeting lovers and friends and drinking ‘till dawn is primarily the domain of the young.
Whatever the intent is, and however well meaning, the impact of the lockdown is the dismantling of the hospitality industry. Whatever the intent is, and however well meaning, the impact of the lockdown is that those least at risk are being asked to forego both the pleasure of living and the smallest edge of financial security to ensure the protection of a status quo that does little to serve them.
A status quo. A system that has empowered the incompetent and chain smoked fossil fuels to the point of biosphere collapse. A system of such greed and failure that it facilitated this situation in the first place. Now it cloisters the young into lonely capsules of wifi and poverty.
These commandments are delivered on high from within a black hole of knowledge, with only the faintest hint of an exit strategy glimmering at the event horizon - the hope for a vaccine that will magically invert the sands of time, outwards from the black hole, entropy in reverse, damage undone, jobs rematerialized, capitalist status quo.
To be clear the public health rationale of using lockdowns to flatten the curve is a sound one - community spread is reduced so that hospitals don’t become overwhelmed. But it’s increasingly clear that in this country the horse has bolted, last seen ridden by Pandora who has well and truly abandoned her box.
At what point do lockdowns become a perpetuation of magical thinking?
What is the exit strategy here? Are we simply praying for a vaccine to be manufactured and distributed across this entire nation to perhaps 200 million people (~60% of the population)? Our most accurate statistical forecasters have it as an even chance that fewer than 25 million Americans will be vaccinated by October 2021, while a full quarter of forecasters push that outcome to beyond April 2022.
What is the calculus of shame and opportunity? This is the metric that young people are being forced to reckon. We are shamed to want to live. We are told we need to stop living because we are risking the lives of our seniors. Yet our cost is opportunity. Our cost is both our means and our way of living.
It is absurd to think that the young don’t value their parents and grandparents. Yet who should the onus be upon? Are the young obliged to terminate their lives to shield the old, or should the old be obliged to shield their lives to avoid the risk of youth. Can we live our lives in generational detachment? The old hidden from the young? The answer should surely be no. Unless, perhaps, the alternative is human detachment, at all levels and all ages.
There are no easy answers here. I do not offer a balm, or a salve, or a comforting rubric. I am merely observing the situation and pointing out that this center is unlikely to hold.
Obviously there are grave problems for millions of financially insecure older people. Delusional self-centric oligarchs restart their production lines for profit, misusing data and using shonky statistics to sow confusion. Preaching the neo-liberal lie that the world is flat, that opportunities are equal, and that liberty is just as useful a construct for a minimum wage McDonalds worker as it is for an MIT-educated aeronautics engineer.
Yet despite the savagery of the risk and the inhumanity of the system it is hardly clear that the lockdown is serving the interests of the old and financially insecure. What magnitude of other risks are the precariat now facing from the annihilation of an ordinary functioning society?
If there is one truly useful lesson to try to extract from the panic melange and chaos of the past six months, we could do worse than tattooing into our collective conscience the notion that: WE ARE EXTREMELY BAD AT ANTICIPATING THE FUTURE.
If we consider the oceans of ink that flowed into policy documents, newspaper punditry, financial models, and other such works of creative fiction, we find voids of pandemic silence. We could make similar observations about the Collapse of Communism and the 2008 Financial Crisis. Despite our delusions we are not very good at seeing things coming.
Yet here we are, making extraordinarily bold assumptions that our society can hold together while shattered into a million confined pieces. Hiding from a natural world that so far at least, we haven’t proven smart enough to anticipate.
From a Re-Tightened Locked-Down Los Angeles, 6/28/20