What’s With All the Nostalgia for the Early Pandemic?
As a society, we still haven’t processed what happened in 2020.
Any of it, really. We never even processed the results of the 2020 Democratic primaries, let alone the Covid-19 pandemic.
Here’s one step toward getting it done.
Pandemic Nostalgia
I look around and see nostalgia — even a kind of longing — for what happened in the spring and summer of 2020. I especially see this nostalgia among young people. Especially young activists. And I’m not the only person who notices it.
But why? What’s going on here? What happened in those quarantine days, and in those days of racial justice uprisings, that leaves people nostalgic for it?
I’d like to lay out a starting point. People’s lives changed in 2020. Even for people whose lives hadn’t changed meaningfully in years — even decades — stuff happened! And then, after a few months, stuff stopped happening. Their lives largely reverted to pre-2020 forms. And they didn’t like it.
If we think about it in this way, we start to understand the nostalgia.
March 2020
The arrival of the pandemic to the U.S. in March 2020 marks the break point for many people. It’s where we can draw a line between…
