After the initial shock wears off from the Bay Area’s Shelter in Place, people start to adjust. Most of us feel pretty awful after a few days of it while the rest of the country catches up.
People start admitting they feel bad and then an effort begins to cheer everyone up.
Obviously everyone is cooking more, but a lot of people aren’t willing to default to frozen pizza and processed food. The past few years nameless, faceless cooking videos with close-ups on food instead of personalities have been proliferating. The food is the star of the show, and often only the host’s hands appear. Simple recipes broken free of intimidating cookbooks show how easy it is to make healthy, unprocessed meals.
Hopefully stuff like this becomes a mainstream trend — people are already probably starting to get sick of stuff like frozen pizzas and potato chips, and once they learn how to make their own pizza there’s no turning back.
Social media posts start turning inwards. Close-ups of plants abound: I’ve never seen so many images of people’s personal plants before. This has been a trend for a while, but the interior windows and restricted spaces turn into a plant explosion. This is just a hunch though! I guess data will show the reality.
Jaded New Yorkers and Londoners’ blogs start reminding me of wealthy Saudi girls’ social media accounts or Victorian ladies’ watercolor journals.
People ask how those who live alone feel, if we’re doing OK: we admit that we have the same feelings of worry for those trapped in apartments and homes with family members or roommates.
Pets, being naturally cuter than 100% of humanity seem to cheer folks up the most.
DJs start doing online streams from their bedrooms… heh “bedroom DJ” isn’t a put-down anymore! As someone who’s been friends with professional musicians, I think this is the first time most people realize that being alone is how most DJs spend their time. They’re more solitary than computer engineers.
It’s cool watching people make music, but for electronic music there’s such a weird push to make producers perform like rock musicians. The best underground electronics clubs always had the musician hidden in the back, with a focus on the dancers. This obsession with the DJ as person is sort of boring. Isn’t that why the Prodigy hired a male non-cheesy non-sexual dancer? Even their ancient song Charlie had real dancers.
People come to realize that most artists with studios spend days in grinding loneliness, often high from turpentine and covered in grime. Streaming their studio time online is like filming deep undersea creatures, dazed and blinking into the light of the camera.
