I’m tired of people saying ‘the new normal.’ It’s the kind of thing people say when they feel the need to fill an awkward pause in conversation. Supply a platitude we can all agree on because we’ve heard it a million times. A saying that has lost all connection to any underlying thought process. Words to be blurted out because they somehow connect us to a perceived shared reality.
Normal is an ideal state we each envision differently but united by the feeling of ease and complacency it confers. Normal makes sense. Normal allows us to let our guard down. Normal is an uneventful work shift, followed by feet up watching mindless television, eating a frozen dinner, and surfing social media for hours, then doing it again the next day. It’s the warm blanket that shields us from the cold harsh elements of reality. Normal is ignoring everything that gets in the way of our own personal happiness. Normal is having our biases confirmed by those we choose to surround ourselves with. Normal is striving to be the best in all and doing everything to get there, or at least pretending well. Normal is being numb and proud. The center of a universe of our own making.
The only thing new about this moment is how it has made us more aware of what was always right in front of us and what is important as a result. In our ever more atomized lives we’re used to conducting all manner of interactions across geographies and from the comfort of our own self-styled bunkers. The tools, services, and transactional relationships we rely on to function at all exist in the margins – people and things out there or in front of us, but always at an emotional distance. People who make and provide middle class comforts. Visible only when you care to see it, otherwise invisible but essential. A synecdoche of the invisible networks that acts as the stage on which we perform our social selves. The tools we use to define ourselves, signal to others our virtues, humor, earnestness, anything, and everything we wish to be.
Today we can see the cracks in the road and the strings holding our lives together. The facade has been lifted and shown us something which is mostly ugly. A stark divergence of needs and wants – a minority struggling for the most basic of needs and another suffering in the claustrophobic conditions of diminished luxury outlets for mindless entertainment. It’s a time of reckoning that will go unheeded as soon as it subsides. We’ll casually talk again about a ‘new normal’ though everything will look and feel the same. We’ll just stop paying attention so much.
GLAZ 