2021: Will things go back to normal?

LAST week, a friend and I were having a short discussion about what should change given that it is a new year and she so much believed in having new year resolutions. During the conversation, I couldn’t help but notice how she starts and ends every one of her sentences with, “when things get back to normal…, I’d do this or I’d start doing that.” At some point, I had to interrupt her with a question: When will things get back to normal? And is the normal you’re talking about anything like the world we called normal before Covid-19 popped into our lives? In any case, it is the normal anxious attitude we confront every day. We must have heard it. We must have said it. In fact, as the coronavirus pandemic continues to bite harder following the discovery of newer strains, we keep asking this question, continually changing our expectations: Will things get back to normal? Of any year, 2020 has been quite possibly the easiest year in our lifetimes to rationalize away our inability to change. It was a year featuring many protests, violence and division. There was a pandemic with roiling lockdowns and mounting deaths. There was an election that produced a contested outcome. There were floods, fires, and even a lot of mental breakdowns.

As a matter of fact, we’ve labelled the pandemic and year 2020 as interrupting nuisances to our lives, something we’d like to skip through and forget or forget about in a hurry. However, what most of us have failed to realize is that things won’t go back to normal after a few weeks, or even a few months just because we have moved into a new year on the calendar. Some things never will.  Also, coronavirus modelling indicates that even if high-risk groups are vaccinated, death rates and hospitalisations would continue if current preventive and management measures were to be relaxed before the virus had been controlled in the general population. And even if the world does manage to achieve mass immunity to the virus, the impact of the pandemic has been so severe that some things may never return to how they were before. No matter who we are, whether we take the pandemic seriously or live in benighted denial, our routines and customs have become dramatically altered. For instance, since the virus hit the world, global demand for oil has decreased by almost a third, over 72 per cent of the world’s student population have been affected by nationwide closures of schools and universities, handshakes and many of the behaviours that seemed completely normal pre-Covid-19, now carry the risk of perhaps never regaining popularity afterwards. Two of the biggest airlines in the Middle East, Emirates and Etihad, have warned that up to 85 per cent of airline carriers could face insolvency on account of the continuing negative impact of the pandemic. In general we now have a pervasive atmosphere of no work, no travel and no social interactions. These are just some of the changes thrust on populations across the world by the upheaval of the coronavirus pandemic.

In the final analysis, everything happening in the world right now seems negative and so it’s easy to say screw it. Or, it’s easy to tell ourselves that we’ll get back on track when things go back to normal. But the question is, can we ever really go back to normal after experiencing a global pandemic with impact and consequences on such a gargantuan scale? The reality is that social distancing, mask-wearing, and some level of regulations may remain even after the current relief of and fascination with vaccine distribution. And even if the light was to flicker and life reverted to a time without coronavirus, we have radically changed especially in regards to how we work, exercise, socialize, shop, manage our health, educate our kids, and take care of family members.  Besides,  “normality” means different things for different people. For hundreds of thousands of people,  a pre-pandemic life would include a loved one who unfortunately died of Covid-19. For some, a return to normal would mean restored health and financial stability. To others, it’s a world with concerts and gatherings, hugs and handshakes.

While there’s nothing wrong with hoping for a better, more stable 2021, the point has to be made that such desire is likely only further straining our mental health. The same way Great Depression and World War II reshaped the attitudes and psyches of those who experienced them, we should expect our living with Covid-19 now to dramatically reshape us in an enduring way. Therefore, it’s important to accept that, for a time, this disease will continue to spend our daily lives. The world has changed many times, and it is changing again. All of us will have to adapt to a new way of living, working, and forging relationships. But as with all change, there will be some who lose more than others, and there will be the ones who have lost far too much already. And this is a reality we have to accept and be prepared to live with as part of our coping mechanism with the changing world. We have to be realistic and accept that we would be changed permanently in some instances that going forward would necessarily be about moving on from the past. We would then find that letting go of our fantasies about a pre-pandemic life isn’t just going to be only good for our mental health, but that such frame of mind is also going to be good for our physical health ultimately. While that may sound dismal and look like a recommendation that we live with the negative, the truth is that it’s appropriate for us to manage expectations in our present situation because in the long run, the virus may go, but Covid-19 and its many-sided impact will remain with us. This is because we would not be able to wish them away or transcend them in any meaningful way than to simply accept them as they are and move on with the new normal of the reality of their existence with us.

• Yakubu is with the Department of Mass Communication, Federal University, Oye-Ekiti.

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