Pandemic generation
(Pandemic Diary - day 23)
From my journal: 21 March 2020 (Saturday)
Is there anything other than the pandemic to write about now?
I just had a look back through the month to see when it entered my world enough to draw comment in my journal. Other than my GDR travel considerations, it was 10 days ago, on March 11th, and my first words about it were “we are overreacting, I feel sure of that”. I went on from there to talk about my wake-up call theory of how this could be a good thing.
This may all still be true, or not, but it has surely become so much bigger for us than it was back then, to the point where it has become a true this-changes-everything moment (a months-long moment, at least).
And it continues to generate ideas for me. I’ll capture this one here: the pandemic is the next generation-defining event.
There are different approaches to defining generations, but the one that makes the most sense to me is not based on a set period of years, but on life-shaping events and who remembers them.
If you’re old enough to remember World War II, you are Greatest Generation. If you don’t remember World War II but you do remember the late-60s, the moon landing, the Kennedy assassination and the Vietnam War, you are Baby Boomer. And so on.
For me those generational events are World War II, Vietnam, the end of the Cold War, 9/11, and now Covid-19. I think this has reached that scale, that as with each of those others, there will be the before and the after, and if you don’t remember life before and life after this pandemic, your view of the world will be fundamentally different than that of those who do. So this is the closing event-of-formation for Generation Z, Lucas’s generation.
Is it hyperbole to give this pandemic that kind of stature?
Ten days ago when I first wrote about it, I’d have surely said yes. But now, it clearly is not hyperbole. Because it no longer matters what actually happens with the virus, how many people die or don’t die, how deep and long the post-pandemic recession is, where things go from here.
It has already managed to do that thing that is so rare now — it has broken through everything else and truly gotten everyone’s attention, worldwide. I think there will be no forgetting the feeling that is building, regardless of what it’s building towards.