It is now the fourth straight day that I have worked from my apartment in Brooklyn. Just this morning, I’m on my fifth cup of tea, and by the end of the day I’ll be finishing my fifteenth, if the past three days are to be repeated. Tea breaks, as I’m starting to call them, are one way I have found to break up the monotony of a day spent alone, behind a desk. I would do it with coffee, and I honestly wish I was doing it with coffee, but I gave up caffeine a couple of months back and don’t know if I could withstand the jitters from so much caffeine in one day. So for now I’m binge-drinking decaffeinated mint tea from Wegmans.
Judging by the news, New York has been all but abandoned by now. The Times shows Central Park deserted and restaurants boarded up. Headlines contain phrases like “bodies piling up,” “family ravaged” and too many uses of “deadly” to count. Many of my coworkers have fled their small apartments for larger family homes in the suburbs, and I haven’t ridden the subway in over a week. Life has certainly been turned upside down.
The parks tell a different story, though. I’ve been in Brooklyn this past week, and the foot traffic in the Brooklyn Bridge Park, along the Promenade and all the way down the bike path into Red Hook has been as high as it is on many summer days. Couples are walking their dogs, holding hands, talking. Dads are chasing their scootering kids and moms are playing pickup soccer. Everybody in the neighborhood seems to have picked up running. In one particularly joyful moment, two couples saw each other from across the street, made a corona joke or two, and then hugged. Social distancing is being practiced, but it’s not happening in isolation.
On my end, I have a standing appointment with a friend and coworker, Matt, to go for a run at the end of each workday. We close down our laptops, stretch our legs, and spend an hour outdoors, in the fresh air, catching up on the day and talking through the latest developments with the virus and the economy. More than anything, it’s been a welcome reminder that life does, in fact, go on. It can be hard, when your only perspective is the news, to recognize that the outdoors won’t kill you. And so in that respect the time spent with Matt has been a healthy dose of reality.
Unless I’m missing the pandemonium in places like the West Village and Upper East Side, it seems like a majority of New Yorkers are coming to the same conclusion. Social distancing can become a new norm, we can all adjust to not going out to bars and restaurants and to being more careful about what we touch, without sealing ourselves off from the outside world. Apart from a few children in breathing masks, which is something I didn’t expect to see in this country, and one particularly paranoid man at the supermarket covered head to toe in protective gear, we all are responding to the crisis in measured, careful ways. We’re a week into this thing and we seem to be keeping our sanity, for the most part.
It’s important to maintain some perspective. We’re dealing with a very serious and difficult situation globally. If the markets are any indication of where this is headed, we’re in for more bad news, not good news. I’ve seen estimates that unemployment could (if it hasn’t already) reach 20%, and that alone could ripple through the credit and housing markets and put us back into a situation like 2008. But for a lot of us, those who remain uninfected, who have their health, who can afford to buy groceries and have a roof over their head, things could be a whole lot worse. Yesterday I went to the store and bought fresh mangos, chicken, ravioli and hummus, among other things, all at normal prices and in perfect condition. Will that always be the case? Maybe not. It seems like the global nature of this crisis could impact supply chains and our ability to import things like mangos. While I’m still able to get them, however, I need to acknowledge the situation for what it is: extremely fortunate.
I’ve been reminded the last couple of weeks of a conversation that has repeated itself countless times since I joined the professional world. It involves someone my age, who was still in high school or college during the Great Recession, asking a more senior employee what it was like to work through that period. “It was absolute chaos,” they’ll say. “News kept coming every hour that was worse than the thing that came before. The company almost went under.” My peers and I absolutely gush at the war stories. How crazy would it be to work in those conditions, let alone to live through them?
We’re at the point where we’re living through another Great Recession. It might look different, last longer or shorter and it might have very different consequences, but the shock to our global system has been the same. Maybe this will be our generation’s wake up call that placid times don’t continue on indefinitely. I’ve been used to five straight years of incredible performance in my 401k. No matter what has occurred during the Trump presidency, our country has been afforded a decade of good fortune, and we have to prepare for some of that stability to be shaken in the coming months.
As the days go on, and my home workspace becomes more routine, I will try to keep perspective as I digest the latest news and sort through the chaotic times. Things are certainly bad, with both a medical and financial crisis on our hands. But we still have things pretty damn good, and I will steel myself for when things get worse, as they most likely will. I can still buy mangoes, but I’m ready for a day when I no longer can.