Gratitude in the Time of the Pandemic

After nine years of living in South Korea, I moved back to Canada for good in 2006. I’d grown tired of always being perceived as a foreigner, and as a gay man I felt increasingly uncomfortable as my life came under greater scrutiny the longer I remained a “bachelor.” It was time to go home, time for a fresh start, and I looked to the future with excitement and optimism. What I didn’t expect was how difficult the subsequent years in Canada would be. I had not expected the extent to which I’d experience “reverse culture shock,” how financially difficult it would be, how deeply unhappy and, most surprising of all, how every bit of a foreigner I would feel in Canada. In short, those were “bad” years. And then I remember one Pride weekend, as I was negotiating my way through the crowded gay village in Toronto, when I heard a woman shout: “Yes! 2011 is the best year ever!” What news had she received that added to what sounded like an already wonderful year? I envied her, I remember thinking. Not that my own life by that point was all bad, but it certainly wasn’t as jubilant as hers. It was a year full of the usual ups and downs, just like any other. And although I can’t remember any specific high- or low-lights off-hand, I do recall resolving to stop dubbing years as either “good” or “bad,” a resolution that has unfettered me of a lot of unnecessary expectation and disappointment.

I bring all this up because I find it troubling how often I hear this collective condemnation of 2020. Don’t get me wrong; yes, 2020 was a year of tremendous suffering for many people: more than 15,000 Canadians lost their lives as a result of covid-19, half a million Canadians contracted the virus, a million others lost jobs, numerous businesses went bankrupt, and life, for most of us, became challenging in various ways. 2020 was also a year that saw large protests and tremendous violence around the world, especially so in the United States. But when I hear people like Justin Trudeau and newscasters—influential voices in society, in other words—saying how they can’t wait to bid goodbye to 2020, I find such blanket statements both discomfiting in their simplicity and naïve in their implied optimism for the future.

For one thing, such generalizations obviously can’t be true for everyone, and when our political leaders speak in such simplistic terms—as is increasingly the style for political leaders to speak—it only encourages a collective, herd-style nodding of heads that precludes any “varying shades” of broader truths, to rehash the language of Nietzsche. After all, not everyone experienced hardship—or only hardship. Just like in times of war, while some suffer, others profit. Apart from the obvious tech giants whose profits soared this past year, numerous entrepreneurs found a niche market that they were able to profit from. There were also stories of those who collected CERB and were earning more a month than they did when employed! And what’s often overlooked is that for many people, it’s precisely because of the pandemic that they discovered joy in things they ordinarily wouldn’t have, like reading, cooking, connecting with family (even if through Zoom), outdoor exercise, volunteerism, or political activism, and sometimes even alongside whatever hardships were imposed on their lives. Many of us, I think it might be fair to say, found strengths they didn’t know they had. And let’s not forget this past year saw Donald Trump defeated in the US election—that alone is cause for celebration!—something no one saw coming a year ago, and it took a pandemic to make happen.

But this habit of positing years as either “good” or “bad” also contains an element of the metaphysical in it that also makes me uneasy, something that was made bizarrely palpable recently in—where else?—New York’s Times Square on “Good Riddance Day.” Apparently, it’s been an annual tradition since 2007, in which every December 28th passersby are invited to write down their grievances of the past year (“Outstanding bills”; “Lost my job”) and put them in a paper shredder or to smash piñatas with the soon-to-end year inscribed on them. In his On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche writes that man must find meaning for his suffering in order for it to made tolerable; and religion, Nietzsche says, has always provided us with that meaning: we suffer because the gods must be angry with us; we suffer because it is a test of our faith; that those who suffer are the blessed ones, the chosen ones; and that our suffering will be relieved in the afterlife. For what is more intolerable than suffering itself, Nietzsche says, what is more frightening is what he calls the “fearful void” of nothingness, that there is no reason or meaning for our suffering, that there is no divine punishment or karmic balance or the wiles of fate. It just is. (It’s what the eponymous protagonist of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych realizes by the end of the novella.) And what is all but completely forgotten nowadays—and one cannot underestimate how prevalent this concept was right up until the turn of the last century—was the accepted belief that the whole point of life was to suffer; and again, for the Christian church, we will find relief for our suffering in heaven. But as religious faith began to fade, so too did this belief. Even the church has abandoned this notion. (For Nietzsche, incidentally, suffering is meaningful; for him it’s “ennobling”, we learn from it, we become better people as a result of it, great art emerges from it. As Nietzsche famously wrote in aphorism 8 in Twilight of the Idols: “What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.”)

Nowadays, though, suffering is seen as useless, to be avoided at all cost, yet the metaphysical drive to find meaning for it, as “Good Riddance Day” demonstrates, hasn’t diminished. Ah yes! It must be the year itself that’s to blame. Sheer bad luck! And so we see this bizarre reversion to something atavistic in the way people shred their grievances and smash piñatas, in the way we annually gather with friends and family, in the chorus of voices counting down the final seconds till the New Year, the burst of fireworks and clinking of glasses, the kisses and embraces—practices, we have come to believe, that are necessary in order to ring in a beneficent new year.

And again, while I don’t wish to discredit the fact that a great many people have suffered deeply as a result of this pandemic, it seems that the ones who are doing the loudest complaining are those who are just inconvenienced by the whole thing, that what I’m hearing is a lot of collective whining. “My child is going to be permanently mentally scarred by all this!” I remember one woman called in to CBC’s noon-hour call-in radio show during the first lockdown to complain about her kid not being able to go to school. Yes, education is going to suffer as a result of this pandemic, but the nature of her plaint pales in comparison to those who are languishing, many of whom for years on end, in refugee camps in Turkey or Lebanon or Bangladesh or in the notorious detention centres on Nauru or Christmas Islands. And given that some countries like Syria have had one “bad” year after another, it seems that this herd-like condemnation of 2020 is something that only rich Western countries can utter, not having suffered very much until now. As my 80-year-old aunt recently put it, a woman who lived through World War II in Europe and experienced, first-hand, hunger, poverty and forced migration: “This? Ach! This is nothing!”

Which brings me to another bone of contention, the phrases: “When this is over” and “When things get back to normal” (phrases that are redolent of what people, thankfully, no longer seriously ask anymore, the idea of the US getting “back to normal” once Trump leaves office). It seems naïve to think that things will ever “get back to normal”—whatever exactly that means. For one thing, as long as the virus continues to mutate and new variants emerge; as long as vaccine hesitancy is present; as long as vaccines remain out of reach for poor countries; as long as mass-inoculation remains slow, disorganized, and administered experimentally (there have been a number of reports in the last few days of administering half-doses, extended waiting periods between shots, even offering the second dose from a different manufacturer: all of which ventures into uncharted territory), it doesn’t seem likely that we’ll ever truly defeat this virus and get “back to normal”—that third and fourth waves seem likely. This idea of “normalcy” also implies that the pandemic is an anomaly, a one-off, and, most arrogantly, that the worst is over! (This mindset eerily recalls those early assumptions when World War I broke out and many predicted that fighting would end in a matter of weeks.) For what also seems immanent, but is seldom spoken of, are the other pandemics that are bound to happen, and sooner rather than later. We now know that deforestation and the destruction of the natural habitats that otherwise acted as a barrier between wildlife and human-life is responsible for the current coronavirus to make the leap from animal to human and its subsequent global spread. So if getting back to normal means a resumption of our pursuit of material wealth and the unimpeded environmental devastation that accompanies it, then it’s almost certain that other, possibly deadlier, pandemics will follow. If one considers, too, rising global temperatures, more and more extreme weather events, not to mention a volatile political situation in the US, it seems foolish to contemplate ever returning to anything resembling “normal” at all, that in fact what we’re currently experiencing is very much within the range of “normal” when it comes to cause and effect. And so, instead of this wholesale condemnation of an arbitrary unit of time with its weirdly metaphysical connotations, instead of this blind optimism that things will “get back to normal once this is over,” it seems to me that not only have we have failed to place the blame squarely on ourselves for our current mess, but that such practices preclude any notion of gratitude for what we still have, for what is still “normal”—something we ought to keep in mind given the precariousness of the future.