Better late than never: Do we have pandemic identities?

I can't believe it — I forgot a week! But here we are.

"Here" for me means San Francisco, though Yana and I don't feel very San Franciscan. We didn't realize, when we first arrived in December of 2019, that there were only a few months left of the Before Times. I imagine that San Francisco minus COVID equals a sociable place, with dinner parties and meditation groups and book clubs that meet in person. But whenever I poke around looking for that stuff, it doesn't seem to have reemerged yet from the fear and caution we're all wrapped up in.

The result is that almost all our San Francisc-ing has happened during COVID, and the great majority of our COVID-hunkering has been done in SF. It's sort of not fair to the city. It's a place where we keep apart from others. A few months ago we went to a live comedy show, outdoors on a sidewalk. Audience and comics alike were rusty, still getting used to being together. And I realized, we've become people who don't go out – lots of us have become people who don't go out.

And that makes me think, maybe we're all being different people now – during the pandemic – that we were in "normal" times. Maybe wars and revolutions make people different, too. I loved the TV show Revolution, which was about what would happen to society if the electric power were suddenly, permanently turned off all over the world. One of the characters for instance, this guy Tom Neville, starts out as an insurance adjuster from Allentown, but then becomes a brutal military leader in the post-apocalyptic landscape. Somebody else, a fancy Google engineer, ends up raising chickens in a farmstead converted from a suburban front yard.

I wonder, would I have ended up focused on book writing, the way I am now, in a world without the pandemic? Or did the quiet somehow end up channeling me that way, putting some hypothetical San Francisco social life on ice?

And, what about you? Are you different now than you would be in a world without COVID?