On 9 January 2020, the WHO confirmed the isolation of a new virus from China: Covid-2019. Five letters and four digits that have turned the world upside down, crystallized time and even changed the grammar, in the verb tenses: you moved out pre-pandemic, you changed jobs post-pandemic. A watershed year, a new 11 September: to stop was not only the Melevisione this time; the whole globe does not know how the episode of History ended without lockdown.
1461 days have passed since that event: what habits have changed? What aftermath left the lockdown?
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First of all we found out that it’s possible working at home, and how many companies were unprepared for digital dematerialization: some loves are difficult to let go, the one for paper even more. In this sense, the pandemic has done well for some dusty working realities that, if they had not been cornered, would never have made the leap into the era of shared drive. Less well than the public sector.
Smartworking, especially for those who have been forced to keep it post pandemic, has proven to be a poisoned fruit. Sociability with colleagues is cancelled, more sources of distraction and therefore less productivity, goodbye to post work activities and immunity, sacred, stay to the phone calls of his boss. Gold is not all that glitters.
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We have all become a bit more comfortable and lazy. The delivery phenomenon exploded in the years of the pandemic: if Glovo delivered 24 million orders in Italy in 2023 alone, it means that we are faced with a radical change in purchasing habits. The less you leave the house, the better, and not only to order a daisy: drugs, clothing and household products materialize on the doormat, ready to leave, without additional costs, if they do not meet our digital expectations. Championship apart for Amazon and Temu, who have recorded staggering increases in turnover: when it serves, ESG indices (rating of environmental and social sustainability of a company, ndr) can be put aside. According to Gratteri and Nicaso, one prosecutor and the other historian of criminal organizations, even in the drug store there is the phenomenon of "uberization": we have become lazy even for drugs.
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Even Friday night cinema has become a nuisance. Why go out, take the car and queue up for a movie that maybe isn’t even that great, when Netflix exists? In 2019, the Californian company closed the year with 67 million subscribers; after 4 years it reached 247.2 million. If we add up the numbers of Disney+, Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, you are faced with a real bulimia of movies and tv series.
If conviviality has been reduced in recent years, the same cannot be said of sociality: it has not decreased, but transformed. Mediated by screens and apps, relationships and friendships begin, develop and die with a tap on the phone: easier, less risky certainly, slightly bland though. After the joy of the first freedom in spring 2020, in which you had to recover aperitifs and previous lunches, over the years has developed a certain nostalgia of pandemic hermitage: we have not become more spiritual, only more unbearable to each other.
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But was there something positive?! Maybe. When the world got stuck, the Planet quietly continued its life, unchanged its rhythms: indeed, it was even better. The result has been a widespread and increased focus on environmental issues, which is still ignored by many policy agendas. This is a footnote for the governments of the world: global climate summits are not enough.
Another discovery concerned mental health: it exists and is important; a new fact for Italy. In the workplace, in the family, in relationships, more attention is paid to your psychological well-being; you are less afraid to turn to a psychologist, but above all you are slightly less afraid to say it. If bonuses are the litmus test of the country’s priorities, knowing that Italy has set up an ad hoc one is a timid positive sign. Obviously also for this service has created the online version: good to be helped, but each at home.
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More alone, unable to live socializing, except with the rider on duty who leaves the groceries on the doorstep. We see the world from a screen, no longer from the oblò of Gianni Togni, yet we get bored the same: more and more city mice, closed in studios, who dream of a cleaner planet, but who do not really want to know. What if the pandemic had only accelerated this transformation, which inevitably would have taken longer? Come to think of it, the symptoms were already there before 2020. A sliding door on which you could reason; maybe you could make a movie, to be seen strictly on the sofa at home.
Illustration by Gloria Dozio - Acrimònia Studios
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