so much for hot vax summer!
we're all exhausted
At the beginning of the summer this year, there was so much optimism. Vaccines became available in the US to everyone over the age of 12, and most people I knew were racing to get theirs as fast as they could. Hot vax summer, they said! The pandemic was nearing the end, they said! It was going to be the best post-pandemic summer ever! Every day I would look at the coronavirus case count tracker on the New York Times homepage and feel relief as the numbers got smaller every day.
The reality, of course, is that the pandemic is and always was far from over. By now we have all read countless headlines about how a large portion of Americans are refusing to get vaccinated, and about how cases are surging once again as the new, more highly transmissible Delta variant is wreaking havoc. Hospitals are once again filling up. (Most of these new cases are among unvaccinated people, but there are still breakthrough cases among vaccinated folks, too.)
Now, I look at the NYT case count tracker and the trend has reversed. The numbers are going back up, as high as early pandemic levels. And it’s all happening just when we thought we were close to beating the thing, close to getting back to some semblance of normal.
But for a brief moment at the beginning of the summer, people dared to allow themselves to feel hope and optimism for the first time in well over a year. It was such a nice change to briefly feel like we could make plans again: see friends and family, go to weddings, travel. We finally had things to look forward to again! But over the course of the summer, I think a lot of people have felt that hope slowly be replaced by weariness.
Headlines went from stories about hot vax summer to being dominated by stories of the Delta variant and crowded hospitals and breakthrough cases. There are renewed debates about mask and vaccine mandates. And while I don’t mind having to continue to wear masks in indoor public settings — I might even prefer it, for my own safety — I’m exhausted by the thought that we’re back here again. We’re once again in that place of uncertainty, unsure what will happen next.
Earlier this week, Anne Helen Petersen wrote in her newsletter about how we’re all still exhausted:
For brief period this summer, we pretended that everything was back to normal. We papered over the deep fault lines in service of nights out and weekends away, because they felt good and nourishing if not always exactly what they thought they would feel like. The season felt at once familiar and stolen: I knew the motions of summer and socializing, and I really absorbed the joy and the relief, but I also felt like I was experiencing those emotions on uneven ground.
And now, there’s something hovering in the air. Not an unease, not a fear, but a real lingering fatigue, like second-day soreness after a hard workout that you just can’t shake. That’s because for the vast majority of people, the pandemic year+ was not rest. It was not quiet. For families, it did not provide opportunity for solitude or contemplation. It was unsatisfying sameness, so familiar we forgot to try and even name it. But it was isolated, extended, slow-motion trauma.
I think AHP nails something here: that the pandemic year-plus was really exhausting, and we collectively still haven’t really taken time to recover from that. We all just kept soldiering on, through work, through responsibilities, through everything else. This summer briefly felt like a little respite from all of that. But it wasn’t enough.
Good things to read
The girlboss apologia era is here, Vanity Fair.
The $5,000 quest for the perfect butt, Vox.
Why millennials are so obsessed with dogs, The Atlantic.
Hundreds of ways to get shit done — and we still don’t, Wired.
The day the good internet died, The Ringer. If you know you know, etc.
You’re still exhausted, Culture Study.
It’s hard to be a moral person. Technology is making it harder, Vox.
The season of tabs, Dirt.
Diary of a teenage adult, The Cut. On pandemic dating.
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