The COVID-19 Vaccine and the Roaring 2020s: An Injection of New Life
Yesterday I received my second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine—the Pfizer version for anyone who is interested. (People are strangely interested nowadays in which version of the vaccine one other have received.) Many people have described feeling tired, drained, achy, even under the weather to various degrees following their COVID vaccine shots. Yet after both of my vaccine shots, the first one three weeks ago and the second one yesterday, I found myself fully energized, as if the vaccine was a dose of new life and normalcy returning, right in the arm and straight into my bloodstream.
Some have predicted, myself included, that the post-COVID era will rapidly become the New Roaring 20s—the Roaring 2020s!—harkening back to the original post-World-War-I Roaring 20s from a century ago. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, however, is whether we will ever again be able to reclaim real social interaction—our joint senses of being-in-the-world (“In-der-Welt-sein”) and being-with-others (“mitsein”) as the 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger called them, after this time of utter social isolation—a kind of isolation never before experienced by humans at any point in history and despite the wide variety of new forms of online communication and connection that arose rapidly and organically during the COVID era (Zoom meeting, anyone?!?)—or whether we are now stuck in a perpetual simulacrum of real social interaction that would have made even Jean Baudrillard, the crowned prince of simulacra, spin in his grave.
My hypothesis, though, is that people will soon be—if they aren’t already—itching to get out of their apartments and houses and out into the public sphere once again, whether to the local bar, coffee shop, farmer’s market, street fair, or watering hole of their choice—and, heaven forbid, once again “packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes,” as Sting once said in his 1983 hit song with The Police, Synchronicity II, when corporate office spaces begin to reopen as if nothing about the nature of work and our relation to it had changed in the interim.
The world has changed around us, as it does after every traumatic or major event and in ways that may not be evident for decades to come. And yet things already feel strangely normal as I write this from my usual table at a local coffee shop. Fellow customers are coming and going, discussing the minutiae of their own lives and spheres of influence. Some people still long for social interaction while others stare endlessly at their mobile devices, whether out of a genuine desire to be left alone or because they have forgotten how to form real connections with others—if they ever learned how in the first place. Although there is unquestionably social interaction going on, much of it has the mask-like “They Self” (“Das Man”) quality of being in public that Heidegger also wrote about in Being and Time, perhaps not coincidentally, in the post-World-War-I era of nearly a century ago.
How little has changed in a hundred years, despite the existential, Promethean, and Nietzschean influx of creativity and authenticity into our self-identities, and despite the many and varied ways in which we now shape and present ourselves in the public (or social media) sphere. One might say that we now wear masks of concealment even in our own uniqueness, and in our vain attempt to connect with likeminded people while retaining our own individuality. But, as fellow existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once said in a letter from another time and about the struggles of his own era, “There may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.” And it’s up to each of us to make the most of this newfound dose of life and normalcy metaphorically and symbolically arising from a COVID vaccine shot—one dose, and one arm, at a time.
