essay on quarantine experiencecurrent time experience
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Explanation:
n the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, when it was just beginning to become clear that people who could stay at home would be doing so for a very long while, an argument began to emerge. It mostly played out on social media, but after a while it moved to news outlets, too: the New York Times, HuffPost, Forbes. It concerned working at home, because it is disproportionately easy for people like me who work in digital media to work at home, and the question it revolved around was: Is a pandemic the time to get extremely productive? Or is it the time to take a break?
First, there was the King Lear argument. Shakespeare, as people reminded each other, wrote King Lear when he was quarantined during a plague. And it soon became clear that Shakespeare was just one of the many geniuses of history who accomplished miraculous things while confined to his house. Sir Isaac Newton discovered the laws of gravity and invented calculus under quarantine. Mary Shelley, well, was not under quarantine when she wrote Frankenstein and invented science fiction, but she was at least cooped up in the house because of the year without summer, so truly, can’t she serve as an inspirational figure as well? After a period, it began to seem somewhat astonishing that anyone ever managed to accomplish anything without some global catastrophe confining them to their
And then, inevitably, came the whispered implication: Shouldn’t you yourself be using this time at home — dare we say this gift — because you are at home and not working in an essential field? Shouldn’t you be using this time to become more productive? Shouldn’t you be buckling down and writing a masterpiece or inventing a genre or discovering fundamental laws of the universe? At the very least, shouldn’t you be taking up a new hobby, mastering a skill, or perhaps be reaching your fully fledged form as what Forbes termed a “coronapreneur?”
But then came the backlash. The push to be productive while sheltering in place during a once-a-century global catastrophe was the latest sign, critics argued, of capitalism corrupting our minds.
“Please don’t be guilted into being more productive during the coronavirus,”
“This mindset is the natural endpoint of America’s hustle culture — the idea that every nanosecond of our lives must be commodified and pointed toward profit and self-improvement,”
“I, too, am declining to write the next King Lear as protest against capitalism,” proclaimed Rosa Lyster at the Outline.
Since Lyster’s March 18 article, the Outline’s staff has been entirely laid off as a result of the pandemic’s toll on the economy. While I was working on this article, CNBC reported that Vox Media, Vox’s parent company, was planning to furlough multiple employees. That’s another layer of this fight: Many of the people who are arguing over how productive anyone should be right now are doing so with the knowledge that layoffs or furloughs or pay cuts are hanging over their heads. With that knowledge comes the whisper developing in the back of everyone’s minds that perhaps this is the time to get very productive indeed, because how else can they show their employer how valuable they are and ensure their continued employment?
Answer:
Answer:The world is grappling with an invisible, deadly enemy, trying to understand how to live with the threat posed by a virus. For some writers, the only way forward is to put pen to paper, trying to conceptualize and document what it feels like to continue living as countries are under lockdown and regular life seems to have ground to a halt.
So as the coronavirus pandemic has stretched around the world, it’s sparked a crop of diary entries and essays that describe how life has changed. Novelists, critics, artists, and journalists have put words to the feelings many are experiencing. The result is a first draft of how we’ll someday remember this time, filled with uncertainty and pain and fear as well as small moments of hope and humanity.
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