The New World of Thrift

If you're my age, your parents lived through the Depression. The impact of that experience – the trauma – remained once prosperity returned. The new world was different because of it – for instance, the ingrained impulse toward thriftiness and anxiety about scarcity.

I was reminded of this today as I chatted with some extended family (distanced and masked). Some of us (Peter and I) tend to feel that human nature will steer us back to the status quo in fairly short order, but – the Depression (thanks, Pam). An excellent, pared-down example of lifelong change brought on by a traumatic transition to a new world* – one that my generation has observed firsthand.

What will be the 21^st century equivalent of the impulse toward thriftiness? Given the major impact on our lives during the pandemic, it will surely have to do with how close we are willing to come to other people, to share accommodations, foods, chairs, airspace. How willing we are to gather indoors. How we approach strangers? People – even people we know – from far away?

I think that those of us with no personal connection to the virus – for whom all these precautions are abstract – will return to normal pretty quickly. Even though our “coronavirus naivete” (to steal a phrase from the opiod crisis) – our freedom from illness and death – is probably a direct result of those very precautions.

How will the trauma express itself in individuals? How will life change?

Stay tuned.

- *The new world that emerged after the Depression was, of course, World War II, and the new world after that was profoundly different from the before, in many (really – very many) ways, including the further trauma of the Holocaust. And then the Cold War. Many new worlds cycling through lifetimes that began in the nineteen-teens or twenties – now there's a book waiting to be written. Or at least another post or two down the line.