The world stopped and, precisely because of that, it changed. One of these days we’ll wake up from this torment the pandemic left us in. When that day comes, the specialists say, it will be crazy. When the craziness stops, history says, it’s possible the hungover won’t be pretty. Let’s wait and see. Alarmism gets us nowhere.
The world stopped and, precisely because of that, it changed. One of these days we’ll wake up from this torment the pandemic left us in. When that day comes, the specialists say, it will be crazy. When the craziness stops, history says, it’s possible the hungover won’t be pretty. Let’s wait and see. Alarmism gets us nowhere.

Artwork by Mariana Matos
Artwork by Mariana Matos
Some time ago, I found a very funny cartoon on the Internet, which I will surely dry up of any form of amusement by attempting to describe it: a huge whale, quite moody and jaded, sits on the sand of a beach as a group of people costly tries to put it back on the water to save it. The whale talks back, in a bothered way: “How are we supposed to evolve if you keep throwing us into the water again?” This description, besides having transformed a brilliant cartoon in a profoundly bland and insipid idea, might not even make sense. However, as the wise Barney Stinson would say… wait for it, wait for it. There’s been a lot of speculation and debate regarding what will become of humanity and of the world after we’ve gotten rid of this strange circumstance that tipped over the entire planet: a tiny virus – according to the experts, it might not be that tiny, not when compared with others of its kind: it is fat and heavy, they say – furiously spread all around. From the now infamous city of Wuhan, in China, it made sure it contaminated more than 206 million people (the equivalent of the entire population of Nigeria, the seventh most densely populated country in the world), according to the official numbers on the 13 th of August, having been the cause of death of almost four and a half million people (more than the entire population of Croatia). However, that SOB of a virus left behind much more than just a trail of destruction to be measured in contaminations and lives that were lost: the virus we call the New Coronavirus forced the world to shut down. The restrictions policies and measurements that led to the confinement of entire populations a little bit all over brought along with them a necessary shift in habits and behaviors.At first, there were the analogies with post-apocalyptic fictions and dystopias known to cinema and literature. After the first scare, then came the optimistic wave, and then the world was flooded with a slightly sticky sense of hope: suddenly, images and hashtags were coming up everywhere saying “nature is healing” (even the dolphins were back in Venice); the speech and generalized train of thought all pointed to how human beings had before them the opportunity to reevaluate and amend a way of conduct that until then, and especially so in the Western World, was more and more consumeristic and egoistic – from now on, we would all be nicer to each other, take less flights, eat less animal meat and stop using plastic straws. The kindness of the human spirit was glamorized and inflated by the pandemic. Except the confinements got longer and longer, with some intermittence, for more than a year, and where once there was hope and optimism it began to turn into impatience, grudge, doubt, and disbelief. Especially online, narratives became more violent, the arguments between those that understood the situation and the rest, those who didn’t accept to take part in the non-conspiracy flock, became fierier; people would accuse each other and insult each other, from all sides and fronts. What should unite us, in the end, divided us even further. Among those at whom accusing fingers were pointed, we inevitably find the usual suspects. Every time something goes wrong, who’s to blame? Young people, obviously. They are sinister figures that awaken in adults and elderly feelings of envy, besides incomprehension and oblivion – apparently, more mature individuals often forget their own youth (perhaps a mechanism that allows them to go around the sadness of their own aging: if we can’t remember how good we had it, we don’t realize as clearly how suffocating and inexorable the passage of time really is). Young people, who have been locked inside their homes for a year, without seeing their friends, without spending time with their partners – let’s say it with every letter: without having sex – without being able to mingle and have fun socially during that whole time, in what was a monumental effort on behalf of their communities, out of a sudden, were transformed into criminal agents when, beyond the limits of their endurance, managed to find breaches in the system and catch up with everything they had been pushing back for 18 months (a time that includes two summers). The progressive liberation of the world, in general, and firstly for young people, has given us the impression, which might prove to be true, that we’re on the edge of repeating last century’s Roaring 20s. Many are the specialists and society’s analysts who look at the paradigm and, in their specialized futurology, take a guess: when all of this blows over, it will be crazy.
The Roaring 20s
Nicholas Christakis, eminent epidemiologist, and university professor at Yale, is one of those specialists. Sometime ago he went on countless interventions and interviews in which he argued how we were on the edge of a reedition of the Roaring 20s. Except instead of 1920s, it would be 2020s. Let’s agree though, the circumstances are the same. In the 20 th century, after the first World War and the Spanish Flu pandemic, the world was craving liberation – from fear, above all, but not just. People wanted to enjoy life, and rightfully so. History shows us that, during times of great crisis and restraint, there are two major tendencies at play: people save more money and become more God-fearing. The time we live in won’t be different. The fear of tomorrow’s unknown makes people spend less and in a more calculated way. If on the material side, they become more cautious, the spiritual side is also not left to its own fate: people’s religiousness tends to intensify. These two realities create, together, a general tension increase – which will explode as soon as there is a chance to do so (and that we hope happens sooner rather than later). It is, thus, perfectly normal for young people who are starting to be free again, to do so with great exuberance, after such a long time of constriction – constrictions, let it be underlined, that cost them nearly two of the best years of their lives.In the 1920s, there was a great span of innovation in many fields, from science to politics, from finances to social rights and, inevitably, to art. Out of the blue, who had been living more than four years locked up whether afraid of either the bullets or the virus, now could let their imagination run loose. Surrealism then came about, dandyism and other modern vanguards, together with the implementation of the Art Deco period, for instance. In music, jazz had its big boom and genres such as the foxtrot or the charleston filled up any ballroom, amphitheater, and cabaret. Parallel to this, but not separately, alcohol, tobacco, and cocaine consumption all went through the roof. Liberation was installed, women walked around a little more undressed, men felt more euphoric, it was time to celebrate. These days, it’s not that strange that the reopening of the world brings about similar excesses, although it is unlikely that the current combination of factors will generate in human beings the same capacity to invent something as fun and contagious as the charleston, or as rigorous and elegant as Art Deco. Times are changing and the manifestations of excess of today reveal less order and rule – we’ll move right past the paradox that is having order or rule for excess. On the other hand, the consumption of alcohol and cocaine are expected to rise. What might also increase are sexual intercourses, and this is not, in any way, a form of pointing a moralist finger at a supposed depravity – people will simply meet again, connect with one another, and, with luck, get laid. The return of normality – perhaps we’re on the verge of a stronger comeback, meaning, even beyond normality – might then translate into bad news for pornography sites. After more than a year and a half getting big checks, the industry now finds itself having to deal with the worse form of competition: people having actual sex. Save online pornography! The change of habits, with an expectable return to old practices, only with fewer rules, might also make a dent in other sectors of the market. After all this time seated on the couch, then at the home desk, then at the dining table, with a smartphone at hand filled with apps to order stuff, the newly liberated citizen will resume, as expected, their capacity of locomotion. What will become of Amazon, Glovo and Uber Eats, and all those other companies that explore any human being capable of riding a bike? And what will we do with so many bikes and scooters now? Where will we store all those thermic cubes in the most excruciating colors? Are they recyclable? One must think of these details. Scooters might still be put to good use by infantile tourists who buy low-cost roundtrips to visit cities where all they do is ride their scooter and drag trolleys across the cobble-stone floors of historical centers. Speaking of which, also in the streets of old Lisbon, “nature is healing”. The touristic fauna is back in full force. It no longer surprises anyone that one can hear, at half past four in the morning, big crowds of people dragging their trolleys back to the airport or as newly- arrivals in the “white city”, heading to a local hostel, with their pockets filled with one-euro coins to spend in water bottles bought at the convenience shops that now make up for the downtown landscape. Normality is so beautiful.
The B side
Just as so happened in the Roaring 20s, liberation usually produces some side effects, it creates antibodies and, eventually, ends up backfiring. On one side, it polarizes society, which starts to divide itself between two extremes: unhinged freedom against whatever it takes versus the imposition of a leash on those liberals in a way to moderate customs. At a political level, this polarization has reflexes, and it is not surprising that the far right develops and blooms. That’s what happened after World War I, and it is not difficult to observe resemblances in today’s day and age, where examples of social polarization are abundant and the far right has grown rather consistently, a little all over Europe, mostly. To political and social positionings, we must add concerns regarding the climate crisis and the general environmental catastrophe, where the growing shortage of resources still isn’t enough to intimidate the uncontrolled consumption pattern. We thus have a cocktail that is terrifying enough to wipe off the optimistic smile we were sporting a minute ago, when we pictured ourselves dancing the foxtrot as nature bloomed and flamingos were back to build their nests wherever they did so before the world entered such a state of calamity. In the 1920s, a similar cocktail – to which we must add the huge New York stock exchange crash of 1929 – ended up in such a political-social entanglement that it allowed for certain people to reach power, and whom I would prefer not to mention. These people would come and kickstart what is, to this day the deadliest armed conflict there is record: it is estimated that between 60 and 120 million people died during World War II, from 1939 to 1945. Of those, 62% were civilians. There is, however, a substantial difference between what happened during the first Roaring 20s and what might occur in these new Roaring 20s. In the same way that, from the First to the Second World War, technological progresses were applying to weapon industry and translated to a huge increase in casualties (during the war from 1914-1918, it’s estimated that 17 to 40 million people perished), the technological evolution that is applied to war purposes might mean we would be facing an absolutely massive death toll, a real cataclysm of such dimensions that it would be difficult to project based on our imagination alone – because I do not wish to imagine such catastrophe – in which case, after the euphory and craziness of the reopening of life as we knew it, the major world potencies would get mad at each other over politics and economics, and go on to form alliances and shoot nuclear missiles across the globe. Humanity would most likely be extinct.
Epilogue
There is no point in being terribly pessimistic. With our extinction, then a lot of what is going wrong with the planet would also come to a halt. Firstly, there would be no more plastic straws. The interference of man in climate change would fade away in a few years. We wouldn’t produce more greenhouse gases, unless people had forgotten to turn off the engines of their cars, for instance. But even then, as soon as there would be no more fuel on the deposit, machines would stumble in a final roar before stopping entirely. Not a single more barrel of oil would be extracted, not another pound of lithium for batteries. The cutting down of trees would cease, along with the hunting of majestic species currently under threat of extinction – not another rhino horn would ever be pulled out, nor an elephant’s tooth extracted from its rightful owner. And, above all, the whales from the beginning of the article could finally shoot their shot in dry land. Who knows, one day they might develop opposition of the thumbs and a vocal cavity. With their dimensions, they would easily rule over the world, it would only be a matter of time until they developed artifacts that allowed to walk in land. They would only have to compromise on their oceanic diets, on eating phytoplankton, and adapting their eating habits to the contemporary needs of the continents: rich in fibers and veggies, no fats nor sugars, and carbs only the good ones and in moderation. It will all be fine.
Originally translated from the New Beginnings issue, published September 2021.Full credits and stories on the print issue.
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