S2E11 – Post-Pandemic Aspirations

As Margrit and Eileen wrap up season two, we look forward to some things we’re hopeful about in a post-pandemic world. Things like compassion and understanding, redefining family and relationships, greater accessibility, and dare we say it… lower real estate prices? 

Recommendation of the Episode: Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake.

Question of the Episode: What are your hopes for a post-pandemic world? 

Join the conversation on Twitter at twitter.com/World_ofStories or email us at worldofstoriespodcast@gmail.com.

Transcript

Eileen 0:16
Welcome to World of Stories, a podcast about how stories shapes our lives. I’m Eileen and my pronoun is she.

Margrit 0:23
I’m Margrit, and my pronoun is they.

Hi, Eileen, how’s it going?

Eileen 0:39
Hi, Margrit. It’s still going.

Margrit 0:44
That’s good, I think, although it’s hard to tell anymore, but… The good is that we’ve managed to pull off a second season and we’re both still surviving the pandemic. So in this episode, we’re wrapping up and thinking about what we think and hope the post-pandemic world will look like.

Eileen 1:05
You know, it’s been helpful to discuss these issues, because the discussions have helped me manage my expectations for what my life should look like during the pandemic. But the truth is that living through this has not gotten any easier. You’d think that I’d have developed some coping mechanisms by now, but I totally haven’t. And like, somehow it feels harder now than when it first started.

Margrit 1:33
Do you think that’s pandemic fatigue? Or would that be too flippant a term for this period of time when so many people are dying or experiencing life changing trauma?

Eileen 1:44
I don’t think it’s flippant. I think it’s true. You know, like, at first, a lot of us were psyched about hunkering down and beating this thing. We knew how important it was and we’re ready to band together and do what we needed. But then one month dragged into six months, which dragged into a year and now we’re, like, 15 months into it. And I’ve totally run out of steam, like all I want to do is to be able to walk into a store and pick up the things I need. I don’t wanna have to pre-plan my errands with online orders and curbside pickups. And I don’t want to be judged every time I’m outside. Because like, oh, maybe I have COVID or I don’t. I don’t know, the whole thing is just too much. I can’t handle it anymore.

Margrit 2:33
It’s exhausting. It’s exhausting.

Eileen 2:35
So exhausting.

Margrit 2:36
Because we, like in Toronto, we’ve had so many lockdowns that have been so long, and it feels never ending to the point that we can’t imagine what it will be like to be rid of this pandemic. And I’m sure that might be true in other places as well. But in Toronto, we’ve been in like strict lockdown. Like, don’t leave your house kind of locked down unless you really have to since November 2020. And it’s now June 2021. And before that, we only had a tiny little respite where the stores were open for two weeks. And I haven’t had a haircut since August 2020. So almost a full year. And yeah, so let’s talk about what we hope will happen after the pandemic ends, it doesn’t really have to be realistic. Our hopes don’t have to be realistic, so.

Eileen 3:24
Well, one thing I’ve been worried about for a while now is that I really think that there’s going to be lasting trauma after the pandemic is over. So even when we get to herd immunity, and stores and offices are open again, we’re gonna have to deal with the mental toll that the pandemic has taken on us and especially for those who have gotten sick or for those who have had loved ones pass away, they’re going to have to learn how to continue on in their new reality. For folks in the healthcare industry, they’re super burnt out. And I think the healthcare industry is going to look very different going forward.

And because of this, I hope that we can be more gentle with ourselves and with others. And I hope that we’re more aware of what people are going through even if they look okay on the surface. Because the pandemic has highlighted so many of the inequalities in our society, the hope would be that it garnered more compassion for the struggles of those around us.

Margrit 4:36
Yeah, I really hope you’re right as well. And so you know, one of the things about compassion is seeing how many people have embraced shopping locally so that the stores, like the small independent stores and restaurants around us don’t die. They haven’t been open to walk-in since November in Toronto. This might be my you know, my social media echo chamber, but a lot of my mutuals have highlighted their local consumption. And I also deliberately changed my shopping habits and made a point of buying like all gifts from local stores and trying to, although I’ve been cooking more, trying to also make sure that I’m getting takeout from local restaurants on my street and whatnot.

Eileen 5:19
Yeah, same, me too, I’m always trying to shop local whenever possible to support the smaller stores, or to order food from restaurants, even though I have also been cooking a lot more than eating out. And the other thing I know that the pandemic has done is moved us toward greater accessibility, particularly through online platforms, which is really great. And I know that a lot of organizations are planning to maintain some sort of online programming or streaming even after they start meeting in person, which, which I’m really excited about.

Margrit 5:56
Yeah, absolutely. So for example, captioning is default on Tik Tok and Instagram stories, so is alt text on Twitter. All good developments.

Eileen 6:07
Yeah, those are some really good examples. But one thing I have been thinking about is international travel, because I’ve heard that the travel booking sites have seen an uptick in activity, which means that people are gearing up for getting back on planes. And there’s even like new airlines that are popping up in Canada to take advantage of this trend, of other airlines that have gone under and so they can, like, snatch up inventory on the cheap. But like, I’m just like, people are getting on planes, like that’s a very small enclosed space with recycled air. And it just feel so counter to everything we’ve been trying to do for a year and a half. And so I have zero desire to get on a plane anytime soon at all, just no desire to get on a plane. Also, it might have to do with the fact that I used to travel constantly for like six years and I’m totally over it. But you know, like Toronto, Ontario, there’s so much to explore and discover. And I feel like I’ve been robbed of that for the past two years. And I really want to make up for it.

Margrit 7:32
Yeah, that makes that makes a lot of sense to me. I’m a huge fan of Toronto in the summer. And in the pre-pandemic era, the city really came alive in the summer, it looked like everyone was outside. And we had like street fairs and events every weekend. And that was amazing. So you really didn’t need to travel during the summer. But I wonder if so many of us who felt bound by the pandemic won’t take the opportunity to flee to places far and wide. So I have to confess to some wunderlust myself, I feel the need to see something different than I have for the past year and a half. And I’m not saying I’m going to jump on a plane but I do want to travel. Roadtrip?

Eileen 8:11
Yeah. Sign me up. I am definitely down for good road trip and seeing some of this amazing land that we live on. Because goodness gracious, this land is precious. And if you didn’t know that already, certainly the real estate prices in Toronto should have given you some indication because they have just skyrocketed in the past year. They were already high but they’ve just become astronomical during the pandemic. And so one aspiration is like hopefully housing prices will come back down to something a little more affordable. What do you think? Is that possible?

Margrit 8:52
What a pipe dream to hope people should afford to live in the city they work in. I’m being sarcastic because honestly, I don’t know how to process the ridiculous rise in housing prices in Toronto, like even during the pandemic where all the newspapers are like people are moving out of the city and into the country for affordability. And it’s like, but how do the prices still go up and up and up in Toronto. And I think affordability will shape our post-pandemic work landscape. And I really hope to see a balance there more than a push from one side. Like for example, a lot of people are enjoying working from home but others really want to go back to a workplace. So you know, if you’re living in, you know, like in a shared apartment or a one bedroom, you really want to get out for your work, I think sometimes. And I fear that ultimately it’s not going to be people’s actual wants and needs that are going to drive the post-pandemic workplace and I think this connects to how unaffordable it is to live in the city because a lot of people don’t have the luxury of affording a home office. And I really do hope that workplaces recognize that and offer a real choice rather than externalizing the cost of renting an office onto the employees.

Eileen 10:04
Yeah, it goes back to the question of accessibility, right? Like some people work better from home. And some people work better in an office and workplaces should be able to accommodate those differences, to allow people to be more productive, not that productivity is the goal, but that they can be happier with their working conditions. And with the pandemic, we’ve definitely proven that there’s no reason why people all need to be in the same place, working at the same time, in the same way. So I don’t know maybe if there’s less demand for office space, some of that can be converted into residential buildings. Maybe? Who knows?

Margrit 10:43
Yeah, yeah.

Eileen 10:46
But I think that the workplace accessibility conversation also brings us to how the pandemic has highlighted the need for leisure time. And, again, not just the separation of work and personal time, but like, we need leisure time to recuperate from everything, from work, from stress, from trauma. And I think that people will be embracing this as the economy opens up, and we’re allowed to get out again.

Margrit 11:14
Yeah, I agree. And I think we talked about this in episode three, where we mentioned like The Nap Industry and how we need rest for ourselves, not for productivity. And I, I’m with you on the hope that that will become normalized.

Eileen 11:31
Yeah, definitely. Because it’s not just break from work. It’s break from life, from responsibilities. And I, for one definitely need that.

Margrit 11:40
Yeah. We need to rediscover what needs we have right in order to to have a good life, because we’ve been merely surviving, waiting to get through and hoping very hard that what we do helps us and our loved ones not get sick and being distraught when it did. And now we need to turn to rebuilding ourselves or whenever the pandemic ends, because even if things are looking good right now, in Ontario, and in Canada and other places, they’re not looking as good in other places.

So our health mentally and physically and also societialty, I think we need to think about that deeply. So I don’t think there’s any going back to what we were used to before the pandemic, but we can move on differently, hopefully with more care for ourselves and each other. So can we imagine what this care for one another looks like in terms of policy? And what I’m thinking about is how much, for example, the rhetoric that was trying to keep us locked down was about keeping our loved ones safe. But what if our loved ones would mean more than our family? What if we enlarge that circle? How would we scale up this care for our community, to something that would be like policy and a legal framework to care for our communities?

Eileen 13:00
That would be wonderful if we were able to redefine family as more than just those who are biologically related to us, but expanding it to mean our neighbors and our co-workers and those who inhabit the same space as us. And I mean, the truth is, is that we’re all interconnected, and so much more than we realized pre-pandemic. So like, for example, we order something online, but the item doesn’t just magically appear on our doorstep, right? Like there are people who work in factories to manufacture the product, people who move the product to fulfillment centers, people who package your order, people who deliver your order to your home, and all of these people whom you’ll probably never meet. But what if they were also considered your family, as a part of your family and influenced how you behaved and how you made decisions? I think that would be revolutionary, that would really change the way the world works. But unfortunately, I don’t think that people will be able to do that. I think it’s asking too much of a society that cares primarily about itself.

Margrit 14:14
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I agree. I think I think we’ve lived in a culture of individualism for so long, it will be very hard to turn to a more altruistic, socially engaged view of the world. And I think some of the reactions have been like, turn into yourself and sort of circle the wagons and because of the pandemic threat, than be like, oh, we’re so connected, we should really think more broadly. And so I want to go back to this idea of relationships and think about the friendship episode. That was episode six this season, where we talked about the need to extend the same legal protections to friendships and other relationships as we do to monogamous romantic partnerships. And I do hope for more meaningful relationships, even at work post-pandemic rather than just, you know, networking. Yeah, so if we do, like you were saying, build this awareness of understanding the interconnectedness, maybe the way that our relative privilege works, maybe we can shift our perspectives.

Eileen 15:19
So I think, I mean, obviously, we don’t want there to be another pandemic, like ever, hopefully. But the reality is, there’s probably going to be some sort of, like disaster of some sort that we will have to deal with as a society, as a community or whatever. And I think one of the lessons I hope that leadership and government has learned is that there needs to be an interdisciplinary response, you know, like public health is very good at what it does. But to manage something as complex and as all encompassing as a pandemic, having only public health respond is not enough. We have to include people who are trained in different areas like economists, and sociologists, and psychologists and all sorts of people like urban planners, even, to really understand how do we have a response that is effective, and as least disruptive as possible. So like, for example, understanding that a shorter, but more stringent lockdown could work better and cost less, then a really long dragged out semi lockdown, that is like, allows the pandemic to continue festering, right. And so I really do think that we need to think more broadly about how to share resources, even like vaccines, and PPE and all of those things, like not hoarding it in a self serving way. But making sure there’s equitable distribution, so that people across all socio-economic backgrounds within our community and also globally, have access to these things. Because as we, as it’s like, clearly made plain to us in this pandemic, that we are a globally connected world. And what happens on the other side of the world affects us. So we can’t manage a global pandemic without sharing resources globally. So yeah, it’s got to be an all hands on deck approach.

Margrit 18:08
Yeah, yeah. And it’s actually not self serving to do that. Because while we’re getting vaccinated here, people elsewhere are not and new variants pop up. And so you have to really realize that even if you have the resources, if you’re hoarding them, you’re not doing yourself any favors. So if you do want to look at it from the self interest point of view, you have to share. You should share.

Eileen 18:36
Yeah. So Margrit, what’s our recommendation for the episode?

Margrit 18:40
My recommendation of the episode is Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: how funghi make our worlds, change our minds, and shape our futures. And I’m going to read two exerpts because they showcase exactly some of the things that we were talking about, the interconnectedness, the need for interdisciplinarity to understand our world. And it’s funny that these come from a book about, you know, mushrooms. But I really, really would like people to read this book. It’s It’s really cool. I’ve actually listened to the audio book, which is narrated by the author, and then I went out and bought the book because it just said, so many cool things. So here’s the first excerpt, it showcases what the book is about, for me or what I’m taking from the book. This is from a chapter called What is it like to be a fungus?

For humans, identifying where one individual stops and another starts is not generally something we think about. It is usually taken for granted within modern and industrial societies, at least, that we start where our bodies begin and stop where our bodies end. Developments in modern medicine, such as organ transplants worry these distinctions. Developments in the microbial sciences shake them at their foundations. We are ecosystems composed of and decomposed by an ecology of microbes, the significance of which is only now coming to light. The forty odd trillion microbes that live in and on our bodies allow us to digest food and produce key minerals that nourish us, like the funghi that live within plants, they protect us from disease, they guide the development of our bodies and immune systems and influence our behavior. If not kept in check, they can cause illness and even kill us. We are not a special case, even bacteria have viruses within them. Even viruses can contain smaller viruses. Symbiosis is a ubiquitous feature of life.

So I thought this kind of encapsulates not only what the book is about, but exactly what we’re talking about, in terms of individuality, and what a fake idea it is. Also how we need to look beyond relationships to different things. And so I’m gonna end with another excerpt that talks about exactly what you mentioned earlier, the need for holistic views, the need for interdisciplinarity and how that can shape the way that we see the world. So this is a paragraph from towards the end of the book, a chapter called making Sense of funghi. And this is what it says,

Sometimes we imitate the world without conscious effort. Dog owners will often look like their dogs. Biologists often come to behave like their subject matter. Since the term symbiosis was first coined by Frank in the late 19th century, researchers studying the relationships between organisms have been coaxed into forming unusual interdisciplinary collaborations. As pointed out to me, it was an unwillingness to make daring leaps across institutional boundaries that contributed to the neglect of symbiotic relationships for much of the 20th century. As the sciences became increasingly professionalized, disciplinary chasms separated geneticists from embryologist, botanist from zoologist, microbiologist from physiologist.

This goes back to exactly what you were saying earlier, if we’re going to face this again, we can’t just have public health do all the work, lift all the hard, you know, all the hard burdens, because it is all about how our lives are interconnected. And how the questions that we’re asking, when we’re boxed up like this will never truly lead to understanding the world. In this case, in this book, it’s about funghi. But we can always extrapolate. So we have to do away with the artificial boundaries between disciplines, between relationships, between people and maybe, maybe we can build a better future.

Eileen 23:00
That is a really, really interesting way of mapping the micro on to the macro. Because you know, fungi are small, they’re like micro, macro like the world. Haha. Anyway, our question of the episode is, what are your hopes, dear listener, for the post pandemic world?

Margrit 23:30
As always, you can join the conversation on Twitter at @World_OfStories or you can email us directly at WorldOfStoriesPodcast@gmail.com. If you like our show, please share the podcast with your friends. You can rate and review World of Stories on Spotify, Apple podcasts, Google podcasts and all other major podcasting platforms. The more reviews we get, the easier it will be for new listeners to find us.

Eileen 23:54
And lastly, if you’d like to partner with us in producing the podcast, we appreciate every contribution no matter how big or small. You can donate at ko-fi.com/WorldOf Stories. Thank you so much for listening. And until next season, stay safe.

Margrit 24:12
And thanks for tuning into our second season, in which we try to figure out how to human in a pandemic.