This month marks five years since “cancel everything” became an American rallying cry. We retreated into our homes for a period of solitude brought on by a global pandemic that many of us thought would last a few weeks but instead redefined how and where we live our lives.
Look around your home, and it’s not hard to spot vestiges. Maybe you’ve still got a Peloton or a fire pit or a random bottle of hand sanitizer in your purse. Maybe you moved to Idaho.
Here is a sampling of the random stuff I collected during the pandemic that is still lying around my house.
A basket of N95s
A stack of board games
Four raised flower beds
A hammock
My dog
A few days ago, I spotted a tattered, faded sticker on the floor of a Vietnamese restaurant reminding me to “stand six feet apart.”
There are more profound changes, too. The phrase “hybrid work” barely registered in January 2020. Now it is deeply ingrained in the fabric of office culture, despite pushback from some employers and, more recently, Elon Musk.
Sometimes seismic cultural changes with a sudden fury. On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic, Tom Hanks, America’s Dad, announced that he and his wife, Rita Wilson, had the disease and the stock market was tanking. Overnight, home became everything. Balconies and windows transformed into kitchenware drum circles to cheer the health care workers. The streets were shockingly silent, lest for the endless, heartbreaking sirens.
“Schitt’s Creek,” “Tiger King,” knitting, and sourdough starters became central topics of conversation. We planted victory gardens. We worried about toilet paper. Living rooms became classrooms and bedrooms doubled as offices, as our kids and dogs and significant others photo-bombed meetings and the hastily arranged Zoom cocktail hours. (It didn’t take too many virtual gatherings to figure out who lived lavishly and who did not.) We formed pandemic pods, making clear who was in our inner circle and who was not. For those without the luxury of a remote job, the transformation took a financial, physical and emotional toll. The specter of illness was palpable: Do you sanitize the groceries? Shed your clothes before stepping back inside? Wear latex gloves?
But we were also restless. With interest rates plummeting, buying a house got much, much cheaper and by June those with means embarked on a shopping spree. In 2020, 5.6 million existing homes sold, up from 5.34 million in 2019; and by 2021, sales reached a 15-year high of 6.1 million, according to the National Association of Realtors. The rental market was just as frenzied. In 2021, rents jumped 13.5 percent, more than double the rate of any previous year, with nearly 600,000 apartments getting rented, about 50 percent more than the previous high in 2015, according to Yardi Matrix, a real estate data provider. Americans, untethered, moved locally, but they also set out for places where housing costs were cheaper and the sky was bigger, landing in Boise, Idaho; Austin, Texas; Phoenix, and Nashville.
Time both stretched and froze. It was hard to imagine an end to this surreal suspension of reality. It was unfeasible that the world would return to what it once was. But then it did.
And here we are, in a landscape that is radically different from January 2020, and yet also the same. Twenty-three million Americans got a cat or dog during the pandemic, or one in five households, according to the ASPCA. I was no exception, buying a puppy when my kids were spiraling and needed something, anything, to happen. We drove three hours to Lancaster, Pa., plucked him from an Amish farmer because there were none to be had locally and named him Bowie.
He’s curled up on the bed as I write this, weary from his afternoon walk. Not all of my pandemic purchases paid off — the heat lamp that I bought during my outdoor-gathering phase is collecting dust in the garage, a hulking reminder of money misspent and the desperate loneliness I was trying to curb.
There are remnants of alternative realities that could have been, like the little canvas basket by my front door, full of N95s I barely use. In a parallel universe, where masks did not become a polarizing political symbol of government overreach, more of us might wear them in flu season, or when we have a cold. The occasional outdoor dining sheds that survived New York City’s post-pandemic restrictions are fleeting reminders of that time when the streets belonged to the pedestrians. (But, love them or hate them, those QR code menus are here for the long haul.)
But then there are the lasting changes that redefined our expectations of what was possible, like having a career unbound from a location. Today, a third of workers have fully remote jobs, more than double the amount before the pandemic, and 43 percent of workers now spend at least some time working from home, according to the Pew Research Center.
The idea that you can leave the United States and log in from Bogotá or Bangkok is hardly novel anymore. Digital nomad visas are available in more than 50 countries, partly because 18 million Americans consider themselves nomadic, up 147 percent from 2019, according to MBO Partners, a company that connects businesses to remote workers.
But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to move. All that pandemic shopping made it much more expensive to find a home because prices and rents rose dramatically and then so did interest rates. Last year, Americans needed to earn $111,000 a year to afford a median priced home, up 46 percent from the start of 2020, according to Bankrate.com. The landscape is not much better for renters, with nearly half of renters spending more than a third of their income on rent in 2023.
We’ve become a nation both tethered and unbound. Even after the world reopened, we continued to spend significantly more time at home (and alone) than we did before the pandemic, an acceleration of a trend that started two decades ago. Fewer homes sold last year than at any point in the last 30 years. For a solid two and half years, it was completely normal to cancel plans without explanation — a selfless act meant to stop the spread. Now, it feels indulgent to call it a night and stay in. Generation Z came of age under lockdown and now has a reputation as a homebody generation.
It’s hard to feel wistful for a time of immense loss of life, livelihoods and precious moments. A time that ultimately led to more polarization. But amid a crisis, we had the chance to experiment with a different way of living.
Neighborhood Fresh Direct orders and enthusiastic Buy Nothing swaps were little acts of hope that made it feel like we were all in this together. The air cleared. Even the local wildlife tried something new and ventured further afield. Americans, a fiercely individualistic and industrious clan, slowed down and, for a brief moment, had a single, shared experience. And then it vanished, leaving only echoes behind.
