Nearly six months before Covid-19, the Yale historian Frank Snowden wrote a book about epidemics and pandemics. What he found was that these periods of suffering reshape not just how societies function, but also how humans want to spend their limited time on Earth.
“Epidemic diseases reach into the deepest levels of the human psyche,” he said in 2020. “They pose the ultimate questions about death, about mortality: what is life for? What is our relationship with God?”
Two years and a pandemic later, Snowden said Covid-19 has challenged another set of beliefs: how America is supposed to work.
Before the pandemic, Americans were already working longer hours than people in other developed nations. Perhaps it was in the spirit of the American dream – the idea that if you work hard, this country will make your sacrifices worth it. But mere days into the pandemic, it became harder to hold on to this myth.
In the first month of the pandemic, about 22 million jobs were lost. Soon after, 8 million Americans fell into poverty. Millions of people were unsure how they would access healthcare. More than half of Americans lacked the savings to survive three months without a job. When the government sent them checks, it was hardly enough to cover a month of rent.
But now America is looking to fully reopen – to get back to “normal” – and a huge part of that is how we return to some version of the in-office 9-to-5 work day. On one hand, companies are acknowledging change: they’re willing to be somewhat flexible with hybrid or remote work, and have signaled that a “transition” will be necessary to adjust to the new normal. But the core of these messages are all the same: where you do work may change, but what you do and why you do it will remain the same.
It’s clear that company leaders still want the old version of the all-American work ethic that was dependent on hustle culture and productivity. But I can’t help but wonder whether that’s incompatible with who we’ve become – and, more importantly, the realities of the world in which we live.
Many of us have drastically changed. It’s not just our attitudes toward work and life, but also that our bodies are reacting differently to trauma, stress and even love.
Just one month into the pandemic, the rates of people reporting depression symptoms soared. Among those earning less than $20,000 a year, nearly half reported depression symptoms – up 30 percentage points from pre-pandemic levels.
That depression and anxiety often stemmed from stress, fear and trauma. While there wasn’t a tiger hiding in the bushes, our brains were reacting to real threats. Some of this has led to a lack of focus and forgetfulness. But research also shows that the brain can be literally reshaped and rewired when we face these threats. For example, chronic stress can cause the body to produce too many cells called microglia, which overzealously remove synapses that we still need. That disturbs brain function in places like the amygdala, which is in charge of telling the body when to activate the fight-or-flight response.
Meanwhile, nearly 1 million people died and, in turn, nearly 9 million Americans lost a close family member. We often use the word “grief” to capture the complicated processes that a loss of this magnitude triggers in our brains. But that shouldn’t obscure very real ways our brains have had to process loss – that a person who exists so vibrantly in our minds no longer exists in the physical world.
Oh, and psychologists are even speculating that the pandemic has messed with our perception of time.
“I believe the deepest, longest-lasting legacy of Covid-19 might be on our mental health,” Snowden said. “The world was not prepared for the physical disease; we’re totally unprepared for the mental disease that will follow in its wake … Are we as a society ready to recognise that need?”
The tragedies of the last two years have woken us up from our work-obsessed culture. Many of us have realized it’s OK for work to be merely a paycheck – a way to buy enough freedom to spend our time how we’d really like. Perhaps that means taking better care of ourselves or those around us. Others may want more meaning in their work – for the world to be in a slightly better place after we’ve worked 40 hours. And if America can’t support these desires, we’ve realized that it’s not because we’re broken; it’s because America is.
Ultimately, when workers were polled how they feel about work, nearly a quarter of Americans said they want a job with “more purpose” and one in five said they want to step back and “focus on their personal lives”.
Compare these experiences with what companies have told their workers in their back-to-office messages.
In October, Amazon told its 1.1 million US workers that their hybrid in-office schedules should be shaped around maximizing work output. “The decisions should be guided by what will be most effective for our customers; and not surprisingly, we will all continue to be evaluated by how we deliver for customers, regardless of where the work is performed,” the chief executive, Andy Jassy, wrote.
That same month, Walmart sent a message to its 1.5 million US employees that they would be transitioning back to the office. “I look forward to the halls and conference rooms buzzing with energy,” Walmart’s chief people officer, Donna Morris, wrote. “Bottom line: we will focus our energy on serving our customers and members, and supporting our associates – not on where the work is getting done.”
What Morris left out was that most of their employees continued working in retail stores throughout the pandemic, while a huge number of them relied on public assistance. Walmart brought in a record $573bn in revenue last year.
The number of labor strikes has risen in the last two years – a clear message that workers aren’t happy with the status quo. A record number of workers are resigning and companies are having trouble finding new recruits.
This wave of companies trying to resume operations certainly feels like these societal and personal changes are being waved away as merely a phase. But that gets to Snowden’s broader critique of American institutions, from companies to government: We still want to get back to normal, and we can’t acknowledge the realities of our current world.
“We ought to recognize that it was normality itself – pre-pandemic normality – that got us into the pandemic,” he said. “A meteorologist can tell you if you live in the Caribbean, a hurricane is in your future. If you don’t prepare, you’re very unwise. Similarly, virologists can tell you we’re going to have more pandemic and epidemic challenges.”
This is the part of the story where I say what companies should do; I found this advice from Harvard Business School faculty helpful – things like showing compassion, being honest about the company’s need and leading with empathy. But no matter how good a back-to-office plan is, they’re all a reminder that we’re insistent on building a post-pandemic world that mirrors the pre-pandemic one.
In reality, more pandemics could be coming, and workers now know that this current economy is not built for this new world. They know that this current system wiped out their savings within a few months of the country shutting down, and it will do it again.
Perhaps it’s too much to ask companies to prepare for that future, much less imagine it. It’s coming nevertheless.