Into the post-COVID-19 future

There is no far future after COVID-19. We can still daydream of beautiful “somedays,” sure — someday I will become this and that, someday I will have more and do more—but we cannot enjoy that now without some bad faith.

I’ve been thinking about little kids today, particularly my godchild, Lulu, who will turn one at the end of the month, and my best friend’s first niece, Harper, who was born today, April 9. I wonder what expecting mothers and new parents feel right now. There is no future left for their kids. I’m not trying to ridicule them. I mean, I do think about having kids, too, even when I have repeatedly said I do not want any. In my wildest daydreams, I’m sometimes a mother raising vegan kids. I am not sure if there is a difference between imagining and considering. Anyway, God forbid I ever desire having children. By this time, amid the coronavirus crisis, any right to dream so is forfeited.

There is no far future after COVID-19. Experts say we are entering a new normal. We have to prepare for new ways of life. We won’t see our streets, universities, coffee shops, stadiums the same way again. And we must change the way we eat. My friends and I have since become anxious: This decade, the decade of our 30s, will be different and we are just starting out—finally getting regular at work, giving back to family, saving up for oneself for maybe an out-of-town or out-of-country trip, starting a family, finishing our Master’s or Ph.D., doing this and that for self-optimization. We cannot ever dream for our children what our parents dreamed and achieved for us — a little wealth, good education, some status. And it would be a mistake to even dare so: If there is anything we should realize now during community quarantine, it’s that those will not matter in the future anymore. We are not just entering a new normal. We are saying hello to doom.

Scientists say we only have until 2050 to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Some even say it is already too late. Whatever is left of the future, therefore, is not for our somedays; we simply cannot afford that now. We will be merely trying to survive the next few years we have left. That’s all: heal and survive.

It is ridiculous to hope for a vaccine so we could go back to our lives pre-COVID-19. To be optimistic now would be a waste of thinking time that this community quarantine allows us. Those of us who are safe and secure thanks to a little wealth, good education, and some status—we do not have any excuse, despite our growing anxieties, to not think better and carefully. We must use this time to really think how we should go on. And we can only go on differently.

Definitely, as soon as the community quarantine is lifted, we will all have to pick up where we left off: our jobs and projects, prospects for self and family. Definitely, there are things in our pre-COVID-19 life that are still worth continuing. But to go on exactly as before this pandemic as if there weren’t hard lessons to be learned and values to rethink would be such a pity, because then we’d risk collapsing the short time we have left.

After all this blows over, I will never return to my life pre-COVID-19. I do have some crazy ideas—that is, if leaving your job and the city and its hellish traffic to grow your own food in the rural is crazy. I’ve been thinking: As soon as the quarantine is lifted, I will finish unfinished business, pack up, then go on differently. I’d take only the things that matter to me (love and friendships, solidarity work, family) and leave behind productivity, success, perhaps even security. I just cannot go back to my pre-pandemic way of life without denying its risks to the future that isn’t even mine.

Unfortunately, we cannot build a future for today’s little kids anymore. The time left is just too short. But I am pessimistic only because I am still hoping, thinking. Perhaps the less we think about creating and acquiring and more about dismantling and fixing, much less about insights and metrics and much more about relationships, we could still leave a little something for them. Maybe not much, but good and safe enough for them to enjoy.

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Julia Dolfo de Castro, 28, is a philosophy student and a literacy tutor in Manila.