The UK Meteorological Office reports that May has been the hottest on record, while those living in the UK have endured unseasonal cold and rain. The age of abstraction has become more prevalent, with what is deemed right and true being unmoored from reality. Over four years ago, Covid lockdowns staged a dramatic confiscation of present reality, leading to chaos and suffering. However, in the midst of this misery, there arose a new possibility: present reality was abeyance, and people were freed of its reality check.
Middle England, the BBC-believing bastion of British Values, bent increasingly implausibly on keeping calm and carrying on. By 2020, this beleaguered demographic had been demoralized by its present reality, consigned to jobs made more bullshit by the erosion of ambition and discipline, flip-flopping between debt and the dregs of old desires, addled by precarity and the virtuosity that survives it.
Lockdowns' suspension of this reality was in itself a great boon. Greater still was what followed: unimpeded anticipation, of a happy tomorrow to follow a happy yesterday, in which all we would do because all we had done was Hug Granny and Play Whist and Toast Marshmallows and Sing Carols. This was not nostalgia, but rather a more potent anticipation of a happy tomorrow to follow a happy yesterday.
In lockdowns, the past was reanimated, suddenly reframed as what would be again once universal cocooning came to an end. People were free now to regret the past, not hopelessly as what was lost and gone, but hopefully as what had just been put on hold and would soon resume once things got back to normal.
Despite going through the present realities of 2020 and 2021, people were left to wonder if they ever got it back.
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-confiscation-of-reality/
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