For me, COVID began on March 13, 2020. That's the day we were all sent to work from home for two weeks. Looking back through my emails, it was clear that no one had any idea what was about to happen.
I have little memory of what I thought, but I can't have been feeling too pessimistic about the fate of humanity — I got pregnant a couple weeks later.
And here we are, five years on, and our collective ability to prognosticate has not improved. Every meeting I go to now involves some kind of lamentation about "these dark times." Someone casually asserted that we are "kneecapping the next generation" in a meeting today. The department I work for has a faculty slack channel which mirrors my LinkedIn feed — a litany lamentations about the collapse of modern science. Even before all the Trump bullshit, every meeting involved some version of "what if she doesn't win?!" handwringing. What if, indeed.
On the other side, those living Trump's paradise feel basically as despondent as their vanquished foes. They are doing their best to stem the overwhelming tide of civilizational collapse. Children are being mutilated by doctors and poisoned by big pharma as we speak. Free speech is impossible, free thinking a crime. Liberalism is disintegrating as we scroll merrily on our phones. In a generation, there will be no more children.
Honestly, it's all I can do not to roll my eyes so hard they fall out of my head.
On November 8, 1989, no one foresaw that the Berlin Wall would fall the next day. (Soviet experts are still weeping for the unfinished dissertations.) I have no memory of portents issued on September 10, 2001. December 7, 1941 lives in infamy. In June 2015, no one except Trump thought Trump would be president.
Maybe the world is ending. Maybe AI will infect my brain and steal my job. Maybe my children will be fighting in Taiwan in 2045.
You know what's much more likely? A future we have not predicted and can't even begin to imagine. It's possible something is coming for us. If it is, my only guess is that it's something we haven't considered yet. That's generally how catastrophes happen.
For most people this is probably too scary to contemplate, but I take great solace in the fact that while people have been forecasting the end of the world for millennia, we are somehow still here, living in unbelievable comfort at the pinnacle of technological progress.
The world may be ending, but spring is here and I just took a walk around campus where the leadership has a stockpile of 34 billion dollars to use for the preservation of something resembling knowledge. Later I will retrieve my healthy children, load them into seats that have been rigorously tested to protect them, and go to our house, where everyone has their own bed, the air is automatically conditioned, and our water is cleaned by a UV filter. I will use my tiny computer to play us any piece of music we can think of while preparing food that is fresh and plentiful.
I could lose all this tomorrow, yes. But that is always true. I could get hit by a bus. I could lose my job. My children could get sick. There could be a natural disaster or a nuclear holocaust. Should this make me more or less miserable today? Why is it so hard to imagine that things might work out in the end?
8 comments:
Things feel very dark in DC, and it feels legitimate, not hand wringing. We know a lot of families at our school where both parents immediately lost their jobs and many more are expecting to. These are not people who are going to end up homeless but may have to move out of the area, and it's a very sad, especially when the cause is some jerk who thinks he is playing a video game. I also try not to make broad statements about the general wonderfulness or terribleness of the world but there are definitely specific things happening in this administration that feel like a travesty to me (different than like, oh, I disagree with this/this is a really bad idea, which is what I would think in previous times.)
Yes, totally fair, I'm not saying people blindsided by all this shouldn't be worried or shouldn't complain. Same with the folks on LinkedIn who are trying to find new jobs!
But no one here has lost their jobs. Nothing has changed in my world at all. And the faculty are even more insulated from personal hardship. So getting the same level of "the world is ending" rhetoric constantly when nothing has happened (yet) is deeply annoying. Especially because then when something does happen, no one cares because we've been lamenting things that haven't happened yet the entire time.
But also, and maybe this is personal to me, but I've always assumed I could lose my job. Of the 3 companies Josh has worked for in the past few years, 2 are now out of business, the other one has been bought and sold more than once, laying off large numbers of people. Friends of his were laid off during parental leave! All of our big financial decisions are made through the lens of what we could afford if one of us lost our jobs. Layoffs always suck, for sure, but I guess for those of us not in DC layoffs are more common.
Yes I think it's true that people who choose government jobs are more risk-averse than the average professional population, and have made trade-offs (like lower salary and dealing with bureaucracy) for that benefit. But for a situation like USAID, the entire industry was destroyed- there's not really anywhere to absorb thousands of people with their skillsets. I think it's also much more common here than average to have both spouses work in the same industry (government) because historically, that was not a risky decision.
The attacks feel very personal, both to DC as a place to be (because they are) and because professionals here, again more than the average, are very invested in the mission of what they are doing. They have mortgages and kids, yes, but they are also rabidly invested in the outcomes of what they are working on. In normal times, I honestly find this a bit tedious, but it is also sad to just see all of it being spit on, out of malice.
Alex, I thought you were planning to take advantage of this situation to swoop into the housing market?
About job security, I think govt and academia are sort of similar in the sense of job security they promote, and I've also been thinking about the ways that these shakeups (direct layoffs in the case of the exec branch, funding loss in the universities) have come to seem simply impossible, even when serious reform is obviously necessary and everyone kind of knows it. I don't purport to know about which administrative agencies should be cut, but in the case of higher ed, there has been just so much limping along for decades without any effort to correct course. I don't even mean DEI or woke whatever, but things like the replication crisis in the social sciences and even in the hard sciences. New methods have made it possible for individual faculty in many disciplines to author hundreds of papers per year, but no one is able to discern whether any of this research is even real. Careers are still governed by research and publication imperatives and peer review standards from 80 yrs ago, even though they make no sense to anyone anymore. Fields and disciplines proliferate simply because money for them exists. Academic standards for students have dropped precipitously. The Claudine Gay plagiarism scandal of last winter was just the tip of the iceberg; everyone in academia knew that if anyone started systematically digging, we'd find dozens maybe hundreds more cases of even more egregious plagiarism and misconduct. And everyone sees and acknowledges these distortions, it's not a partisan question. But we all just carry on like it's not happening, or it will solve itself somehow.
But if we were to get serious about higher ed reform, it would obviously be painful in similar ways. We'd potentially have to fire or demote lots of people. We'd have to shutter entire programs. There was an NYT article a couple days ago lamenting that, due to Trump-induced budget threats, UPenn's English dept had to cut its PhD admits from like 20 to 7, like this is a horrible tragedy. I mean, this is something that they should obviously have done voluntarily 20 years ago! They place about two PhD graduates a year in full-time academic jobs! Limiting PhD enrollments is probably one of the easiest things we could do.
Which is all just to say, I think it has been a big mistake for us in higher ed (and maybe by analogy, the gov't), to expect such security from our jobs. Even setting Trump aside, this complacency makes it impossible to reform even things badly in need of reform in an objective, non-partisan sense.
Sure. Two things can be true (thanks Dr. Becky!) It was not unreasonable to expect job security from federal jobs, and that serious reform is necessary (but that is not what is happening.)
Oh my god, you just reminded me that I need to write a post about how much I hate Dr. Becky. (Sorry.)
So YOU are the people responsible for Dr Becky's (whose name I didn't even know, only her large forehead) infiltration of my feed.
It was reasonable to expect job security b/c that expectation was created and disseminated. But my point is that it was bad to create it. Same perhaps with tenure in academia. Security eliminates almost all internal incentives for reform, and that makes us susceptible to being flattened by a big, Trump-looking bulldozer.
No, I had to unfollow her because she was driving me crazy!
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