Perspective | The benefits of middle age during a pandemic - The Washington Post

Life in my corner of Massachusetts has begun to acquire aspects of pre-pandemic life. Over the past month we have entertained people in our house again, gone out to eat at restaurants and attended a comedy concert. For me the trappings of pre-pandemic life will return with greater force next month, when I start teaching and traveling for work again.

Obviously, the spread of the delta variant has complicated matters, so it is not as though we have left the pandemic behind. There are more psychological ways, however, in which folks are questioning whether they will truly exit the pandemic.

For example, Charlie Warzel had some difficulty fitting into his pants, and from that he spun an interesting essay on how the past 18 months have transformed him:

Realizing your pants don’t fit isn’t the most profound revelation, I know. But, oddly-fitting trousers were the apt physical metaphor I needed to realize the enormity of the last two years. Mentally, physically, I’d undergone a change. In every way, there is more of me today than there was in February 2020. More grief, more distrust, more anger, more anxiety, more hope, more empathy … more everything. For the first time, trapped at home and not performatively busy, I’ve been able to recognize these emotions. I’ve learned more about myself and what I love and what I fear in the last eighteen months than I learned in my first 33 years. In brief moments, these revelations have been life-affirming. But many have been quite painful. I’m not okay yet. And, again, I’d argue I’m one of the lucky ones.

I am a generation older than Warzel, and my experience has been somewhat different. Like him, there is probably more of me today than there was in February 2020. For me, however, most of the added weight is physical. On the mental side, I might actually feel lighter than I did 18 months ago.

How is this possible? My wife has suggested that pandemic life was best-suited for affluent middle-aged folks like myself. As per usual, she’s not wrong. As I noted in my initial pandemic diary entry: “Compared to most Americans, me and mine have been well-prepared to cope with this kind of crisis. … We have carved out an affluent lifestyle, complete with a home office and an affordable mortgage. I can do my job remotely; even before the pandemic I worked from home a lot.” Indeed, even as the pandemic lessened this summer, my routine was not all that different from what it would have been in previous summers: staying home and writing.

There are other reasons that the pandemic suited our middle-aged lifestyle, however. Our children are old enough so that they can largely manage their daily activities — we have no diapers to change anymore. My wife and I have too many past physical injuries for strenuous sports, so walks in the neighborhood followed by Netflix are the perfect form of exercise. We are old enough to have resources and important self-knowledge, but not so old as to be acutely vulnerable to the coronavirus. This was the sweet spot during the pandemic.

The most permanent post-pandemic feature is also the one I most welcome: less travel. To be completely honest, when the pandemic first affected daily life in March 2020, a not-so-small part of me was relieved. That month I was scheduled to travel to Austin, then to Moscow, and then to Honolulu. Each individual trip seemed fun: It was the combination of trips within a single month that seemed exhausting. As I noted a few months ago, “a benefit to pandemic life was to realize how harried I had been before it. As much as I miss traveling I want to do less of it in the future.” I have yet to board a plane since the pandemic started, and I am not itching to do so.

I presume these kinds of reactions are entirely a function of my secure station in middle age. If I were younger, the sense of loss would probably be greater. I welcome less travel, but that is in part because I traveled a lot in the pre-pandemic era.

My point is not to disagree with Warzel, but to suggest that what one takes from the pandemic is a function of one’s stage of life. Generation X took covid-19 seriously from the get go. It would be ironic if our middle-agedness leaves us the most prepared for the changes the pandemic has wrought.

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Perspective | The benefits of middle age during a pandemic - The Washington Post
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