Age may be the best predictor of pandemic resilience

 I managed to avoid all the usual diseases and broken bones of childhood only to acquire chicken pox at the age of 21. A week after my return from Christmas holidays at Walt Disney World I was covered in itchy spots. The doctor at the student health centre was uncompromising: I was to isolate in my bedroom for six weeks while asking my apartment mates, who had thankfully all had the disease, to sort food and drugs for me. While a relatively mild hindrance for children, chicken pox in adults can be lethal. So I was to take care of myself and stay far away from anyone else.

My professors were understanding, but what followed was an odd adaptation of journalism school. This was 1987; long before the publicly-available internet or video calls. Reporting involved physical research and face-to-face interviews. The solution was to report on the world I could access through my television screen ... the State of the Union, the Super Bowl, made-for-TV movies ... filling in commentary from people I could contact by phone. While it honed my writing and reporting skills, it was a strangely artificial way of interacting with the world and I breathed a heavy sigh of relief when, no longer contagious, I could re-join the student newsroom.

I hadn’t thought of that for decades. Until this morning, when I started wondering what I could possibly come up with to refresh a blog that had lain empty for another pandemic-restricted month.

The blogosphere is already awash with viewpoints on the historical merits and demerits of Bridgerton. Recipes and philosophising about Veganuary and surviving dry January abound. Work-related content belongs on LinkedIn. Any commentary on the American election risks angering a percentage of my friends and family and, worse, could attract trolls. (This blog’s usual fare of fine dining, opera, high-end tourism and cultural sightseeing isn’t their usual territory, but they are a true threat across social media.) You can find better January gardening tips elsewhere and I fear I’d bore you with my new-found lockdown hobby of drawing and painting. I could take you on a tour of our newly-redecorated downstairs loo-cum-cartoon-gallery, but that’s best done on video.

Taken as a whole, however, that list is what’s keeping me sane. Intellectually ... if not physically ... I’m resilient and unbowed by lockdown.

Some recent survey results at work reveal at least one reason why. Statistically, my husband and I occupy the sweet spot in pandemic-survival. We’re steadily employed, we have no children, we’re not responsible for caring for any vulnerable people and we live in a big enough house to have separate working spaces and living spaces. It turns out our age, however, may be the biggest factor of all. The study showed an almost straight-line progression: the older you are, the easier a time you’re having. Note that the respondents are drawn from our half-million employees around the world, so statistically significant for professionals of working age ... but separate from the unemployment, student angst and old-age concerns so often making news headlines. 

Since those survey results I’ve been part of numerous conversations amongst the over ‘40s in various “safe” spaces ... both intellectually and physically ... fretting over the findings about age. Have we done something wrong in the way we’ve raised children over the past 30 years? Is the snowflake generation real? Our fault? and unfit for the rigours of real life? Are they totally ignorant of context, unable to realise how easy their challenge is versus generations before who’ve had to face war, genocide, societal oppression and plagues with far higher death tolls?

The 20-somethings I work with and the teenagers I call family don’t give me undue cause for concern, though their reaction does add to my mountain of arguments about why people should study more history. It’s hard to put your experience in context when you have little awareness of the past that could provide it. Re-examining those memories of my own brief quarantine, however, gave me a different kind of perspective. 

I wasn’t bothered by six weeks, but I suspect I would have found more than that to be cataclysmic. I was at the beginning of my career and every action seemed to matter. Socially, every weekend was filled with portent. We were looking for our lives, aware that each step might reveal the job, connection, lover or place that would define our future. It’s hard to remember that sense of daily life being momentous ... probably because I found and settled into my track decades ago. These days I have difficulty placing all but the most significant events in specific years without checking my notes. (Or this blog.) 

Yet every year of the ‘80s is distinct in my mind. I entered the decade at 15 and left in my mid-twenties, having just landed at the bottom rung of the corporate ladder I would go on to climb fairly steadily until now. Losing any of those years would be unimaginable. Any one of them had a greater impact on the person I became than any three or four that followed.

So, my fellow mature and comfortable pandemic refugees, the next time you’re about to castigate the youngsters pause and think how your own life might have changed if you’d lost 12-to-16 months of your formative years to house arrest. If that doesn’t work, perhaps you need to put To Kill a Mockingbird on your lockdown reading list.

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view ... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”