Did We Lose Something Along the Way?

Practicing proper grief in the face of progress

One can argue that humankind, as a singular global community for the first real time ever, has felt pass through them most profoundly for the last few years a wave of grief; a sense that some aspect of human life essential to our antecedents got lost in all the dust kicked up in our march to progress. The way we experience grief is painfully obviously different now. Everyone with an Internet connection — being increasingly most people worldwide — experienced COVID twice, through their phones and the 24/7 news cycle as the virus spread elsewhere first and then again as it hit their own communities.

For decades, people have been able to “grieve”, however valid you’d judge their grief, over other far-away population’s misfortunes, horrified from couches glued to TV screens showing scenes of gore and devastation. To them, at least, it feels real; real enough to hang a flag outside their door or make a donation over the phone. But this time, no matter where you lived, you got to see a real-time sneak peek what was coming for your community before it got there. Still, most of us managed to be unprepared. If you’re thinking ahead to the effects of climate change, you’re not alone. For now, however, what’s important is that the pandemic — arguably, national and world news in general — was experienced by the industrialized world in every way, as everything, everywhere, and all at once. The worst misfortunes of the hardest-hit cities were beamed into our…