The Fall of Everyday Life and The Rise of Life Worth Living Every Day

Written By Becca Mayo

The world we built is crumbling before us, but I’m not panicking. I’m excited. Is it sadistic to think we needed this global pandemic to wake everyone up? No one feels safe anymore. No one feels economically secure anymore. We’re isolating, quarantining, practicing social distancing. But I have never felt so connected to the people I cannot see—the people I do not know—by this universal precarity. The home, the “private enclave cut off from the outside world,” is now the totality (Felski 24). The question of an exceedingly contagious virus has been answered with federal inadequacy, and so we work from home and live at work. The everyday life that was “the essential, taken-for-granted continuum of mundane activities that frames our forays into more esoteric or exotic worlds” no longer exists (Felski 15). What we are left with, however, is the space to create something different. We have been left with a socioeconomic climate ripe for the revolutionary transformation of everyday life. There is no time to waste!

The government told us to stay at home through the month of April. April has arrived, and now they tell us we might need to stay home through this year and even the next. Americans do not like being told what to do. This is America. This is a free country. I get to do what I want in my country—who is we? Oh, how this individualist belief system “masks reality behind privileged conditions” (Debord 238). What high towers we all must be looking down from as we delude ourselves with such flagrant lies. Lies we have been telling ourselves for so long that the light of truth blinds us, and so we instinctively look away. But the Sun always rises, whether we choose to look or not. Even when we are shrouded by nightfall, and we think we can escape the vulnerability of being seen, the Sun sleeps with one eye open.

We practice a fundamentalist religion of progress. Our God is forward movement. Do not look back lest you become a pillar of salt. This is not, however, divine retribution; this is an implication of corporate society. We are not here, in this moment, together. We exist in a futuristic modernity, an imaginative framework where “we learn over and over that humans are different from the rest of the living world because we look forward—while other species, which live day to day, are thus dependent on us” (Tsing 21). We think we are the center, the maker; we think we are stronger, smarter, the most advanced species that has ever walked the planet. Now we are collectively beginning to see the fragility of the web we have spun. Are we even aware of whose web we have been creating? Who are we working for? Who is living comfortably in the homes we are making? The utopian dreams of modernization were always nightmares, and “there might not be a collective happy ending” (Tsing 21). But there was never going to be an American, collective happy ending. Capitalism would never allow such an ending. Americans do not seem to need collectivism when we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, right?

No—the Euclidean mind glitches from the havoc wrought by COVID-19. This mind “which is obsessed by the idea of regulating all life by reason and bringing happiness to man, whatever the cost” (Elliott 68). Our rationalism, our so-called human distinction, is the mistake in our code. Stay inside! Do not leave your home unless it is absolutely necessary! Flatten the curve. Why is this such a difficult request? Why are you anxious about having to quarantine at home with your husband? Are you safe with him? No—he is safe. He uses the privacy of your bedroom, your kitchen, your living room to his advantage. The home is mutilated and feels more like a prison. He is the prosecutor, the corrections officer. The virus is the judge, the warden. There is no fair trial to be had. How could we let you down like this? I do not merely want to break you out of your jail cell. I want reparations made to you. I may not be able to see you, but they cannot make you invisible.

You, over there—you seem restless. Why? Are you worried about how you will pass the time? You tell me if you are not at work, then you are at home. If you are not at home, then you are out spending the money you make at work. When things were normal, you spent so little time with your partner that you did not seem to notice you are happier without them. But can you now see how this “dialectical system” of work, life at home, and leisure has left you hollow (Lefebvre 234)? And who really has time for leisure right now? Wake up. Make the bed. Make coffee. Take the dog out for a walk. Prepare breakfast. Clean the dishes. Vacuum the living room. Zoom meetings with bosses and coworkers. Wash a load of laundry. Have you always done nearly all of the housework? Now, you can see it for what it has always truly been: an undeclared, unpaid job. You try to vindicate your exhausting workload by thinking about how much you hate wasting time. But all of those hours spent working—progressing—toward a never fully articulated goal have bitten us in the ass. Now what? Now that we have been issued shelter-in-place and stay-at-home orders, how can our world—dependent upon the exchange of money—proceed? My friends on social media keep their spirits high by reposting text-images that say this is temporary; life will go back to normal.

Is this moment not just an extreme form of the normal we have been living with for years? Have we not been social distancing since the rise of the smartphone? The smartphone itself—and our use of it—“makes it easy to communicate when we wish and to disengage at will” (Turkle 13). We used to love that power. We would get high off of our ability to skirt around any real type of intimacy. We could get close but abruptly log off if we were to feel too exposed. We felt we were in control, but we never really were. Facebook tells us “we’re never lost if we can find each other,” but we have been avoiding each other for years. In the digital world, our networked connections let us imagine that we can find one another. In our world, we are still alone. Now that the ship is sinking and our digital connections have become our life rafts, we have become increasingly aware of our latent loneliness. Every day we Skype, text, e-mail, FaceTime, call, and Zoom our friends, families, partners, coworkers, teachers, students, doctors, and therapists, but it does not sufficiently scratch that itch. Connectivity is our chosen form of intimacy, but “cyberintimacies slide into cybersolitudes” which have come full-circle and left us simply in solitude (Turkle 16). We are lost at sea on our life rafts, and no one is coming to save us. We have to save ourselves.

We know our miniscule lives are not the only ones at stake. The hospitality industry has been devastated by the novel coronavirus, and we find ourselves in mourning. Perhaps we feel such a gut-wrenching sense of loss because the neoliberal Kool-Aid that had once been force-fed to us is now our drink of choice. In this world, Mr. Peanut died, and both our trustworthy and not-so-trustworthy news sites wrote about its death, whether in jest or solemnity, as if there truly were a death to report. Ten days after the tragic loss of Mr. Peanut, the Planters brand introduced Baby Nut to a predominantly American audience during Super Bowl LIV. A shocking, sudden death followed by an immediate clean slate. A Baby Nut! The 114-year-old Planters company rebranded as an innocent, needy, adorable Baby Nut. I, however, do not like babies. This rebrand is a subatomic particle of disaster capitalism—Naomi Klein’s title for “orchestrated raids on the public sphere in the wake of catastrophic events, combined with the treatment of disasters as exciting market opportunities” (6). Planters felt they needed to regress to infancy in order to advance. This novel coronavirus kills people, but we cannot be reborn. The virus shocks us, but its future containment will not mean we are safe. No—before we have enough time to come to our senses, the corporatist state will administer hundreds of volts of electromagnetic shocks. While we are writhing in pain and incoherence, they will see our anguish as their opportunity for financial gain.

While we self-isolate and monitor each other through Instagram’s shared ‘Stay Home’ story, American industries are sending their lobbyists to Capitol Hill to ask Congress for bailouts. The two-trillion-dollar Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) is “intended to speed relief across the American economy” (Snell). How will you spend your $1,200 stimulus check? Are you buying a cheap flight from a bailed-out U.S. airline for that dream vacation you could never afford? I keep getting promotional emails from retailers about huge discounts and sales. Up to 70% off! BOGO on ALL our Denim Styles! 50% off STORE-WIDE ends TONIGHT! Don’t miss out on these great deals! I think I will buy a roll of stamps to help support the United States Postal Service. People are dying. Hospitals are saying “[t]here are not nearly enough lifesaving ventilator machines” to save their critically ill coronavirus patients (Kliff, et al.). I have not worked for an entire month. I have not left my house—except to buy essential items—for an entire month. I have been officially furloughed since the last day of March. It is not my job to stimulate the economy. I have nowhere to go; I do not need more things.

I’m so sorry, dear reader, but this quarantine has encouraged me to binge-watch television shows like never before. I must ask you, do you know where you are? Does this contemporary moment feel surreal to you—like a dream? Would you like to wake up from this dream? Have you ever questioned the nature of your reality (“The Original”)? Tell me what you think of your world. Now is as good a time as any to question our reality—to critique the structure of American society through the lens of this pandemic. This is not a dream. The people who choose to see the beauty in this world can no longer ignore its profound ugliness. We may be stuck inside our homes, but this is not a period of stasis. We are not machines. Do you really want things to go back to normal? Do not romanticize the past. We are persevering in our existence—the “interactive, rhythmic, and unstable process, which constitutes an end in itself” (Le Guin 91). Do not idealize the future. All we have is right here, right now. What form could progress possibly take?

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  • Debord, Guy. “Perspectives for Conscious Alterations in Everyday Life.” The Everyday Life Reader. Ed. Ben Highmore. New York: Routledge, 2002. p. 237-245.

  • Elliott, Robert C. The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre. Ralahine Utopian Studies, vol. 10. Peter Lang AG Press, 2013.

  • Felski, Rita. “The Invention of Everyday Life.” Cool Moves: A Journal of Culture, Theory, Politics. No. 39 (September 2000): 15-31.

  • Le Guin, Ursula K. Dancing at the Edge of the World. Grove Press, 1989.

  • Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Metropolitan Books, 2007.

  • Lefebvre, Henri. “Work and Leisure in Everyday Life.” The Everyday Life Reader. Ed. Ben Highmore. New York: Routledge, 2002. p. 225-236.

  • “The Original.” Westworld. HBO, 2 October 2016.

  • Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruin. Princeton University Press, 2015.

  • Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. 3rd ed., Basic Books, 2017.

Becca Mayo
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