The distortions of retrospect or do you remember COVID?

I still feel acutely the shame about a minor incident of my younger self in primary school. On the other hand, I think back on the past three years and find that all things COVID are vague and distant, just like an exhausting dream from which I woke up feeling dazed but unconnected. Why?

Collective memory

I understand that it is different for every individual, and if you have been badly affected or a frontline worker, it was naturally another story. But in general, I guess it is because it wasn’t a single moment but a very drawn-out situation. And it wasn’t an individual event but a collective experience, and this results in different levels of emotional connection.

Do you feel the same? It seems that the general agreement regarding the past three years is, that we all act as if they hadn’t really happened. In all ways and expectations we simply continue from where we stood in 2019. In meetings and planning sessions someone might utter: „That was during COVID“, and we all nod and understand: The world was turned upside down. It was massive. It is the past. Weird times, but already difficult to remember.

Faint memories of hibernation

I wonder if that feeling of dazed memory is the result of being advised to deal with that global crisis in a surprising way: inaction. Stay on your sofa. Meet no one. Cancel all your plans. Cocoon with your family until further notice. Days merge into months while you stay in hibernation.

However, that does not mean that nothing happened at all in our individual lives: kids grow up, people falls sick in non-COVID ways, heal or not, puppies become dogs, jobs change: the cycle of private life is spinning, while the world stands oddly still.

So, this gives us a lot of interesting insights: We can consider the reliability of post-event accounts, when we seem to struggle to remember after even a short time. I guess that’s why history books keep evolving.

Perception forms memories

On top, observation and experience itself can be questioned: even while we live through a global crisis with a clear beginning and hopefully now complete ending like the pandemic, the perspective of an individual is somewhat disconnected from the (global) community.

Without doubt this is even more true for less clearly defined mega-trends of today’s world. While we live in times of climate change, global hunger, war, nuclear confrontation, biodiversity loss, and all the grim rest, we are aware of it, understand many aspects of it, but still our individual attention will return to the big questions of „What is for dinner?“ or „Should I go to bed now?“. Yet, at the same time, that applies for positive changes, too. People say, „The world is getting worse and worse“, while that luckily isn’t true at all on all accounts either.

No respect for retrospect?

We simply remember in a funny day: some memories get stuck in our head and cause us discomfort. I remember how I would be surprised as child, when people told stories that happened during the war and featured bombs and famine but were still mainly about a funny dog or some other everyday scene.

We think back on our past with a certain type of fondness no matter how bad the circumstances were. I am sure that I will soon enough sit down with you and we will say: „Remember COVID? How we all had to homeschool the kids! And how we sew masks? And how the streets were so empty? And how we would“ and we will smile and think of all the those things that caused us a lot of grief in the moment. But still, I bet we will smile because we will remember how small the kids have been then, how young we have been (in comparison to today) and how little we had known.

Retrospect is a funny perspective. Distortion guaranteed.

I should keep that in mind the next time, a memory haunts me. Because it is just that: a memory that is shaped by me. It can be revisited and redefined by me, too. Today!