Feels like our utter determination to return to normal has destroyed normality.

There have been so many moments at which we could have stopped, reflected, changed course. But this seems like the most acute yet. If we can’t let go of our ideas and expectations of normality, we’re not going to be able to imagine what needs to come next.

It’s our obsession with individualism that has done this. Individual liberty, individual comfort, the mistaken belief that “freedom” is just the fulfilment of all our individual desires.

It’s amazing to me that people talk about having to make sacrifices when as a society we already chose the sacrifice, and made it: we sacrificed the vulnerable in favour of consumption and entertainment.

I don’t think we’ll ever be able to accept that that was the choice we made and that these are the consequences of that choice. The project to revise that history and what that history says about us as a society will go into overdrive next year.

We’ve struggled to see beyond ourselves. We haven’t been able to imagine anything beyond a few well-worn routines and small, petty preferences. The result is a world we don’t like, and our discomfort with that world will likely drive us further into ourselves.

Everyone laughed at that blog post about learning nothing from 2020 but it was truth: we’ll get our shitty overpriced sandwiches and deadening working lives and poisoned air and negligible “leisure time” back, and we’ll happily forget that we killed people to have it.

I know people will reply to this with comments along the lines of, Jesus Christ, this is bleak, I don’t want to see this, can’t we focus on the positive, but to them I would say: that’s the exact shit that got us here.

We love escapism so much we escaped right out of both reality and responsibility.