Many parts of "daily life" can seem tedious and annoying at times. Take a morning commute, for instance. Sitting in traffic on the way to sit in a cubicle?! Now I repent; I find myself missing lots of these things now that I'm staying in most every day, most all the time.

All this COVID-19 business has made me appreciate how having certain discrete "events" in my day—which at times may have seemed annoying—have acted as useful for anchor points for both structuring my time and "keeping up" with various things I don't typically directly concern myself with.

For instance, through riding my bicycle to class/study, I gained lots of first-hand knowledge of on-going (societal) trends. I don't really feel much of an intrinsic desire to keep up with pop culture. But, going around town, I'd hear songs, see people with graphic T-shirts, etc., which would inform me about what's buzzing. I'd see what kinds of pets were popular, how Chinese vs Japanese vs Korean fashions differed, what restaurants were popular... All sorts of observations that contributed to understanding "what it is like" to be in such-and-such time and place happened during the "transition times" of commuting.

By being in the same world as others, we learn to relate with one another.

"The Routine" as Shared Experience

The utility of activities such as the morning commute do not become apparent until they are gone. Lock-down times have taught me how important many aspects of routine are in developing a sense of connection with the people around me. We need shared context with those around us to understand each other; simple routine things like having to go to meetings and commuting along XYZ freeway are representative "lowest common denominator" ways in which we can relate to one another ¹.

Going through all this lock down stuff makes me reflect on how very different each of us is experiencing COVID-19. Aside from the Internet, we lack a "common space" to meet one another—in the past decade or so of my life, this has been school/coffee shops/restaurants.

Re-creating Shared Context

In these physically isolated times, it is in the shared spaces of social media (e.g. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, games, Discord, etc.) that we establish norms and shared experiences.

I consider it important that we have individuals—not just polished corporate accounts—producing content. Meme "shit-posting", status update ramblings, and rando-comments are all things we can do to claim our place in "writing the narrative" of what COVID-19 was like. Nobody is going to passively observe me walking around town, because I'm parking my butt according to lock-down directives. But somebody might scroll by a click-bait title I produce, and in this sense, I enter the subconscious in the same way I would walking down a street.

Only for the time being, the streets that we "walk" down are social media feeds of various sorts. Until we can again freely walk the streets, we stroll down the "public" boulevards of the Interwebs via social media.