If gathering and sharing our lives seems oh-so-2019, we’re in trouble
Think for just a moment about yesterday. Recall everything you did. What do you consciously remember? Do you recollect hitting the snooze button on your alarm? Brushing your teeth? Putting on your left sock? Buttering your toast? What about opening your car door, buckling your seatbelt, or using your turn signal? Do you remember entering the security code on your phone or the password on your computer? Flipping on/off lights as you entered/exited rooms? Or removing your glasses before lying down in your bed? Even as you might feel certain that you definitely did each of these things, you’ve likely retained not a single memory of actually doing any of them. That is because these actions are habits, and our brains process them in unique ways.
According to cognitive research, forty percent of daily human activity on average is the result of habit rather than reasoned decision making. By contrast, when we learn something new—how to knit, drive a stick shift, or play the accordion—our brains engage consciously and rationally, working very hard to master the techniques required to accomplish these new skills. But once basic mastery has been achieved our neurological patterns change. Processing these activities shifts to a different sphere of the brain, and doing them requires much less attention or mental energy. Such actions comfortably slide into unconscious (and unremembered) habituation.
These insights help us understand why new habits are difficult to form and old ones hard to break. Habits carry us along through much of life, supporting with ease the accomplishment of both good things (like getting dressed, feeding ourselves, and texting our mothers) as well as some bad ones (like snacking at night, rage scrolling through Twitter, and leaving our dirty dishes in the living room). Beginning a new habit or breaking an old one always requires the significant force of disruption. Sometimes such disruption is planned and intentional. Sometimes it isn’t.
Almost exactly two years ago a spectacular buzzsaw of habit disruption ran through our collective lives like none seen in modern times. The pandemic began pulsating throughout the world in the winter of 2020, and by the second week of March virtually every workday, worship service, classroom lecture, sporting event, wedding ceremony, holiday festival, professional conference, musical performance, dinner date, family reunion, world tour, and board meeting was CANCELED. Life itself came to an astonishing and unwelcome halt.
We’re all too aware of the shocking (and often tragic) implications of this sudden transformation for our public health, our social lives, our economy, and our politics. But we are only now beginning to grasp its long-term effects on our personal and collective habits—the embedded, recurrent rituals that enrich our lives, giving us an unconscious sense of order and stability.
In many ways, this battering ram to our habits functioned as a rare gift, empowering us to examine precisely what among the mindless rhythms of habituation we might or might not wish to continue. We Americans have always thought of ourselves as pragmatic innovators, unwilling to persist in doing things simply because that’s the way it’s always been done. Must we physically travel to the office in order to do our work? Couldn’t we have our groceries and even our booze delivered right to our doors? Might education function more efficiently if offered virtually?
This bludgeon to our habits broke the powerful spell that had previously led so many of us to continue engaging in practices that our hearts had long since abandoned. It enabled some to quit jobs they hated—the Great Resignation! Virtual church greased the wheels for hundreds of thousands of lukewarm church goers (along with a great many pastors) to leave the faith once and for all. And strictly enforced requirements to “shelter in place” accelerated the demise of at least as many marriages. The disruption of habits exposed disenchanted hearts while activating unexplored longings.
Even so, we fool ourselves if we think we’ve achieved some kind of rational control over the new patterns of habituation foisted upon us by the pandemic. Even as disruption may have liberated us from some old rhythms, it just as decisively shuttled us into new and often unhealthy grooves. Yes, some amid the lockdowns found greater space to exercise, write poetry, and learn a foreign language. But far more of us drank too much, bathed too little, and sank into desperate patterns of loneliness, isolation, and extremism.
We find ourselves again on the cusp of yet another hopeful moment, where COVID case counts and deaths are dwindling, restrictions are receding, and even masks are starting to disappear. With blurry-eyed vision we look ahead on the horizon at something we’re almost afraid to call normal. But before we reach out to grab hold of it, we should all honestly acknowledge just how deeply our personal and collective habits have been formed, reformed, and malformed over the past two years. Rediscovering and reenergizing once vital habits will be harder than we think.
A modest yet profound symbol of this challenge for me personally is the faculty lounge on the college campus where I work: a large, well-appointed room located in the newest academic building on campus. It contains a long wooden table with seating for more than dozen, a small kitchenette, and a few overstuffed chairs and couches surrounded by tasteful lighting. The faculty lounge has long been an institution within the institution; a comfortable and aesthetically pleasing repose for faculty members to join together to relax, casually socialize, and join in spirited conversation (and perhaps just a tiny bit of campus gossip).
Before the pandemic, the lounge was lively, loud, and sometimes rambunctious, filled at lunchtime with colleagues drinking coffee, preparing and eating their lunches, and chattering about the day’s latest this or that. I more than once, teaching across the hall during lunch, had to stop and ask my colleagues to keep it down. Our faculty lounge possessed all of the charms and drawbacks of faculty lounges everywhere. Many loved it and drew strength from its energy; others found it off-putting and stayed away.
You know where this story is headed. The campus shuts down for spring 2020, remaining a ghost town over the following summer. We re-open in fall 2020 for in-person learning with substantial restrictions, masking, and social distancing. It goes without saying: The faculty lounge is shuttered and abandoned. While we teach “in person,” nearly all other human contact is conducted over Zoom.
While life and learning on our campus has gradually returned to normal, the faculty lounge has remained empty and desolate. The restrictions on the space are long gone. But my colleagues and I have grown accustomed to eating our lunches alone in our offices, or skipping out as soon as classes are finished, heading for home. I will still occasionally stop in the lounge to heat up some food or seek out much needed coffee. But I am almost always there alone, and I never stay for long.
What will it take to salvage the faculty lounges of our lives, to reenergize the badly ruptured habits of gathering and sharing our lives together? This will be among the great hidden challenges of our post-pandemic world.
Jay Green is Professor of History at Covenant College. His books include Christian Historiography: Five Rival Versions and Confessing History: Explorations of Christian Faith and the Historian’s Vocation (edited with John Fea and Eric Miller). He is Managing Editor of Current.