09/18/2021 22:00
Clarín.com
Opinion
Updated 09/18/2021 10:00 PM
In 2013, the year seven BC (before the covid), a young Japanese journalist named Miwa Sado died suddenly.
An official investigation concluded that it had been a case of karoshi, death due to overwork.
When they discovered the body, she had a mobile phone in her hand, like a martyr clinging to a crucifix.
Some of my colleagues are going to have to take care not to suffer a similar fate, or at least not to put their health at risk, they are so obsessed with the pandemic, even now that it is leaving us. In recent months, a
Karoshiesco journalistic frenzy
has been unleashed
around the question, what will the world be like after the covid? Tens of thousands of articles have been published and there will be tens of thousands more, count on it, predicting an epic reset for
homo sapiens
.
That if there will be an outbreak of universal solidarity and we will love and care for each other more, or if we will feel more fear towards our neighbor than love; that if we will travel more, eager to escape the claustrophobia of the viral nest, or if we will stay more at home, even to work; that if we will lose interest in sex, or if we will return to the attack with renewed ardor; that if we will exercise more and eat more vegetables to live longer or if the lesson of the unpredictable and capricious coronavirus will be, the Mexican way, that when it is your turn, your turn and what was screwed, is screwed; that if we will see more responsibility in politics, more restraint in international relations; that if we will refocus our priorities and try to reduce stress in our lives, doing all yoga, for example,or if the effort will be in vain because we will be more stressed than ever due to lack of work. Will we be more Miwa Sado or more Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the inventor of transcendental meditation?
The first thing to do is quote the mid-century baseball player, Yogi Berra, famous more for his clairvoyance than for his game. Among his jewels:
"It is hard to make predictions, especially about the future
.
"
Second, we must remember that we are talking about wealthy problems. I say "rich" for that fortunate minority of the world's inhabitants who have the basic needs more than covered. The concerns we speak of are of concern only to those who have the luxury of choice. I read a letter in
The Times
of London from a reader who summarized his vision of pandemic lockdowns as follows: "Middle class people hide while working class people bring them stuff."
I doubt that we are seeing an explosion of existential doubts among the majority of the inhabitants of Africa or Latin America. Telecommuting, hitting the gym, limiting yourself to vegan - these aren't even options. At most they will be things that they read, with perplexity, on their mobile devices. As for reducing stress, when the main question in life is whether you will eat the next day, stress is so internalized that you don't even realize you have it.
As for us rich people, those of us who have time to contemplate the future beyond tomorrow, I highly doubt that the pandemic of words spilled about possible post-covid changes brings us much value, beyond a light entertainment, of possible subject matter. conversation when the possibilities offered by politics and football are exhausted, topics that here in Barcelona, at least, can only lead to lamentation, nostalgia or suicidal reflections.
One is partial, always. You base your judgments on the luck that conditions everything. I must acknowledge the possibility that I am wrong in my skepticism regarding the journalistic genre so in vogue today. My vision of the future is based on the shrewd Yogi Berra and that the pandemic has not caused me any epiphany. I confess that I have not changed and I neither think nor wish to change. But I suspect that I am not alone. I read of people in distant places who have abandoned sedentary urban life for mountaineering or who have left accounting to study medicine, but I have no acquaintance anywhere in the world who is considering a drastic life change.
Telecommuting?
It would have happened the same, with or without covid. Perhaps it happens less because of the number of people fed up with the screens and the happy personal distancing.
Less travel?
As soon as we can, those of us who can, we will go out to see the world with the same desire as before, or more.
The stress?
There he will continue, like the poor, always with us. For one reason or another. A new universal brotherhood? Please!
Will we work more or less?
It will depend on the need, or personal energy reserves.
More or less sex?
Each according to their opportunities. The world turns and nothing new under the sun.
And the political world and the relations between the great powers? As we can see, everything remains the same. Maybe there is a bit more bad blood towards China since they passed us the virus but the clash with the West has more to do with Xi Jinping and his comrades than with the pangolins, or perhaps the clown scientists, of Wuhan. And as for Putin's ballplayer, the nonsense of Brexit, the perverse object of desire that is Donald Trump, the eternal Argentine pendulum (Peronists─no Peronists─peronists─no Peronists─ Peronists ...): nothing new to report.
The stupidity, posture, lies and ignorance are still there, all fed, both personally and politically, by the most harmful plague of our times, the antisocial networks. No. Not only will nothing change after the pandemic, but we will learn nothing. So it is, so it was and so it will always be. The secret is to take human comedy as such - not too seriously like Miwa Sado, who covered politics, poor woman - and try, as much as possible, to have a good time.
