SO, the supermarket checkout as a reflection of societal attitudes.
All the groceries I’d just purchased were on one side of the cash register beside the large cardboard box they were meant to be packed into.
The way the cash desk was physically set up, it would have been very easy for the teenaged cashier to simply pick up each item, run it through the till, and then drop it into the box.
But she didn’t. She ran the groceries through the till and put them, piece by piece, way over to the far side of the till far away from the box, and then stood, arms folded, staring into space.
I laboriously began to move the items all the way back over to the other side again and into the box. I asked for a hand and she reluctantly put a few things into the box.
That done, she folded her arms and stared into space again.
I continued packing, grinding my teeth.
Seriously. What has happened to people? They’re so lazy they won’t get out of their own way.
The excuse is that Covid changed us.
It cannot be denied that during the Covid lockdowns, there came a realisation that many of us had automatically powered through life, believing our moral worth hinged on our achievements and accomplishments.
Suddenly this maxim – that we must and should earn our right to exist whether at work, in academia, in our parenting roles or in the environment – was turned on its head.
We were getting money from the government for doing nothing. Many workplaces closed down and some people never went back to work. The emphasis turned to leisure as a way to live.
Did this topsy-turvy mindset become permanently fixed in the minds of some?
Now, years later, Covid is gone but pubs and restaurants and hotels and hairdressers and anybody else you can think of, cannot find employees.
The suspicion is that people don’t want to work anymore.
The suspicion is that when young people do accept paid employment, they don’t know how to actually do any real work because they’ve never done a hand’s turn at home.
Many, it’s reported, don’t take well to instruction because they’ve grown up bossing their parents around. They don’t take well to criticism either because they’ve spent their whole lives being told how wonderful they are.
Someone passed me the story of a frustrated manager in a well-known supermarket who was spotted trying to show a teenager how to mop a floor.
Bemused customers looked on as it emerged that the mop was a completely unknown entity to the boy. He honestly didn’t know one end of it from the other and had no idea how to use it effectively to wash a section of floor.
Now that’s a tiring thought.
Someone who works with young children told me about the growing concerns about smallies. Smallies feel that:
School is too hard.
Running is too hard.
Sports is too hard.
Reading is too boring - they literally have to learn how to turn pages with their hands because it’s all devices at home.
They don’t like writing because it hurts their little hands to grasp something rather than tap a screen and it takes effort. They’re not used to effort.
They don’t like having to talk to other children because it’s unfamiliar; nobody talks to anyone in their house, it’s all just faces on screens.
Honestly, they’d really rather sit in quiet dimness on the sofa at home with an iPad than go to school.
Fewer and fewer small children are able to do somersaults.
Their core muscles are too weak.
Many children don’t go outside much.
They don’t run around outside.
They don’t play tag with friends.
God help us, they wouldn’t know how to climb a tree if they were even allowed near one. They don’t meet their friends outdoors to play traditional physical games. They can meet them in chat rooms without leaving their gaming chairs.
Many suffer from a pervasive anxiety about the world because of the inappropriate material they’re allowed to watch on devices.
Babies are pushed along in expensive buggies for convenience, heads down, not looking around or up at the sky; not being spoken to or introduced to the world. They watch ipad cartoons instead of running along holding the parent’s hand and having the birds and the trees pointed out and named for them, discussing the cloud formations above their head or throwing sticks over the bridge into the running water.
So did Covid do something terrible to our mindsets? Has it given us a sense of entitlement to do nothing to justify our existence in the world?
Is that why so many people appear to be allergic to work?
Is that why children don’t want to go to school? They have no hunger to learn? Can’t be bothered?
Seems to me that if you lose the hunger to live, your world slows down and eventually stops going around.
Surely, without having something to strive for, you are lost?
Then, one day, will you look around and feel threatened by the few people who still feel the hunger to power ahead?
I’d been accepted on a challenging doctoral programme a few years before Covid hit, and I was very proud of myself. I’d always longed to do it, but employment, life, marriage, children and family had gotten in the way, and suddenly it was 30 years since I’d done my Master’s.
However, the subtle, insistent, niggling, pushing and even elbowing from inside my own head had been unremitting, and when I heard that it was possible now, to do a PhD part-time, I was hooked.
The timing was perfect. The kids were grown up, the job was manageable, and the housework was half what it was. So I committed.
To my immense surprise, when I told people my exciting news, not everyone was encouraging.
One individual sneered that because I’d be working on a doctorate in English Literature, I wouldn’t be able to call myself “a real doctor”, when I graduated (he thought you could only be a doctor if it was a doctor of medicine).
During, I think, the first lockdown, when asked what I was up to, I proudly mentioned that I was working away on my PhD programme.
The response? Oh, I was told, I was just a sad, post-menopausal empty-nest woman struggling not to feel superfluous to life.
I gaped. What my decision to engage in this challenging academic programme really meant, this person continued, was that I, as a woman in my fifties, was struggling to remain “relevant”. That didn’t burst the bubble either. I had no problem with my own relevance.
The thing about the pandemic was that everyone had to mostly stop what they were doing for a while and do nothing. The single most important thing we were called upon to do was not to go out and do the things we had been forever running around doing.
We were to stay home, avoid crowds, avoid social interaction, avoid touching anything, and go shopping masked at the quietest times if possible. And so on.
Up to then we were a generation absolutely fixated on getting ahead by getting stuff done. And now here was the idea of compulsory idleness.
So, for a while, as the hospitals struggled and the dying reached a crescendo, we stood wringing our hands and doing nothing. Then some people started baking banana bread and washing windows and decluttering their cupboards.
Others struggled to work from home on Zoom, to keep their jobs, marriages and relationships solid under the pressure of being in each other’s ear all day and having children at home doing their own school lessons on Zoom.
I got on with the day job through Zoom, plodded away on my thesis, held Zoom consultations with my doctoral supervisors and spent my down-time doing a lot of spring-cleaning and planting flowers. It was a weird time.
Nobody liked it but most of us got through it. Those who didn’t become deathly ill and tried to get on with everything as best they could came away the healthiest, psychologically anyway.
Now we’ve more or less left Covid behind. It’s rear-view mirror stuff. Problem is, though, is that “yerra, why bother?” mindset is still with us.
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