Lessons from 2020

I just finished Eric Klinenbrerg's book 2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed. It's an outstanding work of research, and it draws some interesting conclusions. Reading it can be daunting, as it brings back the trauma that many experienced during the pandemic, but it's useful and important for us to process what happened and think about how we can get ready, socially, for other crises around the corner. New York City serves as a useful microcosm of the social effects of the global pandemic. 

As a leadership coach with a focus on networking, I seek to help the individual to develop agency around relationships and create a a lively and active support community. In reading this book, a number of thoughts came to mind:

In the pandemic, leaders in the US lost an opportunity to unite people around a common vision necessary to meet the threat. Some of the NYC leaders profiled in the book were able to galvanize their communities, but more often in the world there was a sense of crisis that contributed to "anomie," or social disintegration as examined by French sociologist Émile Durkheim. 

"Social distancing" was a double-edged sward, and we should consider the trade-off in future social connections. While social distancing prevented some of the spread of the disease, it further isolated the population and may have gone too far. There's an emerging belief, too, that many schools remained closed longer than they needed to, and that isolation became worse.

During the pandemic, some engaged in "pruning" their networks. I've also heard the term "turtling," or consolidation of contact within one's own, narrower shell or network. We won't know the full impact of this phenomenon for some time. In one sense there's nothing wrong with focusing in on relationships that matter, but in another sense withdrawal to a smaller circle of contacts magnifies social disparities and interactions among larger groups. 

Finally, with the onset of climate and other crises, renewal of social capital requires what NBC News anchor Lester Holt points to at the end of each nightly news broadcast - the need to "take care of yourself and each other." In the pandemic we witnessed the crumbling of many of our social rituals and support systems. Each of us, as we go forth, must be in the business of reconstructing trust and establishing the renewed social capital we need to face the future.