The Long Overdue Death

I’m far from the only person saying things like this, but for what it’s worth, here’s my version.

Years or perhaps decades from now we may look back favourably on the coronavirus as a saviour of sorts — as the irresistible force that faced off against something far more lethal than itself, pinned that adversary to the ground, and delivered the liberating deathblow.

To wit, with luck, the virus may become seen as the sudden intervention that we economic addicts needed to put our wheezing and decrepit crapshoot out of its misery. I’m talking of course about the long overdue death of the American dream.

Certainly the groundwork has been laid: much of the dazzling and habit-inducing economy lies in ruin. The crucial decisions are coming, however. The ones where we decide whether to simply rebuild the old infrastructure or scrap that deeply flawed blueprint and build something new.

Will we hook ourselves back up to the slow-dripping machine or at last see it for what it is?

Long before the virus arrived, the so-called American dream and its variants had been reduced to little more than a farcical fantasy, rewarding only in the way that heroin is rewarding for a junkie. For decades, our society has been cultivating droves of highly educated, hard-working, and rules-obeying individuals desperately seeking to feel valued, scrabbling for purchase on shrinking platforms in a rigged system where the prevalence of payoffs decreases in inverse proportion to the rising hazards required by the chase.

Describing this hollow competition as a rat race had long ago become far too complimentary. There were so many clamouring and over-qualified rats in the field that winning on merit became truly impossible. Still, what choice was there? Those who declined to compete were stigmatized as freaks, communists, pariahs, losers, and terrorists. The system was all. The system held dominion so complete that it hardly needed to mask its flaws. The numbers were there for all to see. You couldn’t win. You wouldn’t win. And still you sat there and plugged your nickels into the slots and watched with flickering hope that your numbers would come in.

You perked up, however, because those who won, won REALLY big. Gates and Zuckerberg and Bezos were the one-in-a-billion “visionaries” who scored huge and made you think that maybe-just-maybe you could, too. The big winners and their Johnny-on-the-spot pathways to success were romanticized to the hilt and lo and behold we had our aspirational heroes who proved that the system worked. Deep down we knew it was fool’s gold and a fool’s game but by then it was too late; it had its grip on us.

But has that grip at last been torn away? Have enough of us been locked down and cut off from the slow-dripping machine that we might be forced to go cold turkey and emerge from beneath the delusion of economic addiction?

I’m 53 years old. My parents, both of whom immigrated to Canada before the age of 20, were part of the last generation for whom the Canadian cornucopia was not a mirage. For them, you could work hard, be smart, steer straight, and expect your lot to improve accordingly. Neither of them made a killing in the world of work, yet they could easily afford a house, an in-ground pool, two cars, vacations, and the fiscal burden of sending two kids to university.

Since then, the costs of homeownership and higher education (to choose merely two metrics) have skyrocketed with stunning impunity. A great many of us have somehow clung to the rocket’s vapor trail and earned the achievements anyway, largely by tolerating levels of entrapping personal debt that were unthinkable to earlier generations. For the young people now maturing, the dream has become so distant that the machine and its diluted dopamine hits can hardly even entice them.

But still the machine had not died.

Let’s hope that the virus will be the thing to kill it.

We need no further evidence that the financial chase and the required level of addiction are not worthwhile or fulfilling or anything other than an empty ruse that decades ago lost virtually all of its lustre. The only glitter that remains now is the shit that you can buy in plastic packages at the dollar store.

It sounds like a metaphor but it’s actually the literal truth: We are status addicts and the virus has given us a chance to do rehab. Perhaps the curve that we really need to flatten is the one that charts our own impulsive appetites. And perhaps the virus will do us a great service and flatten it on our behalf.