There is no ‘getting back to normal’... the very concept of normal is being reimagined

Sign of the times: we’ve all got used to face masks

The pandemic has been too sustained, too global, too impactful for it not to have changed everyday life. More Australians died in each of the two world wars than in today’s pandemic, but back then everyday life was quite removed from the horrors unfolding elsewhere.

We, on the other hand, have lived with the pandemic, its threats and its protocols, every day for two years. As a consequence we have been reshaped by the experience. And we’re now living in different times; there is no “getting back to normal” because the very concept of normal is being reimagined.

One of the early victims of the pandemic was the use of cash. It was already in decline. I’m not sure buskers or charity collectors in their current form will survive Covid. The leather wallet is now simply a storage facility for credit cards, proof of vaccine and licences – though all these can be stored on a smartphone. Surely it’s only a matter of time before passports shift there too.

And while the use of cash crashed, the QR code – invented in the 1990s to track the progress of vehicles in car factories – became a fixture in our lives. It is now finding new applications, especially in hospitality: scan the code at your table, choose from the menu that appears on your smartphone and place your order. It’s not good news for service jobs, but I doubt that fancy-pants restaurants will relinquish the full waiter experience.

Same goes for booking cinema tickets, or medical appointments… few businesses now want customers to call a receptionist; they want you to engage digitally, seamlessly, efficiently. You want chat time? Fine, chat with your friends. This also means, of course, that the receptionist is likely to disappear.

The coffee catch-up has already morphed from an incidental experience – sure, see you in the food court coffee shop – to a negotiated arrangement calibrated to an equidistant point between the work-from-home bases of the parlaying parties. The lifeblood of the café is as a consequence thinned sufficiently for it to lose pre-eminence as a place of modern social intercourse.

And then there’s the stark realisation that we’re living in a non-benign world as Australia’s adversaries reveal themselves. This is a shock to us; we thought we were winning them over to our way of thinking. All of a sudden the heavy-duty drivers of economic prosperity morph to manufacturing, defence, agriculture, pharma and technical training. This is a shift from the pre-Covid world’s emphasis on hospitality and lifestyle ventures.

I suspect the pandemic plus the troubles in Europe are having an impact on the thinking of Middle Australia. Everyday life has been disrupted by infection, by supply chain stoppages, by nervous chatter about nuclear war. This triggers thinking about health, financial (and familial) security, about the need for risk management. Maybe it widens the market for spirituality, too.

In the decades leading up to the pandemic Australian prosperity and belief in the surety of the global order encouraged just-in-time thinking in terms of supply chains and access to global labour markets. We created a culture of unfettered consumerism based on an assumed right (and capacity) to come and go as we pleased. But the pandemic has changed this way of thinking entirely.

Whatever the way ahead, the most valuable asset in times of great disruption is the ability to remain upbeat and positive. Finding solutions not only ensures survival, it inspires and encourages others.