Happy New Year: The Worst Is Yet to Come

The turn of a year is usually a time for optimism, for chucking out the carcass of a bad year and looking forward to a bright new start, or celebrating a good year and anticipating one that’s even better. But the closer 2021 comes, the more intense becomes that sense of impending doom that’s been such a feature of 2020.

Which isn’t to say my 2020 has been bad, in the grand scheme of 2020. I still have (some) work. I’m in Bali, where there are (currently) a lot of freedoms. I’ve not lost any loved ones, contracted long Covid (or, indeed, any form of Covid) or been consigned to solo lockdown. The boy had a reasonably normal start to university — not imprisoned in halls of residence or confined to study from home. Hell, I even went to Italy.

But, on a personal note, it’s hard to navigate the major life change that is an only child flying the nest while Covid simultaneously limits options and creates wild uncertainty. And on an objective note, mutant Covid (both the British and the South African variants) has me worried. The fact that it made its debut just as vaccinations started to roll out and light appeared at the end of a tunnel feels like a very low blow. Seeing more and more countries slam the door shut on visitors from the UK makes me feel further and further from my family.

There’s an intensity of experience when a lockdown eases that I’ll continue to treasure — the sensory blast of a restaurant meal, the intense immersion of a movie on the big screen

There have, of course, been bonuses to this absolute binfire of a year. Discovering the quiet pleasures of walking, cooking, baking. Practising mindfulness, acceptance, yoga, meditation. Time to read and write — although, with all the doomscrolling, I find my concentration’s shot. Making time for family, albeit often remotely. The US election, and with it some faint hope of action on the climate.

There’s an intensity of experience when a lockdown eases that I’ll continue to treasure — the sensory blast of a restaurant meal, the intense immersion of a movie on the big screen, the all-round wonderment of wandering a beautiful city such as Rome.

But coming into the New Year, I feel in limbo, no longer really an agent of my own destiny, no clear goal or destination, with all the plans I’d made for this life stage unmade and, as yet, nothing obvious to replace them. It’s an almost oxymoronic feeling: simultaneously trapped and unsure.

And I’m terrified by the state of the plague: British hospitals already maxing out their ICU capacity with a month to go before we see the impact of the Christmas mingling, California rationing care, even countries that had controlled the epidemic starting to lose their grip. It’s likely we haven’t seen the last of the mutations and it’s still unclear how long vaccine immunity will last.

The virus was lab-created by Bill Gates to force us all to take a fake vaccine which will both include tracking microchips and render the populace sterile

Conspiracy theories have always flourished at times of intense social change and, even prior to the pandemic, we were living in fast-moving times, as social media replaced old media as the primary news source. But it’s frightening to see how far the conspiracy theories around the pandemic have spread.

Some versions are mild: there is a medical conspiracy to exaggerate the number of cases to raise money somehow or there is a political conspiracy to exaggerate the number of cases to enhance social control. People aren’t really dying of Covid, but other conditions, or those who are dying lived lives that were not worth saving anyway. Other versions are full-blown batshit: the virus was lab-created by Bill Gates to force us all to take a fake vaccine which will both include tracking microchips and render the populace sterile.

But they’re all quite frightening. Not, perhaps, as frightening as Qanon, where a cabal of high-profile paedophiles, including Tom Hanks of all people, are sacrificing children to feast on a substance produced in their blood. But frightening because the old world where most agreed on the basics has been replaced by a world where people fight from their siloes — and, as the economic pain continues to bite, this will only get worse.

The climate crisis, from the melting Arctic to burning Australia, is becoming harder and harder to ignore

Ah, yes, the economy… I’m worried for my son, who is, like all the Covid generation, going to be educationally disadvantaged compared to those who came immediately before and immediately afterwards, and is likely to graduate college into one of the worst economies the world has ever known. I’m worried for myself, having failed to make provision during the good times.

And I’m worried for the world. We haven’t had a banking crisis yet in this catastrophe, but one can’t be far off. People not only on Bali but in the wealthy UK are turning to food banks and to charity. It can’t be long, surely, before desperation fuels crime and riots?

Meanwhile, the climate crisis, from the melting Arctic to burning Australia, is becoming harder and harder to ignore. It already looks as though expectations of temperature rise and sea level rise may have been optimistic, rather than the reverse. Mitigation is going to reshape the world in unknown ways, but I’m fairly confident a nomadic life, like the one I lived for four whole years, is likely to be impossible.

One broadly optimistic analysis predicts that life won’t really pick up until 2024. I can only hope he’s right.