Legal historian and author Nate Holdren joins me to discuss broken sociality, political and social loneliness, and social murder and its depoliticization during the pandemic, as elucidated in his Peste Magazine essay Broken Sociality: Isolation in the Pseudo-Return to “Pre-Pandemic Normal”.

The pandemic emergency has been declared over, both here in the United States, and by the World Health Organization. That does not mean the pandemic is over, but it marks an official end to an emergency level institutional response to it. Any sort of practical and enforceable mitigatory practices to reduce the spread of the virus has been firmly relegated to the past. To add insult to injury, the trauma or discomforts incurred over the past three years are often blamed on these public health measures themselves by high-status conservative and liberal commentators and so-called experts alike. Nevermind the millions dead, the global vaccine apartheid, the tens of millions disabled and those that continue to become disabled, and what those facts mean. The virus’s plethora of variants will continue to infect and reinfect the global population into the foreseeable future—a slow burn with grim long-term consequences.

When I read Nate Holdren’s essay on broken sociality and political and social loneliness as the “urgency of normal” takes precedence in the US, it struck a chord within me. He provided a language to describe my feelings and experiences at this stage of the ongoing pandemic. 

For those of us still masking and avoiding the plague, still keeping up on covid research to the best of our ability, and still admonishing our peers to be mindful of how our behaviors and decisions impact all of us, especially for the most vulnerable, oftentimes a gulf can and does emerge and deepen between our relationships with others that disregard these considerations. When an intrinsically collective health crisis is minimized, and in many cases, outrightly denied by our peers, day-to-day life becomes a lonely affair.