The Year of Returning to Normal

A year ago, we were a out to enter into the Omicron wave, the wave to end all waves, where we hit a ridiculous million people a day case rate. A few people in the biology and epidimiology communities dared to mention at the time that maybe this, a super spreadable but almost assuredly weaker, version of the coronavirus, would be a blessing in disguise. I hate even typing that, because hundreds of thousands, if not millions, did still die, but from where we sat a year ago, despite vaccines (and boosters by then), staring down another winter of virus, to where we are today, as shocking. But more than that, it is warming, that 2022 despite starting a bit darkly, ending up being hte year that we all were able to return back to normal.

I'm writing this in Bar Hop Brewco, a place I went to last on March 11th, 2020, two days before I would take my final flight for 13 months, going there already knowing that this was the last moment before the Titanic would sink. The world was about to be radically changed in a generational-defining event.

32 months later, I'm only in Toronto because it was the right amount of cost to get here and back to get me just across the line for United 1K status for 2023, something that I earned in 2019 and was more than on my way to earning in 2020 when the pandemic struck. United rolled over everyone's status for 2021 but declined to do so for 2022 - a signal that things were "approaching" normal. For 2023, they decided to go back to pre-pandemic spending and flight requirements, giving the biggest sign yet that things are back to normal in that world. I probably won't make it back during 2023 for 2024, which is the primary driver for this trip.

Sitting here in Bar Hop Brewco, there's a weird sense of normalcy. I did this every couple weeks back in 2019 and early 2020. Same with flying into Pearson airport and making that walk to the rental counter. In a beautifully circular nature, it's fun that the place I'm going to where I've come to this realization a bit, is the same place I went to in my last pre-pandemic trip.

When I say normal, I mean that over the course of 2022 all the remaining holdouts from opening back up did so one by one. From Asia, which ironically opened up because of how bad things got locally - reaching the point that they realized you may as well let people in since we're more likely to give the virus to visitors than vice versa. As we saw in the past week, even China finally opened up and dropped entry quarantine requirements. We all have a vaccine card, but are slowly reaching the point where it is a meaningless bit of paper.

I did trips in 2021 - many of them (enough to get to United Platinum, at least). But all were in one way or the other impacted by Covid. From Barcelona of all places having a super hard 12:30am curfew, to India having an even harder 11:30pm one. To having to wear masks on a lot of the flights. From Rocky Mountain National Park instituting a reservation system. But that all changed in 2022. 

In 2022 I returned to the office, and to office events, getting to reconnect in a more frequent and meaningful way with a larger cohort of our ever expanding office for my company (which grew from probably 50 to 90 over the course of hte pandemic). In 2022 I returned to work trips and client site visits which were really fun until the first time I had to deal with a Newark Airport operational meltdown and a flight that landed local time in San Francisco at 1am. But in the end, 2022 was the year where we stopped caring about Covid.

Granted, many will say that is both foolish and a bit overstated. Covid is still a real fear. The potential of new bad variants is always around. I finally got the disease this February, and I've been convinced at various points that I've had it again. But the number of cases / hospitalizations / deaths is not a ticker on CNN. It is still being shown on nytimes.com, but you have to scroll down a decent amount. Part of this is us becoming desensitized, but more of it is that for the people that have taken their vaccinations, the disease just isn't all that dangerous anymore.

There is some beauty in the world kind of going through a bit of a reset from March'20 - Jan'22. But we've come out of it for the better. We've (and when I say "we", I largely mean "I") become a bit more caring, a bit more "in the moment" and little bit calmer. All the various "first" things that we did for the first time post pandemic working as little recurring gifts for an otherwise jaded world. Say the first full office party I went to in London, or our local Holiday party in New York. From that first client site visit, to the first time at our local Princeton bar when it went back to normal hours. Even the frist time that I had to wait in a bus in bumper to bumper traffic to get into NYC, it was a relief of "normalcy" striking again. 

This really was the year that everything came back, everything opened up. Unlike the 1920s after the end of the Spanish Flu pandemic, we didn't devolve into a bacchanalia. Also there was a lot of sadness in this year, from the Ukraine situation to rising tensions between China and Taiwan, to much else. Things aren't perfect, but things weren't really all that perfect before 2020 either. Things were just as they are - normal, and I'm so glad to be back there.