Unfortunately, I do not have data on the changes that the Covid-19 pandemic inflicted on the lives of Poles, but merely some information on the kinds of transformations that were experienced by certain categories of individuals living in our country   ^1  1   The text draws on the conclusions of a multi-stage project “Życie codzienne w czasach pandemii” [“Everyday life in the times of the pandemic”] that has been conducted since March 2020 until now by scholars associated with the Department of Social Practices Research and Theory at the Faculty of Sociology, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. So far, three reports from consecutive research phases were published. See: https://amu.edu.pl/wiadomosci/aktualnosci/ogolnouniwersyteckie/zycie-codzienne-w-czasach-pandemii.-raport-z-trzeciego-etapu-badan?fbclid=IwAR0-3BmKcMaxKLIFvoAL0rKRnNNnwlQtpFkNVzxVL0ScfAOhO2FYJraR2eI, accessed 16 March 2022. The survey can hardly be considered fully representative due to the specific nature of the sample group. Due to lockdown and the communication difficulties related to it, the links to questionnaires reached mostly (but not exclusively) representatives of metropolitan middle classes, and therefore, by necessity, it is primarily them who these considerations refer to.  ↩︎. Furthermore, the information does not concern all the spheres of life of these individuals, but again, only certain ones – namely their daily life, above all   ^2  2   While the project investigated a broad category of everyday life, the research did not cover other areas such as work, education, consciousness or political or civic attitudes.These questions did, of course, appear in the utterances of the respondents, but were not subject to analysis.  ↩︎. By necessity, the following remarks on the changes brought about by the current crisis in the everyday existence of Poles are incomplete, and this is not only because of the limitations of this text.

On the differentiation of the experience of the pandemic as an emergency situation

Around two-thirds of the respondents partaking in the second phase of our study claimed that the COVID-19 pandemic caused some significant changes in their lives. The extraordinariness of an emergency situation – one that is surprising, suspending the rules and the obviousness of the everyday – provokes a misleading conviction that individual cases became the same, equal. However, although we may all have ended up in the same situation due to the pandemic, we are not experiencing it in the same way – we are not in the same position.

For some, the pandemic did not bring anything particularly extraordinary because, while functioning on the margins of the society, in extreme poverty, they experienced exactly the same things as usual: anxiety, uncertainty, a feeling of lack of support from the state, lack of access to public health services or decent housing conditions, and eventually a lack of hope. Paradoxically, their lives did not actually change. For another group of individuals, however, the pandemic brought about an array of annoyances related to everyday functioning: a dysregulation of domestic time and space, a lack of access to certain consumer goods, a separation from friends and family members, information overload, etc. What the pandemic did not take from them is their livelihoods, the basics of their existence. For others, the pandemic meant an intensification of professional duties that was hard to withstand, both physically and mentally. This included a need to adapt to new working conditions affected by the constant hazard of contagion, but also the stigma of being untouchable: doctors, nurses or couriers felt that when interacting with their neighbours.

These instances could be multiplied, but they serve to indicate that the pandemic does not mean the end of the world for everyone. For those who did experience a sudden collapse of their reality, this end manifested itself in myriad ways. Our doubts regarding whether the pandemic has brought about the end of the world as we know it are also backed by the fact that it did not undermine the central role of profit that motivates people to do business; it did not eliminate social inequalities, and it did not lead to a situation where the most fundamental social institutions around which Western societies are organised have ceased to exist. We did not stop loving or hating, helping or competing with others because of it.

I write all this not to prove that the pandemic is a trivial event, or to undermine the dramatism behind it. I do not intend to take away the meaning of death it brought about. Rather, I am determined to underline that it has had very diverse consequences for specific social categories and that it does not question the foundations of contemporary reality. As a result, only some worlds collapsed, but not the entire world in general.

Immobilisation and its consequences

The basic form of tackling the pandemic was to limit what has been the essence of our times: our mobility. The spread of the virus was to be prevented by curbing the circulation of people and goods, isolating individuals, nations and continents, halting exchange and interrupting supply chains, along with preventing individuals from contacting each other, both on a local and global scale. These mobility restrictions bore mixed consequences.

First, what our respondents pointed out is that these restrictions resulted in a feeling of reality being shrunk. Their world became more compact, and the world outside – pocket-sized, framed within the rectangular screen of a computer device linked to the web. Especially during the first months of the pandemic, individuals were cut off from their hitherto lavish social lives and the diverse spaces it took place in. Not only did they stop going to work (although they still performed it remotely), but also the whole infrastructure of going out, which has flourished in Polish cities over the last decade – parks and riverbanks, clubs and cafes, bars, pubs and galleries, socialised public spaces etc. – became inaccessible. The analysis of photographs sent by the respondents captured a certain astonishment: one that resulted from an erasing of everything that the respondents identified with the city, i.e. bustle and noise, movement and crowds, out from the metropolitan landscape. Our respondents were eager to photograph empty streets and railway stations, deserted shopping malls, closed restaurants, empty cinemas and theatres. Their attention seemed to have been captured by this non-modernity, by a city deprived of the attributes that connote modern, urban life and all that it represents for the middle classes: the dynamism, multiplicity of cultural events, optionality, competing for attention, being in focus, vital streams of information and the need to be up to date. However, the unavailability of urbanity did not make the needs it had awakened disappear. As a result, the activities hitherto dispersed and performed outside of the home have now been radically compressed into a relatively small space   ^3  3   According to the data of Statistics Poland [GUS] from 2018, the average surface area of a flat per person in Poland is just over 28 sq. m, but if we take into account the increasing number of single-person households, it must turn out that the number of square metres per person in multiple-person households is much smaller than average. In comments to the photographs shared with us depicting everyday life in the pandemic, the respondents stated: “Attached are some photos depicting how my life changed during the coronavirus. In the picture, you can see my workplace behind a wardrobe and the workplace of my husband in the kitchenette – this is not a proper kitchen, as we are living in a studio flat. We’re quite cramped, but we have never spent so much time together before, which is nice.” (res. 034a). Or: “Together with my husband, we work from home. We rent a room in a flat with other roommates, so now our entire life is squeezed into 25 sq. m. It is our bedroom, our living room, a marketing director’s office, an insurance agent’s office, a gym, and a classroom. I am constantly on the phone and having video calls – my husband jokes that he knows about every issue from my workplace.”  ↩︎.  The space also changed its functions   ^4  4   For instance: “The balcony: the photo shows how the balcony was rearranged into a tiny dining area, to compensate for the habit of eating out with my husband” (res. 733). Or: “The first day of spring. I don’t have a balcony, so I ate breakfast on the windowsill. What I missed the most was the walks and greeting dogs I used to encounter. From my window, I can see my neighbour walking a dog I know.” (res. 667); or: Image 2 “There is no corner in the entire house where I could conduct a work meeting in relative silence. The best place for that is the car. But the car is also our pantry, so I get unexpected visitors here as well” (res. 488).  ↩︎, with people seeking out substitutes for their activities   ^5  5   One of the respondents writes in a comment to the photo she sent: “The image of the balcony – I cultivate a small garden out of my longing for space, but also to have something I can care about, control, and to observe changes in time” [190a].  ↩︎. The space was also extensively shared with others, and so social relations became condensed. On the one hand, this resulted in a rediscovery of the joy of reconnection (cooking and having meals together, watching TV, playing board games, etc.) but, on the other hand – in increased negative feelings, a need for isolation and relationships breaking up   ^6  6   We write about these positive and negative emotions accompanying the pandemic in: M. Krajewski, M. Kubacka, Pandemiczne emocje i radzenie sobie z nimi [Pandemic emotions and tackling them], [in:] R. Drozdowski, M. Frąckowiak, M. Krajewski, M. Kubacka, P. Luczys, A. Modrzyk, Ł. Rogowski, P. Rura, A. Stamm, K. Sztop-Rutkowska, Życie codzienne w czasach pandemii. Raport z trzeciego etapu badań [Everyday life in the times of the pandemic. Report on the third phase of study], Poznan 2021, p. 58–76, https://issuu.com/wydzialsocjologiiuam/docs/_raport_ycie_codzienne_3, accessed: 16 March 2022.  ↩︎. Such a compressed everyday reality turned out to be a challenge, especially for people with young children, because the pandemic ceded most of the obligations, hitherto shared with schools and kindergartens, onto the parents, as well as creating severe logistical challenges in terms of household organisation. The home became not only a bedroom and a place for recharging batteries over the weekend, but also an office space, a classroom, a football pitch, a cinema and a playground. An intense kind of bordering   ^7  7   This issue is tackled by Maciej Frąckowiak and Piotr Luczys in the aforementioned report. See Rozregulowanie czasowo-przestrzenne, p. 128–144.  ↩︎ and the delineation of new frontiers in time and space for every activity; a consent to mix various activities within the limits of the same space; creating entry barriers; the intense use of various distractors (mostly media-based) to engage the child and allow time for work and enough silence to conduct an online meeting – these were just a few of the adaptation strategies that we came up with in the face of the new reality inflicted by lockdown. They were accompanied by a sense of chaos and disorder, and a lack of control over reality.

Second: immobility enforces a concentration on what comes closest. This is enhanced by the anxiety and fear that followed, especially at the beginning of the pandemic   ^8  8   The five most commonly unlearned emotions that we defined during the second phase of our research thanks to the analysis of responses to the question about three words that best characterise their feelings related to the pandemic are: anger (fury, madness, etc.) – indicated by 25.9% of the respondents; a sense of restriction (isolation, enclosure, hygiene, lack of contacts, etc.) – 30.7% of the respondents; helplessness (impotence, powerlessness, hopelessness, lack of agency, etc.) – 30.9% of the respondents; uncertainty (the unknown, lack of clarity, non-transparency, anxiety, etc.) – 41.5% of the respondents; anxiety (concern, fear, etc.) – 50.6% of the project participants.  ↩︎. This is hardly surprising, of course. However, what was more surprising in this context was that there were, in fact, things being done for others – with touching instances that emerged in the first weeks of the pandemic. On the other hand, this kind of “introversion” generated the risk of closing ourselves away in small, self-defensive communities that compete for limited resources, are unable to show solidarity and which cultivate a peculiar, if not radical, form of “ourness”, concentrating only on the self, treating others as dangerous strangers, and showing a lack of interest for anything that happens outside. Such an attitude was obviously already present before the pandemic – it manifested itself through xenophobia, racism, and radical nationalism. It was intensified by the closure of the borders and our enclosure in family-based communities, but also by defining other people as a potential threat, as rivals in the fight for essential resources. Therefore, the pandemic has posed a threat of a return to a pre-modern, tribal world, a world in which people are deprived of contact with those who are different from them. A lack of such an experience seems dangerous for democracy, which, in its essence, proposes ways to arrange our lives together, in the neighbourhood, right next to each other, despite all the differences that divide us.

The third, definitely positive effect of mobility restrictions is that many of us have finally been convinced that we can function fairly normally without consuming as many resources as before the pandemic, intensely using the global flow of goods, services and information; without travelling as compulsively as before the crisis that we are currently experiencing hit us. To paraphrase all that – perhaps the pandemic did not reduce consumerism and resulted only in a temporary reduction in the scale of our spatial mobility, but it undoubtedly caused that, somewhat forcedly, we started to notice and appreciate what is close by, right outside the window, locally. Perhaps this demystification of activities, things and forms of mobility that have turned out not to be vital to lead a normal life is one of the most important consequences of the current crisis. I am aware that, due to a verification of the hierarchy and structure of our needs, the pandemic has caused the economy to slow down, delaying deliveries, breaking supply chains, and resulting in budget cuts and inflation, eventually disturbing the material foundations of our existence. But on the other hand, perhaps this will become an impulse to create new models of doing business that would be more local and eco-friendly, making use of what is available, and requiring less complicated and energy-consuming supply chains and forms of cooperation.

The curious adventures of the overactive

As we have repeatedly tried to demonstrate in our reports, the pandemic – like other crises, in fact – has led many people to question the belief that they are capable, that they can control reality, and therefore, in principle, that they are subjects. For the people we focused on in our research – well-educated and relatively affluent inhabitants of large cities who lead a fairly stable life – this was especially hard to acknowledge. The capital they took for granted as a tool to control their reality, i.e. money and education, turned out to be unreliable: it did not protect the individual from fear and uncertainty. What is more, some of these people, especially those identified as belonging to the intelligentsia or the creative class, were even more affected by this state. This is because of the specific ethos that defines these categories and coincides with the belief that lies at the very core of modernity and capitalism: that an individual should be useful, productive, and, thanks to his/her effort, persistence and entrepreneurship, that the individual can become whomever they want. If we add to that a strongly internalised – by a part of this social category – obligation not to waste time, to set an example with one’s own behaviour and to perpetuate, by one’s own practice, the vital values that are constitutive for the community, we receive, in effect, a formula for extreme overactivity, which we observed during the pandemic. Baking bread and cakes, experimenting in the kitchen, making preserves and marinades, smoothies and cordials, reconditioning and renovating furniture and interiors, taking up abandoned arts and crafts, drawing and painting, cultivating a garden or growing flowers on a balcony, doing intense physical exercise, reading, journaling, doing visual documentation of the pandemic, sewing masks and other garments, learning new languages or learning to play an instrument – we dubbed all these activities “rituals of empowerment”. Most of those activities were deprived of basic instrumental goals, although they brought, of course, very specific, tangible effects (which is of vital importance here). The aim was not only to have something to do with one’s hands and mind and to relieve oneself from anxiety and concern about the future, even for a short while; it was also about proving oneself in control of reality – even if it only concerned a small, marginalised fragment of it. The feeling of causality, the tangibility of the effects and the specific materiality being transformed by oneself turned out to be helpful in reclaiming the belief in one’s own subjecthood, so heavily undermined by the pandemic. This was not enough, however, because these little victories were then announced to the world – to prove that we are not wasting time, that we occupy ourselves with something meaningful, and that we make use of the pause inflicted on the world by doing new things and gaining new, previously unachieved skills. Such a pedagogy of activism, which is in line with the social categories I am interested in here, helped sustain the identity of those who, according to their ethos, should set an example and be a role model to others. What is more, this overactivity has also resulted in overcoming a “deep deskillisation” that was forced upon us in recent years by the market offering things we could previously do ourselves in the form of a product or a service. So, one effect of the pandemic was not only to close us up in remoteness, in a mediated world dominated by the sense of sight, but it also led us to re-evaluate and appreciate everything that is tangible, tactile, and manipulable; to rediscover the extraordinary potential dormant in our own hands. The paradox of this situation was that the ideology of activism and productivity that is functional for capitalism but detrimental to the environment and the individual him/herself was simultaneously perpetuated. Therefore, at the very heart of the discussions about the need to decelerate, descale, about de- and postgrowth   ^9  9   See: J. Hickel, Less is more. How degrowth will save the world, Windmill Books, London 2020; T. Jackson, Dobrobyt bez wzrostu: ekonomia dla planety o ograniczonych możliwościach, translated and worked on by M. Polakowski, Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, Torun 2015 [T. Jackson, Prosperity without growth: Economics for a Finite Planet, Earthscan, 2009]; V. Liegey, A. Nelson, Exploring degrowth. A critical guide, Pluto Press, London 2020; Dewzrost: słownik nowej ery, eds. G. D’Alisa, F. Demaria, G. Kallis, transl. Ł. Lange, LangeL – Łucja Lange, Łódź 2020 [Degrowth: a vocabulary for a new era, eds. G. D’Alisa, F. Demaria, G. Kallis, Routledge, London, New York 2014] and many more.  ↩︎, one paradoxically celebrated this subject that is otherwise intensely criticised as one of the main sources of issues we are currently tackling as a species. Thus, it turns out that some crisis situations – those that are more specific and tangible and affect us directly with real consequences – have suspended the debate on those situations that are more abstract, distant in time and dispersed. Of course, this couldn’t be any different because curbing a direct threat not only sustains the hope that the same can be done with this other, more distant situation, but also makes the solution more plausible.

Porous houses

The lockdown that cut us off from the external world and enclosed the majority of us in the walls of our own houses and flats had yet another twisted result: it turned our homes into public places. Isolated like never before, private spaces suddenly became more accessible to others. Obviously, this happened because our work and education went online – as happened to most of our respondents. This led to the creation of various coping strategies that aimed to reduce the kind of transparency that emerged. The most common were the attempts at framing the reality, and an intense scenography work, with improvised constructions made from what was available at hand. Individuals could thus expose themselves to the gaze of others in a way that would be compatible with their vision of how they would like to be seen. This fast-track course on visual literacy, whose effects were immediately verified by the gaze of others, reminded us how much our everyday life is staged, how important the right to privacy is to us, and how fragile the reputation and the image we have created over the years is. The oppressiveness of this situation is hard to overlook; it has resulted in a rise of a quasi-presence of some individuals who would share only the sound but not the image of themselves, as seen from the perspective of their desktop computer. We have accepted the surrogacy of interactions and of them being cut down to the necessary minimum. Although our respondents did send us images of online parties and family celebrations, they seemed to treat the everydayness mediated by computer screens as a necessary evil.

The porosity of our homes has had a totally different side, too. The pandemic has also brought a previously unavailable multiplicity and variety of media experiences. Most of the cultural institutions and artists, as well as sports, social and educational organisations transitioned to organising online events. It is thanks to the pandemic that the term “a window onto the world” related to a screen has finally reached its full meaning. The situation provided an unprecedented opportunity to participate in the global stream of transmissions and events that were previously limited by physical inaccessibility or price. On the other hand, however, it also increased the penetration of domestic environment by marketing and promotional activities that socialise us to consumer culture. Here, too, the pandemic bore mixedconsequences: on the one hand, it freed us from the limitations of locality and expanded the scope of our experiences, but, on the other hand, it exposed us to market-driven indoctrination on a much larger scale than before.

A concise conclusion

The pandemic is a situation that has implemented a sort of a break in our everyday life, suspending many of the rules that had previously organised it, along with our routines and habits. It has turned out, however, that the respondents we surveyed and who represented certain social categories experienced it not only as something that undermined the material basis of their existence, but also as an unexpected event that cancelled the capital (education or money) that hitherto reassured them of their control over reality and ascertained that they are subjects, and not objects. This experience bore, as I tried to present above, very mixed consequences, challenging the belief that crises always prove to be a game changer, radically transforming the world and the ways we adapt to it. This, in turn, shows the strength of the habitus created by the capitalist reality: the pandemic has not really cured us of our compulsions, our overactivities, and our identification of a “good life” as one where a lot happens. Rather, it necessitated new forms of implementing this programme. The most promising option here seems to be the return of the haptic, an intense exploration of matter, be it soil, sourdough, plants or meat, of objects restored and mended, an experience that becomes an integral element of the rituals of empowerment. One can also define it as yet another form created by the market that responds to the desire for the new, providing a remedy to the consumerist boredom of people who have already experienced it all. One can also treat it as an introduction to a reconstruction of our relationship with the world, fighting the alienation that comes when the world is constantly being offered to us as a product or a service.

Bibliography:

Dewzrost: słownik nowej ery, red. G. D’Alisa, F. Demaria, G. Kallis, przeł. przeł. Ł. Lange, LangeL – Łucja Lange, Łódź 2020 [English edition: Degrowth: a vocabulary for a new era, eds. G. D’Alisa, F. Demaria, G. Kallis, Routledge, London, New York 2014].

Hickel J., Less is more. How degrowth will save the world, Windmill Books, London 2020.

Jackson T., Dobrobyt bez wzrostu: ekonomia dla planety o ograniczonych możliwościach, translated and worked on by M. Polakowski, Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Mikołaja Kopernika, Toruń 2015. [English edition: T. Jackson, Prosperity without growth: Economics for a Finite Planet, Earthscan, 2009].

Krajewski M., Kubacka M., Pandemiczne emocje i radzenie sobie z nimi [Pandemic emotions and tackling them], [in:] R. Drozdowski, M. Frąckowiak, M. Krajewski, M. Kubacka, P. Luczys, A. Modrzyk, Ł. Rogowski, P. Rura, A. Stamm, K. Sztop-Rutkowska, Życie codzienne w czasach pandemii. Raport z trzeciego etapu badań [Everyday life in the times of the pandemic. Report on the third phase of study], Poznan 2021, https://issuu.com/wydzialsocjologiiuam/docs/_raport_ycie_codzienne_3, access: 16 March 2022.

Idem, Życie codzienne w czasach pandemii. Raport z trzeciego etapu badań,https://amu.edu.pl/wiadomosci/aktualnosci/ogolnouniwersyteckie/zycie-codzienne-w-czasach-pandemii.-raport-z-trzeciego-etapu-badan?fbclid=IwAR0-3BmKcMaxKLIFvoAL0rKRnNNnwlQtpFkNVzxVL0ScfAOhO2FYJraR2eI, accessed 16 March 2022.

Liegey V., Nelson A., Exploring degrowth. A critical guide, Pluto Press, London 2020.