There are formative parts of our lives, and one of mine might have created a negative worldview.
I entered what I would call true adulthood in 2019. That’s when I finished post secondary education and began my career. I moved across the country by myself for the job, the timing of that would end up not being ideal but it wasn’t predictable. I got one year into that new part of my life, then the world ended (temporarily).
My COVID experience is best summed up as being fine. I was fine. Super fine. Uncertainty messes with your brain, there was a long period where I didn’t know if I was going to be fine. Some people were getting sick, some people weren’t surviving getting sick, my company was doing layoffs like most businesses, and I was isolated. Nova Scotia locked down hard to minimize damage so there was no going home for awhile, not unless I was laid off and had to move back in with my parents. Alberta went the other way restriction wise and eventually became infested with anti-vaxxers.
Are you going to be alright?
It was a time to wait and see what happened, so it was the first time in my life I really started looking for music that I emotionally felt. I was more of a “switch between a couple radio stations” type of music listener before that. There is plenty of music I latched onto during COVID but to focus on one that happens to be a Nova Scotia band, I got pretty into Wintersleep’s 2016 album The Great Detachment.
Wintersleep’s The Great Detachment Cover.
My familiarity with Wintersleep before this had only been a couple of their hits, 2007s Weighty Ghost was the only one I knew I had heard before. Maybe The Great Detachment’s first track Amerika. Which is as good a place as any to start.
My freedom, I don’t want to die.
Amerika is a song of the 2016 moment made evident by the music video they released in April of that year. Uncertainty about Trump and what he meant for the USA was a huge part of the moment with the music video being much more explicit on that point than the song by itself. And by 2020 I felt that uncertainty everywhere, and Trump would keep offering it until Biden was elected in November 2020. And then offering it some more in January 2021, continuing to the time of writing in 2025
But it was Spirit that broke me.
I am a liar.
I spent a whole year telling everyone I was fine because other people clearly had it worse than me.
The question the song repeated over and over, “Are you gonna be alright?” That was a question I wanted to scream at myself to find an answer that I just couldn’t be confident in. I’m not sure I knew how to deal with being sad, I’m still not sure I do. I’m not sure if a lot of men do. Sad is an emotion we aren’t supposed to feel. But not feeling didn’t help so I wanted to feel it through other mediums. Music, games, books, the stuff a good citizen was supposed to do at the time.
At the time I felt devoid of any kind of purpose. The momentum of a routine and a paycheck was all that was keeping me going. And I was doing a job to do what? Get oil out of the ground? Forever? Until I retire and die? Having most of what made life fun stripped away made me hyper focused on what work was, what the company was doing, what most companies were doing. Work was a transaction that they might end on a whim, why should I feel good about doing my job? And government response was all over the place, a grand failure to coordinate. I was getting more and more bitter.
How have I become a man I despise.
That was a tiny bit of clarity to hold onto. No matter what, I couldn’t become someone I hated. I wasn’t happy, but I had to stay me. So I would jam out to the Great Detachment album while doing work for quite a while. For that point of my life, four years after it released, it helped.
That bitter cynicism has yet to leave. I think our systems taking a dive right when I became an adult solidified that into something that is hard to undo without a major change, in my life, or the world. I imagine people trying to enter the job market during the great recession felt, and maybe still feel, similarly. There will be situations like these again, a lot are hard to predict. But we should try to get better at dealing with the human cost, if only for collective trust.
Some trust in our systems is good, falling trust seems to make a lot of people think a serial liar can be trusted because he’s an outsider. But trust is earned, we can’t give it back for free.
NS Politics 