I’ve been retired since 2011 so I can only understand the the working world’s experience during the worst and after the worst of the pandemic by talking to to friends and family members still in it. Helaine Olen’s piece in the WaPo largely matches what they said.
But what’s increasingly clear is that the March 2020 decision to partially close down the American economy shattered Americans’ dysfunctional, profoundly unequal relationship with work like nothing in decades. And even if there was great discomfort in a shutdown that severed almost every one of us from assumptions about how we earn a living, we also found an unexpected opportunity: to remake our relationship with the labor that fills our days.