We feel it, we see it, we sense it, change. We are changing already after just weeks of social distancing and isolation, and when those weeks stretch to months the change will set.
The first day of social freedom may prove me wrong. If there is an outpouring of celebrating, gleeful people onto the streets and into the pubs and clubs and restaurants and cinemas and shopping centres I will be wrong, and we will be very likely reverting to the life that was by some measures too good.
I believe we will, instead, emerge on the other side of COVID-19 with markedly different fears, attitudes and values, and that for many even the structures that shape our daily life will be different. But as you know, I'm often wrong.
No longer, for example, will we see the rest of the world as another world. You won't regard the next news report of an Ebola outbreak somewhere in Africa with quite the same sense of detachment and personal safety. Maybe that's a good thing, for Africans, and maybe it's not. Will we be more likely to help or will we reinforce the wall between Australia and Africa?
Regardless, the world will be smaller. And more crowded.
Only time will tell if we'll resume all the patterns of our life ...
For at least a decade you and I will be frugal, or frugalish, or less wasteful, or more considered in our consumption. Just as the Great Depression of 1929 spawned a frugality that survived at least a couple of generations, COVID-19 will create a lingering uncertainty about the supply of food and necessities and the security of our affluence. Banks of bare supermarket shelves have been a shock for all of us.
And even the irrational has come to be rational. Panic buying of toilet paper was irrational but self-justifying, in that now buying as much toilet paper as possible is rational. The starter's gun for the next toilet paper race will have a hair trigger.
Panic buying of groceries will be a feature of every scare for the next few decades.
We will seek on the other side of COVID-19 to be more self reliant, and that has started with gusto. When I went to order winter vegetable seeds this week, I found that one of my two regular online suppliers is accepting no new orders and the other is supplying only existing customers.
And there's been a mad rush on chooks. But be patient, there'll be a glut of slightly used chooks when we're allowed out.
The flour shelves are usually bare now, too, and rather than panic buying it seems that the reason is a cooking frenzy. My wife and her friends and women I know are cooking madly, and I wonder if it is a response to anxiety. As I write this my wife is busy making sourdough bread for the first time in her life, and for the second time in a few days she's sending me out to search for flour for her and for a madly cooking quarantined friend.
Of course only time will tell if we'll resume all the patterns of our life, but among the least likely will have to be the annual cruise. Perhaps, too, ocean liners based in the northern hemisphere will be wary about venturing to Australia, given our hostility when the chips were down. There will be, too, a certain nervousness about overseas travel, not so much caused by fear of infection as by fear of not being able to return fast enough to Australia, and not without some justification. I expect that the borders of Australia and many other nations will clang shut at the first reports of a new virus anywhere in the world. New Zealand may be the new OS, and Australia's domestic tourism industry will hit new highs.
Will the business of pubs, clubs, bars and restaurants be restored within days of the mass vaccination? We've seen the wonderful photos of people pouring onto the streets at the end of World War II, and the hospitality industry will be hoping for the same response on the day we are released. But, I suspect, many people will have reset their habits, and it will be a national blessing if prime among those are poker machine losers.
Unfortunately, the COVID-19 isolation will hasten the end for retailers struggling against the tide of online shopping, and I believe that among them will be the big department stores. I see it as unfortunate, by the way, because it will be a painful end for a great many people. More than ever we are buying online, and buying everything, and that won't stop. If there is a silver lining, it is that a much higher proportion than usual of the online shopping is with online retailers in Australia, because of the shortage of international air freight.
And the way so many Australians work will change. Working from home is working so well for many who've been forced to do so in recent weeks that they will want to continue doing so, and their employers will be alive right now to the benefit of that.
That benefit is a huge saving in office and property cost. Many businesses will reduce the size and cost of their workplace real estate, and some will have no bricks and mortar at all, instead hiring a catered room for an occasional eyeballing.
The new world is, much more suddenly than anyone could have predicted, online. From doctor consultations to university lectures and tutorials, and maybe soon online school days will be an option.
This national stay-at-home isolation, with police fining someone for sitting on a public bench eating a kebab because he didn't have a good reason to be sitting on a bench eating a kebab, may become as great a change to our daily lives as that of the two world wars and the Great Depression.
But at this early stage only one thing is certain: we will never again see just toilet paper when we see toilet paper.
jeffcorb@gmail.com
