Rob Greenlee argues that pandemic-era fear has become embedded in parenting and culture. Parents remain hyper-vigilant about dangers, passing anxiety to their children, while many have shifted to home-centric lives through online shopping and streaming. This clashes with corporate pressure to return to physical offices.
Chapters
And people were fearful of what someone else could give them or share them. And they felt threatened by that. And our culture and our society and our institutions and, and everybody played right into that fear. And people have, I think, not ever gone back. To, to what it was before. And I think to some degree that was going on prior to the pandemic. I guess it's been, what, 4 years now? I think it's relaxed a little bit, but I do think that there's still a lot of people out there that will— I see driving down the roads that are wearing masks in their cars while they're driving around, or I still see people wearing these surgical masks even, even today. And I think it really gets back to there was this instilled fear, and then to layer it on top of it with, with the children too. They, you know, I think children are increasingly feeling fearful because parents are fearful of what the world, what the risks of the world might be, and that they have to protect their children and always be looking out for them all the time because there's a bad person right around the corner. And to some degree, that's been a verified experience for many people. And it's been talked about in the media and people are, are seeing it as something that is a real thing. You know, I, I just think that people are staying home a lot more now because frankly, there's a lot more things to do at home now. You can shop on Amazon, you can buy things online. You don't have to go out to the mall. You don't have to go out to the, like, a place to watch a movie or anything like that. You can get a big screen television in your house and watch all the movies that you might want to watch and watch YouTube and watch all of these things. So, and then people aren't going out to coffee shops, people aren't meeting people in real life very often. Now, granted, many corporations have pushed for bringing people back into the office again. So increasingly there are companies that are pressuring their employees to come back to the office.
