It’s easy and comforting – when you can afford it – to forget what’s going on outside of the wall of your house these days. Even more so in my neighbourhood in Brussels, where the atmosphere in the streets, unlike – as far as I have heard – in Italy, is not heavy. The world that I see when I go outside for groceries or a short walk seems like it got stuck inside an eternal sunny Sunday morning, which, as a friend commented, “it’s not such a bad place to live in”.
Until I watch a heavy-but-unfortunately-extremely-realistic (and highly recommended) movie such as The Hunt, or read an article about workers trying to flee cities to avoid the pandemic in India, that brings me back to the world as it is.
Otherwise, my life at the moment is a slower-paced and quieter version of normal life. Some aspects of it have actually improved. My attempt to avoid buying unnecessary stuff got much easier. I am less exhausted by work. I am dedicating quality time to writing. Breaks during working hours are spent in a different way; in the morning for instance when I take a break from work I sit in a sunny corner of the house and read a book. I have so much mental energy that I manage to read and do sport every day after work, whereas in normal times I only managed to watch a TV show. The disappearance of the source of FOMO – the infamous fear of missing out, that used to torment millennials like me, definitely helps to deal with the absence of a proper social life (besides quite rewarding video calls).
We are living a historical moment, that my grandchildren will study in school. I will tell them that I was born in 1984, during a period of peace and prosperity in Europe and that these almost fairy-tale peace and prosperity started to gradually come to an end, that the enchantment was broken on 11 September 2001, then again in 2004 by the bomb in Madrid, and again in 2015, following the Paris and Brussels attacks. In that moment Western people of my generation learned what it means to be afraid to take the metro, to see soldiers in the streets. On 9/11 I was at the seaside with my mom. Back then I didn’t understand why she was so shocked and why she wanted to cut the holidays shorter and go back home. In my black and white vision of the world, typical of teenagers, it was just another episode of violence, like many others around the world, nothing less, nothing more. But for my mother, who was born in 1945 in the post-war parsimony, the world changed that day. Then I will tell them about the coronavirus pandemic we went through in 2020, that was the only real global event until then, not like World War I and II. Will see if I will tell them that the world changed that year. However, probably the main thing I will be able to tell them about my first-hand experience during this historical moment is that I was home watching movies, having Skype calls and baking cakes.
Blabbering of a millennial 