Whose Feelings Count Most in a Pandemic?

If an alien or visitor happened to take a gander at lifestyle journalism over the past six months, they might assume that even though a lot of people are losing their jobs, waiting endlessly for unemployment, or even being evicted, the majority of the country has passed the pandemic baking bread, moving out of cities, and gazing out the window wondering if every day is Wednesday. For every story about the truly devastating impact the pandemic has had on normal life, it seems that there have been countless others that do little more than document every single possible concern of the upper-middle-class.

Lifestyle journalism catered specifically to the needs, wants, and desires of the beans and sourdough crowd: the same affluent workers whose jobs afforded them the flexibility to do their jobs from their homes. During the long, dark months of the spring, while many Americans were contending with lives lived mostly indoors, countless other people were doing the work that afforded the WFH class the freedom to worry only about how to occupy their time now that they were trapped inside.

The New York Times quickly gathered their resources to create At Home, a section of gentle lifestyle content meant to quell the anxieties of their core audience, many of whom might have already escaped New York City during the worst spring months. The landing page for the section collects the various articles written for the express purpose of soothing the frazzled nerves of its readers and states its intended purpose: “We may be venturing outside, tentatively or with purpose, but with the virus still raging, we’re the safest inside,” the copy at the top of the page reads. Of course, inside was the “safest” place to be for a good long time, but even acknowledging that is a privilege. For all the Times readers who spent the spring worriedly disinfecting the groceries delivered to them by DoorDash or FreshDirect employees, there were countless other people working to make sure that the people locked in their homes, fearful of the out of doors, had food to eat. This divide was rarely noted in the lifestyle content that proliferated, most likely because it is not soothing to readers to think about the minimum wage employee riding a bicycle through rain and sleet to deliver them a pizza.

As the pandemic unfolded, I turned to the Times for recipes like many of my other peers did, but quickly developed a one-sided adversarial relationship with the What to Cook This Week email newsletter, written mostly by Food section editor Sam Sifton. Cataloging the innermost anxieties of the upper class has always been the hidden directive of the paper’s Style section, but witnessing that bleed over into the Cooking newsletter became tiresome after a while.

Consider this dispatch from the July 24 newsletter, some six months into the pandemic:

Good morning. I caught a fat porgy on a home-tied fly the other day, a blind cast into clear ocean water, streaming past boulders on an outgoing tide. It wasn’t the striped bass I was looking for, but I thought it might be good for a few tacos for dinner and that hauled me out of the rut I’ve found myself in these last few weeks. It’s been freestyle mapo tofus with ground beef and chile crisp; skillet pastas with Italian sausages and plenty of kale; crema-marinated chicken grilled and doused in lime; repeat. It gets boring, frankly.

For thousands of people who have yet to leave their neighborhoods or who have been working and running the household in a capacity that does not allow for leisurely casting a line into a clear blue ocean, Sifton’s missives are comically out of touch with other, more pressing realities like juggling childcare and a full-time job. What he and so many other writers have been working against since the pandemic started is nothing more than an exploration of what it means to be bored. Sourdough, an affectation that has largely been abandoned, was an effective way to channel anxieties about an airborne virus, but also, baking bread is nothing more than a hobby that adequately fills empty stretches of time while also making people feel productive. Baking bread for leisure is an activity that I imagine those who do it for a living, in industrial kitchens and the like, would rather not undertake. The gap between leisure and labor here is wide.

Other, more esoteric “hobbies,” like growing scallions in jam jars, was rebranded as “novel frugality” in a piece that now feels typical of the sort written during the spring and early summer. Habits like saving Ziploc bags, regrowing the aforementioned scallions, and eating the heel from a loaf of bread were the sort of penny-pinching habits reserved for the generation that survived the Great Depression, not the rest of us who have long luxuriated in the great American pastimes of consumerism and consumption, the April story at Vox implied. These habits, which are fairly normal and do not really deserve any special mention, were documented on social media and in pieces like the one that ran in Vox. Framed as an upper-class panic about safety and minimizing trips out of the house, these behaviors are unusual only because the people in question never really had to think about frugality in a concrete way. (...)

Paying close attention to lifestyle journalism over the past six months revealed that the anxieties, concerns, and fears that are being documented are purely those of Richard Florida’s “creative class”—upwardly-mobile individuals working in vaguely creative sectors who mostly congregate in cities like New York and San Francisco. These individuals value the sorts of amenities that make a city feel superior to a suburb: museums, bars, restaurants, and the ability to find a decent heirloom tomato at the height of summer. It’s worth noting that these concerns are, in the grand scheme of things, first-world problems. The trouble is that when these issues are given top billing, they appear to be the only issues that really matter. Carefully documenting the vagaries of the upper class and expecting their anxieties, hobbies, and worries to be representative for the entirety of society is a tale as old as time.

Giving space to the weird quarantine quirk that you and maybe three other people you’re friends with isn’t self-aware—it’s simply elevating an inside joke or observation made between friends by using the platform afforded to you and presenting it as a matter of course rather than an anomaly. Much like the case of the Amazon coat, which appeared in the Times Style section in November 2019, the small observations in and around the writer’s friend groups are not representative of the experiences of others and it is presumptuous to assume that just because something is happening to you, that the experience is universal.

by Megan Reynolds, Jezebel |  Read more:

Image: Chelsea Beck