COVID's Legacy of Judginess

We spent so much time calling people out— and never stopped.

- Kathryn Jezer-Morton

Around noon on the very first day of the COVID lockdown, I was working on my laptop at my dining-room table—I didn’t know yet that it would become my desk for the next year—when I got an email from my upstairs neighbor. She and her partner were working from home, she informed me, and she requested that my children quiet down. They were trying to focus, she said. You can imagine how my eyeballs turned molten while reading these words—we were trying to work too. I couldn’t imagine, that dismal March afternoon, how someone could be so inconsiderate.

It’s funny thinking about it now because I was about to become an expert on inconsiderate behavior—spotting it, naming it, being accused of it, being guilty of it. What constituted inconsiderate was about to become a main subject of discussion in all my group chats. I would spend the next several years consumed, to varying degrees, with thinking about what constitutes consideration. In the absence of anything else to do, calling people out for being assholes became a form of entertainment during the pandemic years.

We haven’t really stopped since, have we? The epidemiological Reality of covid meant that what other people did was our business, but many of us maladaptively applied that rule to our lives broadly and haven’t looked back. Sometimes I think what has really stuck with us from the covid years is a sense of entitlement to the moral high ground. We’ve clung to it, and it has cost us. I say “us” meaning people who believed it was important to protect the most vulnerable. I don’t think we were wrong in taking that priority very seriously. But we’ve made moral superiority a habit—families in particular. This habit has outlasted its utility.