Here are a handful of headlines from a single website, the internet arm of a once glamorous, still respectable glossy magazine: 

Getting Back to Normal Is Only Possible Until You Test Positive
How Easily Can Vaccinated People Spread COVID?
Parents Still Have a Thanksgiving Problem
The Nasty Logistics of Returning Your Too-Small Pants
What Collective Narcissism Does to Society
You’re Boosted! Now What?
The Pandemic Is Still Making Us Feel Terrible
America Has Lost the Plot on Covid
Why Are We Microdosing Vaccines for Kids? 
How Public Health Took Part in Its Own Downfall
The Self-Help That No One Needs Right Now
Nine Pandemic Words That Almost No One Gets Right
Why Are Americans Still — Still! — Wearing Cloth Masks?
Did Pfizer Peak Too Soon?
We’re Already Barreling Toward the Next Pandemic
Fully Vaccinated Is Suddenly a Much Less Useful Phrase
‘Post-Vax COVID’ Is a New Disease
Six Rules That Will Define Our Second Pandemic Winter
Sorry, a Coronavirus Infection Might Not Be Enough to Protect You

Brought to you by The Atlantic, or as it’s now known: Slate for Middle Managers. Whenever I am feeling just slightly optimistic, about either the state of the world or the slow Nothing-like progress of the plague from one county to the next, I visit the Atlantic’s website to have my mood brought down a register, or several. Did I read all of these articles? No. I am not that masochistic. Are the headlines the same as the articles they tease? No. The headline writers are a different breed than the actual article writers, meaner, kept in captivity, fed only when they achieve the day’s required click-rate metrics. Headline writing has always been a combination of a striptease and a poke in the eye, but the Atlantic headline writers have ventured into a new realm of insult provocation during the pandemic. Over and above the content of the underlying stories, it seems like the Atlantic headline writers really want you to feel terrible, feel guilty for your relative level of safety, and feel anxious about the state of the pandemic. They’ve become the shrieking hall monitor of the national mood. If the primary rhetorical mode of the Right-leaning Fox News network is aggrievement, then the corollary for the Atlantic, more Left-leaning or perhaps just more BMW-leaning, is anxiety. The first tells the viewer: they think you’re a rube and they’re coming after you. The second tells the reader: you’re doing pretty good and it will never be enough. 

Yes, I understand the past 1.67 years has been a veritable disaster along every metric one could possibly conceive, and I understand that various glimmers of progress or hope or improvement are highly contextual and that circumstances are not better for some people. But as of mid-November, there are some solid signs of progress in the continental United States. Vaccines for children ages 5 to 11 have been finally approved. Boosters are widely available. Two new antiviral therapeutic treatment drugs are approaching emergency use authorization. If you are an American parent with school-aged children with potentially immunocompromised grandparents, the viral probability statistics that invisibly govern your life have just become much more favorable. If you have perhaps been threading the needle of normal, it just got easier to darn the socks of civilization. Of course, if your children are still in the eating-with-their-fingers demographic, then your life is still not normal. And yes, I don’t know if we as a society will ever return to a pre-pandemic normal. No doubt we will fall into some new kind of normal, equal parts fear, paranoia, Facebook science (sorry, Meta science), slightly more wizened knowledge of our shared infectability, and TSA-like security theater. Will I always wear a mask in the local grocery store? Will I do it to protect myself and my neighbor or will I do it to hide my frown? Too soon to tell. 

I will admit that I was feeling good at the beginning of the summer, an optimism that was crushed by the delta variant. I had heard of a potential timing danger with regard to the vaccine rollout, that the vaccines, despite being widely available and effective, would not be taken up by a large enough portion of the population, so that a more virulent mutation would develop and spread, which is essentially what happened. Thankfully, the vaccines are still effective against this variant, but there are even more sick and dead than there should have been post Easter 2021. Three cheers for America, the best of all possible worlds.

But then life got weird again, just in time for the kids to go back to school, and concurrently, the Discourse Machine, or the Despair Machine, or the Metaverse, or whatever you want to call our ongoing online virtual media sidecar to life, chugged a Four Loko and got busy. Life is not yet normal. Cue the headlines above. I realize Covid has not made the progression from pandemic to endemic, but conditions have improved, and there is a horizon glimmer of further improvement, like an undulating oasis. And I find myself daring to feel optimistic, or perhaps I am just daring to tire of despairing, tired of drilling down to see the 14-day percentage change in case loads in my tri-county area. I went to a small concert two weeks ago, my first since Before. And I’m planning to go to another. These events are not without risk, but then nothing I do is risk-free. I am always weighing, measuring, even when it’s subconscious. I’m not trying to be careless, but I am trying to care less. Because I’m 600 days older and death is not an abstraction.  

And the metaverse makes me feel bad. It wants me to feel bad. It wants me to worry, despair, feel anxious, Read More, and Share with my Friends. The metaverse wants to spread. Perhaps the delta variant wasn’t the viral mutation I needed to worry about.