Hitting Pause on the Rat Race

Covid-19 has done many bad things, not least of which is laying bare the precarious foundation on which many of our lives dance.

But one good thing: pausing the rat race.

I was recently reading an old scuffle between Will Wilkinson and Henry Farrell over the nature of status. Wilkinson argues that “status-seeking need not be a zero-sum game, because there are indefinite dimensions of status competition,” to which Farrell responds: “Even if you’re king of your own mountain, you’re likely to be quite well aware of the other mountains around you that make yours look in comparison like a low-grade class of a gently sloping foothill.” Put another way, Wilkinson is saying that one of the great inventions of liberal market societies is that there are, potentially, an infinite number of status dimensions: I can be a Level 125 in my sprawling Runescape kingdom (highly respectable, for the uninitiated) and you can be a slick, overpaid investment banker, and we can both be perfectly happy. Farrell’s retort? There’s a sort of meta-ranking of different status dimensions; certain dimensions are “superior” to others, and we all know it. And so, in my example, the Runescape lord presumably wins in the meta-race (right??).

But what happens in a world where all these dimensions are suspended in limbo? A world where there’s no forward momentum? Where Runescapers can’t grub for points, bankers can’t swindle us (jk), Olympians can’t shatter records, consultants can’t hit that KPI, students can’t take tests, academics can’t out-publish their peers, entrepreneurs can’t exit, and so on.

Perhaps this reality lays bare something else. You. And me. And what’s left of our “status” once we’re all shorn of the daily rhythms and sub-rhythms that have slowly enveloped our lives, like a sheet of ice creeping over a mountain.

For my part, I’ve been thinking a lot about how we’re having a Marilyn Monroe windy dress moment: a violent gale has loosened our outerwear and we’re balling up to stanch the damage, desperately trying not to find out what’s underneath.

And what could be underneath? Something raw, I think — a life stripped of its superficial overlay and pared down to its natural substrate. Something less kinetic, less invested in the logic of moving for moving’s sake. If things felt overdetermined before — the way we slide from task to task, from lost children to lost adults, indulging in a round of self-care here and there — they feel underdetermined now. Inertia can no longer carry the day.

More important, inertia can no longer carry the rat race. The typical measuring sticks don’t apply. What does count is perhaps a wee bit old-fashioned: the depth of your compassion, your patience and forbearance, your kindness and comity.

There’s a simple premise at the heart of Wilkinson’s and Farrell’s arguments: that we’re all status monsters. For the foreseeable future, such a premise seems untenable. You can try to mark your pre-Covid 19 spot, but there’s no guarantee it’ll be there when you get back.