We just went through a period where most of the people I know left their abodes only for essentials, and even then with trepidation. A trip to the grocery required wipes, latex gloves, perhaps some face covering and a plastic spray bottle filled with antiseptic alcohol, ever on the ready.<\/p>\n
But today that game has changed. The government is now telling us not to go out even for groceries. Order in if you can. If all else fails, get take-out from a restaurant.<\/p>\n
Which means we may all be shut in for the long haul. We will meet each other socially on-line, do our double dates over Zoom, pretend to share a beer. But we won’t actually be in physical contact with people outside our household.<\/p>\n
These habits will start to be ingrained, as they become integrated into our daily rituals. I wonder whether, after we are once again free to roam the earth, we will have found ourselves changed in fundamental ways.<\/p>\n
Maybe we won’t enjoy the bar or restaurant crowded with strangers in quite the same way. We might get an uneasy feeling when packed tightly into a concert venue.<\/p>\n
In the future, we might all acquire agoraphobia. But that’s not the strangest thing. No, the strangest thing is that being agoraphobic might simply come to seem normal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We just went through a period where most of the people I know left their abodes only for essentials, and even then with trepidation. A trip to the grocery required wipes, latex gloves, perhaps some face covering and a plastic spray bottle filled with antiseptic alcohol, ever on the ready. But today that game has … Continue reading “Future agoraphobia”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22114"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22114"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22115,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22114\/revisions\/22115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}