Vaccine gangs, M*A*S*H, and idle chit-chat
Getting out again is going to be weird
Side effects of long-term quarantining probably don't include personality change: After a year of spending far less time around other people than would ordinarily be the case for most Americans, it's natural to wonder whether all that time in quasi-quarantine is going to have an effect on our personalities. There's some reason to believe that it's going to take a little while for people to readjust to a vaccinated, somewhat-back-to-normal world, but it's unlikely that confirmed extroverts are going to become introverts or vice-versa.
■ To a great extent, we are who we are from birth. Most people are somewhere in the middle between the two extremes, anyway. Some of our traits are more mutable than others, but it's a pretty big stretch to expect one of the big five personality characteristics to be so plastic that a year of enforced isolation is going to change it.
■ There's a much better chance that people will find themselves hesitantly adapting to a complex environment for a while, but don't expect radical changes out of anyone. In the meantime, though, we're going to have strange new conversations with strangers as "How about the weather?" turns into "Which vaccine did you get?" And what's interesting about that is -- God willing -- this will be the biggest positive cultural event Americans will have shared in common since the final episode of M*A*S*H (which was seen by 77% of television-watching households and 60% of the entire country at the time).
■ Television doesn't satisfy that mass-experience feeling anymore, nor do other positive events. We barely have any synchronized cultural experiences anymore -- which is not necessarily a bad thing, since it reflects the fact that people are able to choose cultural content much more satisfying to them than books, movies, music, and television programmed for a lowest-common-denominator audience. But it does deprive us of generic things we can all talk about at the same time. "Hamilton" has been touring for half a decade, but there are still plenty of people who haven't seen it.
■ Most adults of a certain age can easily answer where they were on 9/11, but that's not the kind of subject that comes up in casual conversation. Which vaccine did you get? Now there's a question we're free to chit-chat about. And it feels especially weird to be chit-chatting again after a year of social distancing -- but it's going to be good for us.
