WHO WE’LL BE AFTER THIS
When This Is Over, I’ll Live By the Sea
Before the pandemic, stepping off the treadmill always felt impossible
In the first sentence of Joan Didion’s iconic essay, “Goodbye to All That,” on leaving New York City, she wrote, “it’s easy to see the beginning of things, and harder to see the ends.”
No offense to Joan, but I actually can remember when it ended for me — the moment when I decided to leave London, the place I’d lived for nearly a decade.
It was late April, several weeks into the UK’s lockdown. I was lying on the grass outside, taking a break from reading a book. I watched an ant crawl up my leg, and marveled at how different I felt compared with just a few weeks before. Back then, I had a constant, low-grade sense of dread that was impossible to name or find a cause for. I always felt busy. And even when I pared down my schedule as much as humanly possible, I never seemed to have enough time to do what I wanted (namely, read, write, and lie in the grass). I remember in January, mapping out my year of work and leisure travel and other social commitments ahead, and feeling slightly short of breath.
Then lockdown happened. And, suddenly, that particular brand of dread was gone. I found myself in possession of something I’d long wanted, even in the midst of a horrific world event: time. Once I had it, I knew that if I wanted to hold on to it, I needed to move to a less outwardly stimulating place.
Of course, like any overworked urbanite, I had certainly thought before about decamping for locales with cheaper rent. But stepping off the treadmill always felt just out of reach: Maybe I could start thinking about it next year, or after this job, or when my relationship status changed, I’d say.
Large cities like London are predicated on constant forward motion, after all. There’s something undeniably beautiful about that — the time-honored mix of grit, luck, persistence, and the hunger of youth that launched a billion careers, including my own. But when you’ve lived there for a while, you forget there’s a version of life that’s not so relentless. Plus, as the pandemic seemed to underline, those aspirational lifestyles in mega metropolises also have tremendous downsides: exorbitant costs of living, lack of green space, and a nervous system overdrive that can lead to burnout, as I experienced earlier this year.
The way things are looking, I may not be alone in this move. According to a Gallup poll, three-fifths of Americans who have been working from home during the pandemic would prefer to stay that way once restrictions are lifted. More and more employers (including my own) are seeing that it’s possible to ditch the office altogether. And while there’s been much equivocating on whether places like New York and London will be forever changed by the pandemic’s economic fallout, I think that might be the wrong question. Perhaps what’s changed this time isn’t these cities, but us.
So now I’m here in Margate, a seaside town outside of London, where I’m reminded each morning and evening on my walks that life has a certain rhythm to it. The tides are not linear, but cyclical — never arriving nor leaving. The reminder comes as sweet relief.
This story is part of a Forge series on the effect the quarantine has had on who we are and how we live.
