Tablet Magazine - a new read on Jewish life

When the COVID lockdowns began in March 2020—that great sterilization of our personal lives, that mass removal of distraction—I observed something strange. My peers, ordinarily proud of their independence, realized that they didn’t just love their families but kinda liked them. Other friends—friends who’d been stuck quarantining with roommates or worse yet alone—yearned for families; they began joking about how nice it’d be to have a husband and kids for company in eating or drinking themselves to death—or, less gloomily, to share their freshly baked sourdoughs. With the mounting pressure of COVID restrictions, many people learned that their “chosen families” of friends and colleagues were less durable than they’d thought. I wasn’t a detached onlooker. I, too, worked a tech job 3,000 miles away from my family, the kind located on a plush campus with floor-to-ceiling windows and on-demand gelato. Then suddenly the artifice was stripped away and my time was no longer broken up by campus bike rides or leisurely strolls to the office sushi chef. I was alone facing the silence of the day and I found myself confronted by questions I hadn’t asked since my early 20s: What am I for? Why am I doing any of this?...

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