As back to work, back to school, and notions of back to normal drift from late summer to the fall, to after the election, or flatly “next year,” I’ve found my day job as a brand strategist a refuge from my own slippery slope of doomscrolling all the way into abject despair.
My work involves looking at signals, interrogating data, observing behavior, poring over dossiers, financial reports, and macro trends — broadly speaking, socioeconomic stimuli that can be formed from sopping clay into a recommendation-like object for a CMO, CEO, or CCO.
What behaviors during lockdown will stick? Will we ever shake hands again? Will the media landscape be completely up-ended by remote work and therefore the end of rush hour, making drive time and dayparting as we knew it obsolete — and if so, how will I slice up my radio dollars? And have the media companies changed their slots and rates to reflect that yet?
Most of my presentations begin by couching everything in the fact that like Nate Silver, we’re going to get some of this very wrong but that despite the unprecedented nature of all of this, we can draw on history and experts to cobble together implications. I’ve talked with psychologists about how the duration or scale of a trauma often correlates to its lasting effects on behavior. I’ve talked with economists and hedge fund managers who’ve said events like this tend not to create problems but rather reveal them. I’ve discussed the reality that a global pandemic did not actually bring humans together as one symbiotic, sympathetic nerve system but instead pushed us apart in almost every sense — only some of that stemming from the rise in populism and nativism that had been brewing for a decade before anyone walked into an ER with a persistent cough. I’ve talked with technologists and environmental designers about the touchless evolution and the dignity of personal space. I’ve talked about recession fashion, quality over quantity, hoarding and hunger, and spirituality in response to war, politics, and public health.
The truth is, consulting all of these people and signals to know for sure what comes after is about as good as a call to Miss Cleo. But the possibility of intoxicating joy that just might come post-this is a pretty seductive thought…A rebound. A revival. A roar.
Many Americans spent the 1920s in an almost euphoric trance. With the trauma of world war behind them, the early part of the decade saw a rising stock market, which attracted millions of new investors, while others opened staggering lines of credit to buy new fangled appliances, houses, and cars. The “bedroom on wheels” as some called it further propelled a kind of freedom. Americans had space, they had privacy, they went to movies, they blasted the radio, and happily got seduced by the jazz scene leaking out of Harlem, creating a mini art and culture quake with aftershocks of shifting hemlines and erogenous zones.
This kind of cultural exuberance, with undertones of recklessness, rarely exists in absence of a tension. And the 1920s had constraints, fears, and societal tension in spades. In January 1920 the federal Volstead Act closed every bar, freehouse, and saloon in the country and an anti-Communist “Red Scare” quickly fanned widespread nativist, anti-immigrant flames. Othering of urban-dwellers and small-town residents, Protestants and Catholics, blacks and whites, family values advocates and so-called new women, reverberated violently under all that roaring.
When you start comparing these dynamics to what we’re up against right now it’s almost uncanny. Not least the timing of the “Spanish Flu,” which after killing some 600 thousand Americans had petered out by the spring of 1920.
While stories in 2020 of renters fleeing the cities to buy in the burbs are a little inflated, there are plenty of new home owners who took advantage of low mortgage rates and work from home policies to create a pocket of buoyancy. Home goods and decor sales are up, as everyone turned kitchens into classrooms and bedrooms into home offices and gyms.
If you live in New York City or San Francisco, you might feel as if everyone you know bought a car. Whether it was to just get away or avoid public transportation, while the conditions are different to what drove the automobile boom 100 years ago, having a car has a certain cache again. Brands and dealerships are offering 0% APR loans, six month payment deferrals and other incentives for essential workers or those who’ve lost their income. Nationally, the picture isn’t quite so pretty for the auto industry (Edmunds estimates that sales fell 34.3% through the quarter) yet the froth coming off the second-hand auto market, which is rebounding faster, is hard to ignore.
As I watched David Blaine’s latest stunt titled “Ascension,” I couldn’t help draw the similarities between its distracting silliness and the barnstorming daredevils of flight a century ago; Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd silently risking life and limb for the roar of the crowd.
A surging economy created an era of mass consumerism and cultural hype a hundred years ago and while economists and even my own head of finance urge us not to think of this as a V-shaped recovery, could the strides made in science and technology during this pandemic spur a celebration? Could the hard graft and real grief yield to mass relief? Regardless of cashflow, which would allow for splurging on consumer products, a large-scale blowing off of steam feels probable if not inevitable in the years ahead.
It may be Newtonian to suggest that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction but if we remove all the signals from all this data and all the experts and look purely at the global quiet that befell us this year, I’d like to posit that the 2020s will get loud and once again, America will be roaring in one sense or another.
