Peter McGraw is joined by Mary Dahm and Shane Mauss to reflect on how the pandemic disrupted everything—and unexpectedly liberated Solos. From lockdown revelations to pandemic breakups, we explore how COVID accelerated a shift toward independence, self-reliance, and living a life off the relationship escalator.
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Listen to Episode #242 here
Did The Covid Pandemic Fuel The Solo Movement?
Welcome back. I’m joined by a familiar voice to the podcast, a friend who helped keep me sane during the COVID pandemic, which we were dealing with at this exact moment in 2020. Welcome back, Mary Dahm.
Thank you. It’s good to be here.
We have an unanticipated guest, at least one whom I didn’t anticipate when I prepped this episode, though he was in my life also at that time. He has appeared on the Solo Podcast, including the Not A Solo Trip episode, which we taped prior to the pandemic. He is my shaman. Welcome back, Shane Mauss.
Hello. Thanks for having me.
We are at the Hi-Fi Homestead in Joshua Tree, California. It has come up time and time again in the podcast. For the frequent listener, they know that this is a very special place for me. I escaped the LA lockdowns, which originally were going to be two weeks long, by booking this very place for two weeks. Two weeks turned into two and a half months that I spent in the desert here, listening to music.
This place features a music room, a wonderful Herman Miller chair, and lots of walking and hiking around. It’s a very peaceful place and a very special place to read, write, reflect, and then do some of my solo mushroom trips out here. I’ve got a chance to share it with Mary and Shane. I don’t know if you have any comments about this place before we jump in.
I love it. I love Joshua Tree generally. This is a lovely place. It has everything you’d want.
It’s very Pete because you get the feeling of camping without actually camping.
That’s true. It’s very comfortable. I feel indebted to the owner of the place, Lori, who created it. She’s an outstanding person and a fellow vinyl lover. Now, I text her and find out when it’s available and come out 2 or 3 times a year. Before we jump in, I want to share some good news. The personal finance e-book that I was working on is finished. I sent it out to folks who pre-purchased it. I want to say thank you for their patience and thanks for supporting the Solo Movement. Any proceeds from the e-books support the podcast and all the endeavors associated with the Solo Project. If you’re interested in the personal finance e-book, the workbook, or the Solo Movement more generally, including our online community, head to PeterMcGraw.org/Solo.
Five Years After The Pandemic
We’re here to talk about the pandemic five years later, and in particular to probe this observation that I’ve made about how it accelerated the Solo Movement. Before I get into the caveats, we haven’t done a proper post-mortem on the pandemic. We found out that the virus, for example, likely came from a lab. That was super debated. I don’t want to go into all the politics of this. I think it’s too politically fraught. One of the things that I am focused on in life in general is this notion of post-traumatic growth. That bad things happen, and for some people, that creates more bad things in their lives. For some people, bad things happen, and it creates growth in their lives.
When I was working on the Solo book, I had a series of solo love letters that people wrote. The theme emerged in some of those where folks were talking about how they were liberated by the response to the pandemic, in particular, the lockdowns, the move to remote work, and so on. It’s served as an accelerant. For example, here’s part of a letter that sums that up. “When the pandemic came along, and it became practically against the law to date, I was set free. State-sanctioned orders to stay home, grow out your roots, and rock a hairy leg in PJs. Look, coupledom was off the table, and I felt a huge sense of relief. Time to stop lady gardening and start real gardening.”
What is lady gardening? Is that grooming?
It’s grooming. Lady gardening is the equivalent of manscaping.
I feel you.
This solo listener and contributor felt liberated by this. I thought that was very fun.
I stopped shaving my legs as well during the pandemic. It has been liberating. I didn’t do any gardening.
Let’s set the stage. COVID-19 changed a lot of the world, changed the way people work, affected people’s relationships, and their sense of self. People lost loved ones. There are millions of people who died, people who are dealing with long COVID, the trauma of grieving some of those lost people in isolation. We’re still dealing with some of the inflation as a result of policies, changes to jobs, the economy, and so on, and learning loss among young people, mental health struggles, and so on and so forth.
The political divides. This is not all pretty, yet there are people who have had post-traumatic growth, who learned something about themselves, their world, their values, how they function, and so on. I guess I’ll start by asking the two of you, looking back five years, are there any particular personal reflections that you have about either your soloness or your life in general as a result of this profound, unanticipated, largely tragic event?
You’re the shaman. Maybe you should go first.
That’s what Pete calls me. That’s not what I call myself.
It’s like, “As the shaman, I will lead us off.”
The positives, I had some nice strengthening of relationships with females who were like, “There’s no sexual anything here.” We’re locked out, talking over the phone, and everything. It was a lot more freeing.
The sex wasn’t in the way.
That was a big one. I think that to one, getting forced out of doing the same thing that I was doing, and then taking a chance at reinventing things, failures, learning, some successes, and some innovations. I built a lot of skills that I may not have had if that had not happened. I innovated in some interesting ways. I learned also to not take my finances for granted as much, and losing everything. I would say it’s ongoing. I have a science podcast, got to talk to scientists, epidemiologists, and infectious disease people very early on.
I have always had it in my head and books that I read. This is like a ten-year thing for the economy to start coming back. The social stuff that happens is the same. If you read pandemic history, you would think our time now is so different because we have technology and everything, but it’s the same behaviors being expressed over and over again. I think it’s ongoing a little bit, but I don’t know. There were plenty of silver linings, and there was plenty of personal growth. Also, it was very hard and devastating for me and many people.
Especially for you, as a touring comedian, live events went away, and thus the source of your income went away. Also, as a comedian, I think that because you already are not living in a normal world, there’s the ability to be like, “Now, I’m living in an abnormal world more generally.”
I will say that the whole time, I was like, “This is weird,” but life always seems weird to me. Life always felt more fragile than what people thought it was. I felt like people have been taking things for granted for a long time, and having trouble facing reality. It was a heck of an experience.
Shane’s podcast is called Here We Are, and he talks to scientists broadly, whether it be psychology, biology.
My new show, InShanely Curious, is a lot of animal behavior type stuff, learning by animals, and such.
I will say this. I did not have the perspective that you did before the pandemic about how all of this civilization is fragile, much more so than I ever thought, because I never experienced a great world war or something like that. You think about milestones in my life. You had the Challenger disaster when I was young, you had the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but those are limited. They’re not worldwide. They’re not global. Now, I have this belief that all of this is much more fragile than we assumed beforehand.
Something about a pandemic feels so antiquated. We don’t have plagues anymore. Those are over. That fragility and the feeling that this could happen again or something similar, like the first time you experienced something cataclysmic, it changes the way you move through life more generally.
I always thought preppers were silly because I was always like, “I’ll jump off a cliff if everything hits the fan or whatever.” You know who you should have on is Athena Aktipis.
She has a new book about apocalypses.
She’s a cooperation theorist at ASU who also got into prepping and stuff like that before COVID. Especially important for everyone is that I now realize that you could have the best government working their hardest in the entire world, like anywhere or some theoretical government, you should still probably have enough stuff for a month or two. Things could go like crazy earthquakes.
There’s talk going on now in governments where it’s like, “We can’t scare people,” but people don’t realize that when there’s a huge mudslide in Nashville, when there’s a huge fire in LA, of course, there’s always more that can be done and ways to improve it, but there’s nothing on earth that has the capacity to stop all of natural disasters. On paper, they go, “Everyone should have 72 hours’ worth of water, food, and stuff.” That’s something that’s drastically different than a point of view that I would have had ahead of time, where I’ve been like, “Who even cares? Whatever, we’re having fun. If things hit the fan, I’m out of here.”
There’s a phenomenon on dating apps. Why would I be good with a zombie apocalypse? Some people write, “I wouldn’t be. I would let myself get eaten. I don’t want to deal with zombies.” I’ve started putting together what I call a go bag, in case I need to grab this bag, get in my car, and drive to the mountains. Why? I don’t know what the why is, but that’s not something I thought about prior to this.
I did not do any of that. I had to evacuate for the LA fires, and I learned that I’m not a good evacuator. I looked at my bag. I brought every bra I owned, no underwear, and no socks. It didn’t make any sense.
You’re not good at packing under pressure.
No. Plus, I didn’t think of that because of where I live. I live in Hollywood. I evacuated because of the Sunset Fire, which will not go down in history because it got contained at 40 acres. I didn’t think that my place in the middle of the city was going to burn. It’s not taking it seriously.
I get that. One of the problems is that what we decide is possible is from what happened before. For example, the Titanic. A ship this size has never sunk before, so this one will be okay. Every time there’s an earthquake, a fire, a pandemic, or whatever, we do update. It could be that much worse, but we never project that it might be even worse in the future.
The same goes for opportunities, too, by the way. I’m not trying to be a doom and gloomer. When it comes to doom and gloom stuff, what I’m also saying is that from thinking about things in that way, I now have a flare in my van, which could very well come in handy. I now have roadside stuff with reflectors. If I have a flat tire or something, it’s going to make my life easier, less stressful, safer, and everything else. I’ve thought of various life hacks and things that helped me appreciate things like hiking more and things like that, too, where it’s the same stuff that goes into packing for a long hike. It’s the same mindset.
I guess my point is that I used to see preppers and be like, “This is a mentally deranged person, living in a bunker or something like that.” Now, this is a very reasonable thing to have on hand, so you don’t need to think about it outside of that. That’s a very good example of how drastically many of our perceptions shift. That’s something I can easily point to as something I’ve done a complete 180 on.
That’s what interests me, too, what you were saying earlier about long-term outcomes of this, that the outcomes can be ten years after the fact, talking about how we predict what’s going to happen. During the pandemic, I was always obsessed with the Jazz Age of the 1920s. In college, I studied history. I was interested in what happened after the cataclysm of World War I. How do people react to that? There’s a bit of this hedonism and free-for-all that people are partying and out there having fun after to try to forget what happened, and also to try to move on.
In the case of World War II, to celebrate even winning.
This is the interwar years after World War I, before World War II, the Jazz Age, prohibition, and a lot of partying and drinking. Before the pandemic, I was annoyed that nightlife was dying. These younger generations, I’m angry with them for killing nightlife. They don’t like to go out. They don’t like to drink. I was annoyed that the LA nightlife scene was declining before the pandemic. During the pandemic, I thought we were going to have a 1920s after this.
I’m like, “Guys, it’s going to be fun when this is over.” I was predicting what would happen based on my knowledge of this time that was pretty similar to ours, with cataclysm, the influenza, the Spanish flu, and then the roaring ’20s jazz age. I was like, “Here comes our jazz age,” and then it was the opposite. People got used to not going out. People got used to going to work and school on Zoom. Social life felt more dead than it ever had been. That surprised me.
I would say that I certainly, through the pandemic, and you two witnessed it, I had a lot of anger. I was very fortunate that I wasn’t personally affected. I didn’t get sick. I didn’t lose anybody close to me. A lot of the pain and suffering was a bit distant from it, from me at least. I was on sabbatical. I was in Los Angeles. I was sucking the marrow out of that experience. Suddenly, I was being locked down. As someone who is pretty obsessed with his freedom, I resented that. I had all these plans that got ruined in that way. That said, it’s hard to know counterfactually what would have happened. Many ways I feel better off in a lot of ways for it. One is that I did exactly what you talked about, Mary. I learned to enjoy myself at home.
I started, for example, doing creative work in the evenings. I started cooking for myself. I used to eat out all the time, and now I don’t. I used to be out five nights a week, going, and I found ways to embrace my creativity, reading, and writing in solitude. I had an episode that I taped here at the Homestead called Sharpening Your Sword, which my guest Chase Johnson talked about how he was using this downtime to acquire new skills and work on new things that he wouldn’t have time for or energy for in his own life. My version of sharpening my sword was this project, the Solo Project. I don’t know if you know this or remember this, Mary. I launched Schtick to Business on April 1st.
I do remember that.
Anybody who has read it knows Shane from that because Shane was the contributor to Schtick to Business. He did these bits called Schtick from Shane. I remember people saying to me, “Are you sure you want to launch this book at this time?” I was like, “We are launching this book,” because that was my last big humor-related project. I was so eager to get into the Solo stuff because podcasts had been launched. I had huge swaths of time. I was starting to cultivate this creativity, and I threw myself into this Solo Project. That helped accelerate it in a way that has made it much more impactful than it would have been otherwise.
The last thing was because I wasn’t going out all the time, I was eating at home, and I was getting better rest, I’m much healthier now than I was at the beginning of the pandemic. I was able to let my body heal from a lot of injuries and stuff from the gym. I was able to eat cleaner. I don’t drink anymore. I wasn’t a big drinker, but any drinking was probably not good for me at that time, at that age. When I think about my professional life, the meaning of the work I’m doing, and then even my good health and so on, I can point back to the pandemic and say, “If I hadn’t gotten knocked off course, might I be still living the same lifestyle that I was before?” This is where you congratulate me.
Congratulations. It is hard to figure out the counterfactuals and the sliding door. There are a lot of things that I’m grateful for. I ended up spending two years in my parents’ basement, which is not an ideal thing or a way to turn 40. Also, I will forever be grateful that I got to hang out with my parents for a couple of years, which I had always had a little bit of a challenging relationship with, and a little bit of distance here and there. It was nice to get to connect with them as an adult in a different way.
That was my favorite part. Oddly enough, I got to spend a lot of time standup paddleboarding and things like that. My last tour is three cities a week. That’s the intensity that I toured and was touring for a long time. It was nice to hang out in one place for a while and see what that’s like for people. I also already liked my alone time before COVID. I think that I’m more self-reliant and stuff now than I used to be, which is nice.
Undergoing A Solo Awakening
Let’s talk about some different categories of change that people in the community either identified or I’ve identified as themes from my conversations. The first one is this solo awakening. I think a lot of people realized they were happier living alone, that they enjoyed their solitude. Matt wrote, “More free time to observe your own mind, read, daydream, and consider alternatives. The pause button of COVID gave space to let more people recognize that they are single at heart. The world tells you how you ought to be behaving. Suddenly, the world tells you, you need to behave differently. You’re like, ‘I like this different way of behaving,’ shifting away from external validation, people embracing their independence, their solitude, and so on.”
I feel like for me, in some ways, it was the opposite that I realized the importance of community for a single person versus people in a relationship or married. You’ve talked before, Pete, about how single people are more likely to volunteer. They’re more likely to get involved in their communities because they don’t have this crutch to fall back on of this person at home, so they’re not going to be lonely. I think if you’re married or partnered, it’s easier to withdraw.
I know couples who get into their routine of watching a show on the couch every night. You’re not going to be lonely because you’re with someone, hopefully someone you love. To me, it’s not a very rich life. I was single for part of the pandemic. I have some close friends who had older parents who were pretty worried about getting COVID. We did our little pact like, “You’re not going to see anybody outside.”
The pod thing.
I resented that, to be honest with you, because I’m the single one. It affects me more if I can’t go out and see people versus everybody else.
I remember someone was telling me that in San Francisco, you could not go out on a date. You were allowed to be with a romantic partner, a husband or wife, but you couldn’t be with a stranger. You couldn’t be with someone with whom you didn’t have a familial relationship.
What’s the difference? There’s still a person. The irony was that I ended up having my friends-with-benefits guy at the time. This is my “partner.” It’s still one person. We didn’t go anywhere, but I think that was funny.
It is true. I have some data that shows single people do more things in public alone more often than married people. If you think about actually locking people down, it affects singles more because they’re more likely to be out in the community. They’re more likely to go to a museum. I shouldn’t say this. They’re not more likely to go out, but they’re more likely to go out alone in this way. The reason they’re more likely to go out alone is that they’re craving interaction.
There isn’t that ready-made social life within their four walls that are there. What you’re highlighting, Mary, is this tale of two singles. The person who’s like, “I don’t need to do any lady gardening. I get to enjoy my life, enjoy my garden, read my books, and do my at-home hobbies. It was liberating.” Other people, at least how I was at first, were chafing at the fact that now I have to be home, that I’m not used to it. I managed to adapt. Some people didn’t. I guess you’re lamenting.
I kept up my lady gardening.
Your friends with benefits thanked you.
The other thing that I realized during the pandemic was that I had pretty much zero jealousy of my friends who were married or in relationships. From an outsider’s perspective, you might think, I saw these people who are home with their loved ones and not lonely. I was like, “That does not appeal to me. ”I wanted to be out in the world. I was able to do that afterward. It reinforced my aversion to being the couple on the couch watching Netflix together every night, which is maybe at this point, not that I don’t want to be in a couple, but it’s a certain type of couple with more freedom, more adventure, more excitement.
Robert Putnam wrote a book called Bowling Alone. I’ve made fun of the title of the book because I feel like it’s misleading.
It is a dumb title.
One of the main premises of the book is that the rise of television has inhibited people’s community participation. Who is it affected the most? It’s affected married people the most. With the exception of religious participation, single people are more involved in their communities in part because they can stay at home on the couch with their partner. If you have a good partner and the TV is good, that can be fulfilling, especially when you’re living out in the suburbs. You’ve got to get in a car to do anything in that way. What you’re saying is that you’d rather go bowling alone.
Honestly, I think a lot of people in those types of couples would like to expand and do more things, but they don’t know how to do it.
You need two people to want to do it because there’s no going out and leaving your partner behind, typically.
I think a lot of it is about finding third spaces, getting involved with them, and then things happen from there.
Adaptation With Isolation
Another issue is this adaptation dealing with the isolation that you’re talking about. Angela wrote, “I didn’t realize that I was still in semi-shut-in mode until about a month ago, as I watched others doing things I used to do before the pandemic. Now that I am aware, I’m going to try to return to my pre-pandemic life. #maybe.” Steve wrote, “The pandemic hit when I was beginning to settle into my newly solo life after being widowed about a year earlier. I wanted solitude while grieving, but never expected it to be that extreme.”
I’ve had this experience at one point, I don’t know if anybody else has, where as we were emerging, going back to travel, and going back to much more social life, it did feel like a hurdle in some ways. Maybe it has to do with a little bit of the fragility of the world, and as someone who’s incredibly social and travels very comfortably, it was weird to me that I felt a little bit unsettled sometimes, like going to another country because it had been so long since I had traveled, where I’m like, “I’m far away from home. I’m far away from anyone that I know in any way.” I never experienced that in my life, even when I was a rookie traveler. I wouldn’t call it anxiety. I wasn’t anxious about it, but it did seem unsettling. I don’t know if you had this experience in any way, but I think that’s what Angela is talking about.
From a live entertainment perspective, there were first waves of people in 2022, and then in 2023, everyone was getting out. It was like, “Live music. We enjoy live things again.” There was a year of that, and then I feel like people are going back to convenient watching Netflix. I think that social media use has ramped up so much, and people’s social lives have gotten so connected.
You could be on your phone.
I don’t know. I feel like people are going to be less and less interested in some of the social media stuff. Everyone has gotten a taste of it now. Every single person on earth tries to be a creator. I think people understand it now. It’s like fast food. When fast food first arrived, to see the cultural impact of fast food, it was like, “What a treat. Can you believe it? You can go to this drive-in and get a cheeseburger. It’s delicious and cheap.” After time, you go like, “Actually, that’s all you eat. You know what I miss? Cooking at home sometimes.”
It’s always a little tough to predict. I’m curious if, coming up, there will be a little bit more of people uninstalling their app. I uninstalled my app. I usually install Instagram to post whenever I’m posting, which is sometimes, I go weeks without it, which is unusual for a comedian. I’ll install it to post, and then I’ll uninstall it again. I have a friend who works with Meta that’s somewhat higher up, and I was telling him that. He’s like, “We’re seeing a lot of that in the data.”
I would be curious about what age groups are uninstalling. We’re all in our 30s, 40s, and 50s. With teens and people in their 20s, I don’t know, I don’t see it. To use the fast food comparison, the novelty and the glamor of fast food are gone. People know it’s bad for you, but there are still tons of people addicted to it. It’s still everywhere. I have a journalist friend who feels very strongly that social media is on the decline. We reached peak popularity, it’s going to go out of vogue, and something will replace it. I don’t know, I was a high school teacher, and I didn’t see any signs that it was going away.
First of all, I hope it does. I’m a light user, but even that feels too much. Look at smoking, for example. At one point in time, 60%-plus of the adult population smoked. Now, we’re down to 20%. These are rough numbers, so you can’t quote me exactly on that.
Twenty percent. It’s got to be less than that.
I don’t think it is.
Is this including vaping?
No, I don’t know. That does not include vaping.
Vaping is basically smoking.
The point is this. Smoking is not randomly distributed across the population, so there are people who are more likely to be smokers. That’s going to eventually be the case with social media. The evidence that you have is that the executives at Apple don’t let their kids have iPhones. The executives at Meta don’t let their kids on Facebook. There is a recognition that there are some downsides to these kinds of things that are happening. My hope is that it’s not going to go to zero, but it ends up at least not becoming so universal. People can then better opt out of it.
My students who struggle with their phones generally and struggle with social media specifically, in many ways, feel like smokers to me. They feel like they can’t quit. The difference is they’re not addicted to nicotine, but they’re addicted to the social element of it. What they say to me is, “Peter, I can’t give up social media because that’s where all my friends are. That’s where my entire social life is.” To do that is to detach oneself from social life. It’s hard for me to understand that because that’s not where my social life lies.
No, it’s different. I had some students say to me when I was teaching high school, “John and I were hanging out playing video games,” and they told this story. As they’re telling the story, I realized, because I’m picturing they’re sitting on the couch together playing video games. No, he means John is at his house in West LA, and the other kid is in his house in Mid-City. They’re playing with the headsets, talking to each other, or whatever. They count that as hanging out. They know it’s not hanging out in person, but they don’t see as much of a delineation. I would consider that not hanging out.
That feels like a phone call.
That’s a very poor imitation of actual time spent with friends.
Certainly, one of the things that I do feel like the pandemic did was accelerate a lot of the phone use. To be honest, there wasn’t that much else to do for some people, depending on the choices they made. They were just talking about the pandemic on social media a lot.
Changed the entertainment landscape a lot. It is going to be very difficult to predict exactly where things go from here. The first thing that you couldn’t buy during the pandemic was toilet paper.
There was scarcity.
After that, it was webcams. There was a months-long waiting list for certain webcams. Everyone was like, “The world is ending. Quick, I need to start podcasting.” I doubled down on my digital efforts and stuff. It was an interesting time for the landscape. The point is that it changed so many things in so many ways. In my mind, late-night television is dead, but I would also not be shocked if it came back, and after a while, people were like, “You know what. We like well-produced things where twenty writers sat around and put some thought into this ahead of time.”
It’s been great that suddenly there’s been all of this organic stuff, and that all of us got to articulate our own experiences of a pandemic and record them in real time. We’re going to have a lot of different historical records of this one than there have been in the past. I do wonder what it’s going to mean. As someone about to sell a comedy special and who first got breaks doing late night, and is now like, “Netflix is the big thing right now, but is it YouTube?” That’s their main competition, and it’s so tricky to understand and have any idea where entertainment is going to go.
I think that within some of that, I’m very hopeful that people are going to start making real-life connections. It’s going to become so overwhelming that people are going to be rawdogging flights. I’m going to sit and stare at the back of a seat. I would not be shocked. I’m not putting a huge number of chips on this, but I wouldn’t be shocked if people continue to put more thought into real-life relationships.
My experience with this recently was that I went to the ballet. I had good seats, and I was enthralled. It was expensive, so I was certainly motivated to get the most out of it.
Did you go by yourself?
I did not. I brought a date. That’s not true. When I was in Buenos Aires, I went to the ballet alone. I did a mushroom trip. While I was coming down from the mushroom trip, I went to the ballet at their famous opera house. More recently, I went to the ballet in Denver, and I brought a date, but I realized that I don’t need a date to go to the ballet from both of those experiences.
In both experiences, it was so incredible. The talent, the whole experience, and also being so present because you’re not on your phone. You can’t be on your phone. It was this forced focus in this way. It was delivered at such a high level. In Buenos Aires, I cried. I was so moved by what I was watching that I had that experience. I share your perspective. This is where it’s at. This is where it’s at in terms of having a peak entertainment, cultural, and artistic experience.
Two weeks ago, I was at a festival checking out some bands and stuff. I had the first experience where I sat through an entire hour-long set, completely, fully engaged in it without thinking about my dancing or getting in my head about anything.
Texting someone or checking your phone.
Often in those situations in the past, I’ve been like, “I wish I liked stuff like this as much as everyone else seems to be, because it sure looks like they’re having fun.” I get it, and I’m having fun, but I’m not fully in it. I’ve had things like that. It might be an age thing as well. I’ve been doing some camping in places where I don’t have phone reception. I can’t use my data. I can fire up my computer to write, but I don’t have internet access. I’m like, “This is amazing.” I’m looking at a fire or a plant for a little while. This is boring old life for all of human history, that now seems like a very novel, exciting experience to someone whose life has gotten attached to phones.
When Did The Pandemic Really End
Let’s talk a little bit about dating stuff again because this came up a lot in listener comments. Janice Formichella, who’s a breakup coach, wrote, “I do know that I’ve had several breakup coaching clients who had pandemic breakups and then stayed single after for some years.” The pandemic put a lot of stress on some relationships.” I think strong relationships got stronger. You had more chances to spend quality time with your partner, for example. For others, it revealed some cracks. For some people, as mentioned earlier, it gave people a break from the constant swiping and dating, which they weren’t finding fulfilling to begin with, and then had a chance to take a break from it, and was like, “I like my life alone. I like my relationship with myself.”
I do think that the world is often telling you that you need a partner, and that’s the way to be happy. One way to figure out if you are happy without a partner is to not have a partner for a while or not even be in the process of looking for one. It gave people a break. Maida writes, “I’m one of those people who had a big a-ha as a component of the COVID lockdowns. I had started dipping my toe into the dating app world in the fall of 2019, but all that came to a halt in March 2020. The isolation I experienced was profound and very challenging. I remember feeling so jealous of my friends who were figuring out creative ways to connect with their live-in partners, but at the same time, I recognized that I was learning something valuable about myself. I didn’t need a partner.”
The flip side of this was how isolating it could be. Kim writes, “Lockdown was one of the darkest times of my life. Over 2020 and 2021, Melbourne was locked down for a total of 262 days, which puts it as one of, if not the most, locked-down cities in the world. I love my own space, but I’m also an extrovert, and having the better part of the year where the only people I saw face to face were when I went to the grocery store, one of the few places allowed to be open. It was rough.”
Rachel writes, “I suspect there is a misconception that solos are introverted, which is not necessarily the case. I’ve always been shy, but the isolation of the COVID lockdowns highlighted to me that I am most definitely an extrovert. I like my alone time, having full control over my own space and what to do with my time. However, the lack of social interaction had a negative impact on my mental health. It was literally illegal for me to be within two meters of another person for months.” I think some of these stories are upsetting.
Honestly, I like the silver linings and everything. I think that there are tons of opportunities. There’ll probably be a huge economic rebound 3 or 4 years from now. Things will start looking up in significant ways for people. I think that people have gone through absolute hell in all sorts of ways, no matter what you look at, if you’re angry because of whatever laws or lack of freedom, other people lost members, other people have long-term COVID, there’s all stuff that’s ongoing.
I think it continues to be a mess. In my mind, COVID hasn’t ended. It’s interesting to reflect back on what those times were like and learn about what went wrong and what went right at those times. People are still reeling from it and going to be for a little while. A lot of people are feeling that way. I wish I had a little more of like, “Get up, we’re all going to be great.”
This is also the difference between Shane and me in general. This is how I feel about things.
I think there are a lot of opportunities out there for sure.
I do think that it did feel like an accelerant for the Solo Movement because it revealed to some people that they didn’t have to live the way that the world did. Suddenly, the world is telling them to be alone. Some of them were like, “I like being alone.” At least in the case of some of these stories, I like being alone some of the time. I also like being social some of the time, but I don’t have to follow this particular script. I think that is a liberating experience to have, in a sense.
Also, to realize that you’re in an unhappy relationship, it takes some shock to realize that “This is not the right person for me. I might be better off alone in this thing,” or “I don’t need to have a traditional relationship. I can have friends with benefits, that’s going to be enjoyable and fulfilling.” There’s nothing wrong with that in my sense. By the way, in no way do I want to diminish the pain that people had, economic, social, or whatever. That story has been told time and time again.
I get it. I’m saying why, personally, I have a little bit of a harder time. As you said, I’m not the most optimistic person, generally speaking, from a bigger, broader picture point of view anyway.
Let Mary break the tie here in a second. One of the things that’s different about the pandemic than about World War I or World War II is that there’s no V-J Day. There’s no armistice. There’s not a moment in time when the war is over and we can celebrate. We’re bringing the troops home. We are victors. It has slowly declined the effects. There was no celebration. As I said at the outset, there never was a postmortem. What did we do right? What did we do wrong? What did we learn from this? There’s never been an apology for any mistakes that were ever made. None of that helps people’s grieving and coping in any real way. Mary, what comes to mind as you’re hearing us talk about this?
It is interesting. The pandemic probably ended at different times for different people. Everyone has their time, or some people never feel like it ended. I think a lot of people have a “When this happened, it felt like it was over for me.” For me, it was in LA when they opened up bars again, and you could go without masks.
That felt like the end for you.
That felt like it was over.
In my consumer behavior class, I teach undergraduates. The model that I use is this notion of goal setting. People have goals. Some of the goals come from culture. Some of them come from internally. Our behavior in the marketplace is essentially trying to find ways to achieve our short-term and long-term goals. There’s a concept called goal release. When is it that we stop pursuing a goal? One obvious time is when we’ve achieved it. You’re looking for a life partner. You find one, you stop searching. You release that goal. Another one is good enough. Someone’s like, “I want to lose 20 pounds.” They don’t lose 20 pounds, they lose 17 pounds. They’re like, “Good enough.”
Another way that people release goals, and those are good reasons. One is that the goal seems out of reach. “I can’t do it. I don’t have the ability to do it. The world is working against me. I don’t have the whatever it is to do it.” Some of that happened when I talked to my students. They tell me stories, which were, “I did all the right things. I wore my mask, I socially isolated, I got my vaccines, I did all those things. I still got COVID. I followed all the rules, and I could not achieve the goal of not getting COVID.”
At some point, they’re like, “I gave up. I couldn’t do it.” Some of it was these milestones. You’re not locked down anymore. You don’t have to wear a mask in public. Some of it was like, “I can’t do this anymore.” You’re right. For some people, that was early on, depending on where they lived. As you said, there are still people who are isolating and masking up on the real extremes of these things.
I’m talking about the political ramifications, economic ramifications, and the way in which the world has changed. That is very much an ongoing thing. If COVID hadn’t happened, there wouldn’t be an outrageous number of people not vaccinating their children now, which is going to cause so many issues with so many other things moving forward. When I say it hasn’t ended, it’s because polio, measles, all that stuff is going to start ramping up. It already has and will continue to. In terms of do we worry about COVID, I’m saying everything that happened because of that, because of the lack of trust or whoever’s fault it was, it’s still going to be leading to ongoing health issues and economic issues that are going to be hurting a lot of people for a while.
One of the big concerns I have as an educator is what’s going to happen with the young people who miss school, who are isolated, and potential learning loss. How will that play out?
My friend had the most fantastic Freudian slip when she was talking about her 24-year-old coworker. She was like, “After she graduated Zoom and started working.” We’re like, “Graduated Zoom?” She’s like, “I mean, graduated from college.” This is a woman who’s 24 or 25. Most of her college was on Zoom. She graduates, gets a remote job, and is working remotely. She’s never worked in an office in person ever. Her college experience, half of it was on Zoom. There’s a whole generation growing up that’s a pretty normal experience to the point that, for Gen Z, office core is trending in fashion.
I don’t know what this is.
They love having fill-in-the-blank core. Core is like the style, like skater core or mermaid core. The office core is that they fetishize office clothes, like blazers and trousers, because they never got to wear them.
I missed out on business casual.
They’re like, “Glamor, that’s not interesting to us,” but they glamorize it.
Life In A Post-Pandemic World
It’s something you see on Friends. Interesting. I certainly in closing, recognize my bias as an optimist and as someone who wants to turn lemons into lemonade and also my own very personal bias of looking at my life and seeing the many ways that it’s better, while also recognizing the tremendous economic loss, loss of life, loss of learning, loss of opportunities, to your point, Shane, that are still playing out. I think it’s helpful for me to hear you say that historically, it’s a ten-year window to recover, so to speak, from these things.
People didn’t want to hear that when I was saying it in 2020, believe me. When they were saying, “A couple of months,” I was like, “No scientist is saying that.” I don’t know why that messaging is going out there, but no scientist is saying that.
This desire to return to normal.
Might I say, before the audience gets upset with me, there are misperceptions about what scientists think, and not everyone was pro-lockdown and stuff, too. Things got political, things got crazy, and it pains me that scientists became the scapegoat for a lot of this, but that’s also the history of what’s happened in every single pandemic ever.
I do think that there’s this idea of returning to normal. If you’re a member of the solo community, you are likely to question whether normal is good for you. When you gave people a taste of abnormal, some of them were like, “Give me more.” In that way, I do see how the fortunate elements of this are for some people. They saw another glimpse of another world. It agreed with them, and they’ve continued living in that other world, which is, by the way, a life that’s not necessarily isolated, but a life that people recognize the value of solitude, for example, and that you don’t need to have this one style of relationship to be happy. A life that made people question whether they want to be going into an office and sitting under fluorescent lights and around a rectangular table.
They might want to spend more time gardening. A life where they were on their phone all the time and were like, “I do not want to keep doing this.” One of the things about disrupting the social norms is that it gives you a chance to see the social norms and to recognize whether they agree with you or not in that way. That’s where my bias lies. I think a lot of the rules are made up to begin with. They’re made for the average, they’re made for society, and they don’t always work for the individual. I think a lot of members of the community can recognize the pain, the loss, the missed opportunities, but they can point to these moments or these insights that they had that said, “I can live this other way.”
I have plenty to say. First off, here’s a whole bunch of hope and optimism that I’ll end with, to throw you off a little bit, because I like mixing it up. Anything that I’m saying isn’t about me. I worry about people who are the most vulnerable. It troubles me. The idea of someone yuming in right now and hearing a comedian having fun, it is something that I can’t shake out of my head. That’s where some of my pessimism comes from. I will say that normal has never been normal. Whatever people’s idea of normal has always been shaky and weird anyway.
I grew up in a Leave It to Beaver kind of household. My mom is the most adorable person in the entire world. She starts watching Hallmark Channel shows in July. Every day, she’s watching the Christmas Channel for 6 to 8 months out of the year because that’s how she needs to perceive the world. That’s sweet. That’s wonderful. What a thing to hope for. The world has always been changing. With that comes all opportunities and interests. I think it’s fascinating. The best thing you can do is bring curiosity to any situation in life. COVID allowed for that.
Five years later, the feeling that’s the most salient in my life is gratitude. I feel very grateful all of the time for everything that I was able to do, and that I made it. I don’t remember wanting to live that much before COVID. I’m like, “You know what? I actually want to live.” I’m not sure that I would have the sense of gratitude for getting to exist that I would have had had COVID not happened in the way that it did.
I think for me, it helped me not to take things for granted. When the pandemic ended, I wanted to be more involved in my community and have a broader network. My deep, visceral fear of being in a house or an apartment, staring at my partner, and they’re too much of my world, I never want that to happen.
That’s a very solo thing to say.
That was a big change for me, I would say.
One of the things, Mary, that I’ve seen with you that I’ve enjoyed is that you are a member of this writing group that you’re running.
We’re all running it.
It’s been amazing watching you connect with fellow writers, how inspirational it has been, how it’s focused your writing. That’s a nice example of coming out of the pandemic of something that you’ve done that’s very community-focused, very communal, very connected.
That has been a fun thing. You’ve got to find things like that because I think they can be very life-changing. It takes a little bit of effort.
Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words
It’s not ready-made like a relationship escalator. Thank you for joining me at the Hi-Fi Homestead, a place where I usually am quite isolated, and I spend a lot of time alone here. It’s fun. It’s also a little weird to have other people here with me like this. It’s very nice to be able to share this wonderful place with you, which I discovered as a result of the lockdown. I can’t help but be a little bit grateful.
There’s got to be a few things like that, where people are going to take away from. You know what, I miss not being around people sometimes. This was one of the biggest travesties. My biggest hope for COVID was that people were going to do more stuff like this. People were going to venture outside of the city, find cool places like this to have fires, spend some time outdoors, invite some friends over, and do stuff. I hope that still happens. I thought it was going to explode.
I thought because of COVID and lockdown, you’re not going to be able to buy a cabin anywhere. Everyone is going to leave the cities, work remotely, and see how amazing this country is and how many cool spaces there are. I hope people start taking advantage. I go to a lot of state parks, and I’m shocked that there aren’t more people. That’s one thing I think that people could take advantage of.
Thank you both.
Thank you.
Cheers.
Thanks, Pete.
Important Links
- Mary Dahm on LinkedIn
- Not A Solo Trip
- Shane Mauss’ Website
- Peter McGraw – Solo
- Solo
- Here We Are Podcast
- InShanely Curious
- Athena Aktipis’ Website
- Sharpening Your Sword
- Schtick to Business
- Peter McGraw: Stop telling single people to get married | TED Talk
About Shane Mauss
Shane Mauss is a comedian, science communicator, and psychonaut whose work bridges the worlds of humor and the human mind. After launching his stand-up career in 2004, Shane gained national attention with appearances on Conan, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and Comedy Central.
He’s released acclaimed specials like Mating Season and My Big Break, the latter chronicling his experiences with injury and recovery. In recent years, Shane has become a leading voice at the intersection of science and comedy.
His Here We Are podcast features deep-dive interviews with over 500 scientists on topics ranging from psychology to evolutionary biology. He also co-hosts Mind Under Matter, a show that explores consciousness, creativity, and psychedelics.
Shane’s documentary Psychonautics captures his thoughtful, often hilarious, exploration of altered states. Whether on stage or behind the mic, Shane Mauss invites audiences to laugh while thinking deeply.
About Mary Dahm
Mary Dahm is a writer. She studied English literature and history at Boston College and earned a Master’s in Teaching from USC. She also likes to deadlift.