The post-pandemic journey
Or, how buying a new-to-me-car became an analogy for rejecting the fine of life.
This post is about buying a car, or maybe about navigating life.
When I began my search for a new-to-me car, I split the car universe into 3 categories:
Cars that are fine, and within my budget
Cars that aren't fine, and within my budget
Cars that aren't within my budget
After my first-ever test drive, the salesman asked the question I was dreading: "So, what did you think?" If you don’t know what you want, how do you evaluate a car in any real way? It drove, it was comfortable, it had tech stuff that's useful, it had low miles, it fit my budget. “It was fine?” I responded, before oversharing that I hadn't owned a car — or regularly driven — since George W. Bush was president, and a car was a car was a car. He nodded. I thought of those memes: “Ma’am, this is a Wendy’s.”
As part of my pandemic penpal project, a friend wrote about her car buying experience and how straightforward it was after she outlined some basic criteria: “I've never thought less about a big purchase in my life. It was strange.” I wished that were me. But I’m the person who hemmed and hawed for so long about what to buy with a $1,000 gift card I won to Best Buy that I had to get the money reinstated. Twice. On average, Americans test drive 2-3 cars before buying. I drove 8.
I met Michael on my second venture out in search of a used car. He bounded out of the office, wearing jeans with rhinestone-encrusted back pockets and oozing enthusiasm. He led me to the car I’d come to see — well, the one my dad thought might fit my threadbare criteria — and excitedly mentioned that the backseats fold down, making for a good sleeping place. I winced, uncomfortable with the implication I might be the sleeping-in-the-car type. Staring at this station wagon, I thought of uttering the following words: “I drive a wagon.” While 2020 delivered some blows, I wasn’t at a place that involved buying — and possibly sleeping in — a station wagon. Yet. Even before I started the engine, I knew this wasn’t the car for me.
Michael really did his darndest to slather lipstick on that little pig of a car that was, by all accounts, fine. So when the inevitable question arose, I had a salesman-friendly answer ready that was partially true: “It felt like driving a boat.” The car was too big.
Michael nodded knowingly. "We have this really cute orange Jetta,” he said, leading me to the most prominent spot on the lot. I trailed along, tiring of this dog-and-pony show. I couldn’t work out whether Michael was a great salesman who got my indecisiveness, or a not-great salesman who was too eager. I didn’t know what I wanted, with a car and arguably other aspects of life. Before I walked up to the “really cute” car in question, I had protested the idea aloud: “I need more space than that…”
Michael, ever at the ready, popped open a cavernous trunk big enough for multiple bodies and demonstrated how the seats fold down. (Apparently the seat-folding-down criteria was my vibe that day.) He rattled off more perks, and my ears did the equivalent of glassing over, until I heard: “…but…it’s a manual…”
And with those four words, I was sold.
Well, figuratively speaking. I finally got excited about buying a car. I test drove this ridiculous habanero orange car with tinted windows and black rims. Then I waffled in that daydream loop for just long enough for reason to creep in. It was more money than I wanted to spend, and while doing a second test drive, some guy on the highway rubbernecked. Too expensive, too flashy. I gave haggling a half-hearted attempt, but Michael had another fish on the line, so I stopped dreaming of life in an orange car.
However, Michael had steered my car search in a new direction: Cars that are fun, and within my budget. I wanted a manual, dammit. Arguably, it was silly to be so insistent when just 13% of new cars in 2020 were offered with a manual transmission. But a stick shift was a throwback to a simpler time, when people drove cars and weren't helming little spaceships. If I was going to spend all this money, maybe I could buy a car that was more than fine.
The rest of the car-buying journey is sorta mundane: I tested a few more options, then trekked to Seattle to buy an older, cheaper version of that Jetta — in a less-flashy blue. As I began to actually drive my new-to-me car, an analogy for life emerged.
Shifting gears
Driving a manual requires you to be an active participant. Your left foot needs to be ready, as does your right hand, in the event you need to shift. Shifting gears doesn’t take long, and once you’re accustomed to it, you don’t give it much thought. But I’m constantly aware things might change, and I should be ready. There are more options — downshifting vs. braking vs. shifting into neutral — and even though the technology is better these days, stopping on a steep hill still gives me a hint of anxiety. By contrast, life in an automatic feels easier, but also — to me, at least — boring. Driving is a task of getting safely from point A to point B. There are fewer requirements: Keep both hands on the wheel and brake or accelerate, as necessary.
Buying an automatic would have made more sense, but in this tiny slice of my life, after a year with plenty of ups and downs, I wanted something that didn’t quite make sense. Maybe it's a little nerve wracking at times, but it also feels like a bolder choice. (And yet, not that bold, it's a sedan with the most basic of basic features.)
I think we all have aspects of life that are fine. Not terrible, not great, could be worse and could be better. I could paint a picture of a pre-pandemic life that was perfectly fine: The job, the apartment, the friends, the weekend activities, the whole kit and caboodle. It was fine, it wasn’t always great.
How’s work? It’s fine.
In the fall, I saw a few friends with jobs that, on paper, are impressive or a career pinnacle. When I asked about work, they said: “It's fine.” They weren't being generous to a gal freshly weaned off unemployment benefits. No, I think they were being honest. At a stage of life when their careers should be peaking, they’re instead grappling with whether to ride it out — or make a move that’s risky, adds stress, and hopefully, offers more satisfaction. Adding further complication: Some have young kids.
This idea goes beyond career choices. Swap out the word “fine” for “settling” when it comes to relationships, and see how it fits. I’ve thought a lot about changing dynamics with friends — and my recent post elicited more feedback than I anticipated. Seems I’m not alone. Surely this is the stuff of an eventual midlife crisis, right?
The pandemic offered some of us an opportunity to re-evaluate and make changes. For others, the decision to make a change was made for us, and we were forced to adapt.
A life that’s better than fine
One of those “my job is fine” friends texted recently to ask what I'm up to. I gave the brief summary, including what life as a self employed gal of the world is like, and he responded: “You are much braver than I am. That level of uncertainty, aka freedom, is so alien to me I don't know how I would handle it.” It helps that the decision was forced on me, no one is depending on the money I make, and I’m in an industry where a buffet of take-as-much-as-you-like work is possible. Also, it’s arguably part of a bigger reckoning — like the car purchase — to opt for a life that’s better than fine.
There are hints other people are doing something similar. For example:
Gray divorces are exploding. Looking at you, Bill and Melinda. Older couples — the ones who presumably have been together the longest and are closest to the time they may really need that spouse — now have the highest divorce rate (about 43%). The relationship that was fine for so long just isn't anymore.
Workers are fighting back. Hiring signs are everywhere, and yet employers complain that they can’t find people who want to work. In Montana, where the minimum wage is $8.65, I saw McDonald’s touting $15 wages plus benefits. I’ve seen signs urging customers to be patient because an establishment is short-staffed. Other hints of worker empowerment: Membership in unions has ticked up and people are quitting their jobs at rates unseen since 2000.
Americans are on the move. The exodus from New York was overstated, but millions of Americans changed addresses this past year, opting for places in the South and West. An influx of new residents — escaping higher-priced places like San Francisco or Seattle or Denver — have driven up housing prices in my hometown. The median listing price now is $498,600, a whopping 29% increase from a year ago.
People are shoring up their finances. Thanks partly to those government stimulus checks and less options for spending money, some Americans improved their financial situations in the past year. The savings rate now is at nearly 15%, and has been in the double digits for over a year, a range it hasn’t been in consistently since the 1980s. And there are some other hopeful signs: People are paying off debt and investing more for retirement.
Let’s all crank up Twisted Sister and sing along: “We're not gonna take it / Oh no, we ain't gonna take it / We're not gonna take it anymore.”
Not so fast
Or we could pump the brakes on the idea that everything is great. Because, of course, not everyone has the luxury to make the above changes. If you lost your job, lost a loved one, were forced out of the workforce to care for kids, or any other variety of hardships, pandemic-induced changes probably don’t feel like an upgrade. And it seems we’re kicking some pretty big stuff down the road, to be dealt with another day:
Alcohol consumption, particularly among women, is up. There already was an alarming uptick before 2020 — and then boom, add a global pandemic to the mix. Research shows that the psychological stress related to the pandemic resulted in more booze for women, but not so much for men. America Has a Drinking Problem, as Kate Julian, recently wrote for The Atlantic. Oh, and drugs? The overdose epidemic worsened during the pandemic, and now people are dying thanks to party drugs that are laced with fentanyl.
The homelessness epidemic has worsened. There are nearly 600,000 Americans who are homeless, of which about 18% are children. That number already was going up before the pandemic, and was made worse as millions of workers lost their jobs last spring.
Crime rates are up. I heard this stat on the local news in Chicago: There have been 661 car jackings so far this year, compared with 395 in the same period of 2020. And after the deadliest year in decades for gun violence, 2021 is on pace to be worse, as The Washington Post recently reported. Google “violent crime” and your locale of choice, and odds are decent that 2021 isn’t going so well.
Wealth inequality. A booming stock market has made the rich richer in the past year, and the growing divide (even with lowly workers rebelling) doesn’t seem to be getting much better. Forget the gilded age, things are worse now than they were back then. Try this stat on for size: The ratio between CEO and median worker pay averaged 830 to 1.
Whew. There are plenty of other things — the environment, mental health, our own personal health — that have also gone from fine-ish to decidedly not-fine. On a walk with a friend recently, we talked about some of our hesitancies about life returning to “normal.” We settled on why we were nervous: Because we don't want our lives to just revert to how they were in that pre-pandemic state of fine.
Buying a car as an analogy for life
It’s practically comical that I’m now going to try to link my car buying decision with the state of this country. But here goes: At any given time we can opt for fine or more-than fine. With life returning to some semblance of “normal,” many of us will be doing this on an individual basis: Ditching the toxic habits, quitting the job, cutting ties with shitty people, finally making that hard life decision, etc. And maybe there’s hope for change on a societal level: We could become more compassionate, more civically involved, and could stop ignoring the problems around us, etc.
When faced with the decision of what life looks like post-pandemic, maybe we could all use to ask ourselves that question: “So, what do you think?” And if you need a nudge in a different direction, I know a great car salesman. His name is Michael.