What we owe 2020-somethings

IN JANUARY 2020, LUIS WAS 21 AND BEGINNING THE second semester of his junior year at a public university in New York City. He lived with family in Queens, and everyone pitched in to make ends meet.

- ERIC KLINENBERG

His father was retired. His mother collected disability insurance. His older sister, with whom he shared a bedroom, was a veterinary technician. Luis worked at a law firm. The apartment was crowded, loud, and sometimes crazy. But in New York City, what isn't? Luis was usually out in the world, anyway, because when you're in your 20s, the world is yours.

When COVID-19 hit, Luis' universe suddenly narrowed. No school. No job. No parties. No friends. Soon, his whole family had the virus. It was scary, because by then Queens was one of the most dangerous places on the planet, with mobile morgues standing outside overflowing hospitals. A few weeks earlier, Luis was looking at graduate schools and thinking about a new life in a new city. Now his main goal was to survive.

Luis was one of the 33 college students and recent graduates whom Isabelle Caraluzzi (an NYU doctoral student) and I interviewed for a book about the year 2020. They were a diverse group, so it was striking to find so many commonalities in their pandemic experience: Stress, anxiety, and a generalized insecurity from which they have yet to be relieved. Deep uncertainty about the nature of the post-pandemic world. Feeling obligated to make enormous sacrifices for the good of others, with no one in power ever naming, recognizing, honoring, or compensating their losses. Losing faith - not only in the core institutions that anchor society, but in the idea of society itself.

By summer 2020, Luis had fully recovered his sense of smell and taste. "But I lost everything," he reported. His family, once stable, was impoverished, relying on food pantries. After George Floyd was murdered, he joined in protests that lasted through the summer. "It was connected to the pandemic," Luis said. "It was boiling over at that point, this kind of mistreatment."