Nothing new or normal in new normal

It’s sometimes hard to remember that the current global health crisis is not the first time the whole world has been rocked to its core. It certainly feels that way for the vast majority of us, because we’ve never lived through anything even close to this kind of upheaval.

Others have, of course. Consider the late stages of the First World War, when leveraged technology facilitated killing at a mass scale with unprecedented efficiency. It also happened to be the entry point of an influenza pandemic, the Spanish flu. That is when we see the expression “the new normal” enter common usage.

“To consider the problems before us, we must divide our epoch into three periods: that of war, that of transition, that of the new normal,” American inventor Henry Alexander Wise Wood wrote in 1918.

The expression has been used after every major historical trauma since then, from worldwide tragedies to geographically specific incidents.

Think about how difficult it would have been for returning soldiers and their families to acclimate to their postwar lives after being separated for so long, after being on the front lines of battle day in and day out. Imagine how strange it must have been to adjust to the return of the supply chain after years on rations.

Applying “the new normal” to more recent events, we all remember how foreign policy, border control, travel and more changed in the aftermath of 9/11, as well as how slow and painful the economic recovery has been since the 2008 recession. All these periods of time qualify as the new normal, to apply Wood’s definition.

In COVID-19 terms, no sector is immune. Health care, education, hospitality, transportation, tourism, finance … the fallout might look different depending on the industry, but just try to find a business or organization that hasn’t had to adapt to a pandemic world (OK, today, we are more likely to hear “pivot” than “adapt,” but that is another Bizspeak column).

Some sectors were decimated and will be slow to rebound; other industries thrived during the months of lockdown (e-commerce and delivery services, we’re looking at you). But every single company and organization has felt the effects of the past 18 months, and many of the changes we’ve had to make are here to stay.

Offices are the perfect example: remote- or hybrid-working arrangements aren’t going anywhere. Physical spaces will be permanently altered to account for disease transmission. Video conferencing is here to stay (even if Zoom doesn’t). Vaccines and all that go with them will be top of mind for years. That’s the new normal we’re up against.

But here’s the thing: There’s really nothing normal about a world in the aftermath of an intense international event. Experts say that we apply that language to make things feel less turbulent, but that we must acknowledge and grieve what we’ve lost — on all fronts.

On the other hand, every generation has its upheavals and the new normal may be a clichéd acknowledgment that things change. They always change. Hence, there’s a lot of backlash against latching onto the new normal as a way to capture our time in history. There are widespread calls for people to stop using the term to describe the COVID-19 chapter.

Painting what we’re left with as “normal” also fails to acknowledge the lived experiences of so many. Instead, the suggestion is that we reframe what’s to come as “new” — a new model, a new standard, a new paradigm — but nothing close to “normal.” Trying to pretend otherwise just prolongs the heartache, and we’ve all no doubt had enough of that.