When scattered reports of a new virus appeared in late 2019, my first response was not fear but a difficult-to-describe sense of unreality.
Not because the event was minor—quite the opposite. It was so large that neither I nor many of my peers had experienced a comparable global shock. War, epidemic and total shutdown had long existed for us in history books, documentaries and conceptual discussions. The words had weight, but no lived scale.
At first, the outbreak felt distant. Daily figures, maps and curves resembled a constantly refreshed broadcast that could not be touched. Sitting at home watching news, briefings and experts, you could imagine it all happening beyond the screen, separated from your own life by a pane of safety glass.
That distance did not last.
Abstract statistics quickly became events involving people we knew. Some could not obtain medical care in time. Others died so suddenly that there was no chance for a proper farewell. I finally understood that this was not simply “something wrong with the world.” The assumption that tomorrow would begin normally was no longer secure.
Our generation found itself living on two scales at once.
One was immense and global: a systemic event beyond ordinary measurement. The other was private and concrete: family, bodies, breathing and farewells. The two scales stood side by side without explaining one another. They simply exerted pressure together.
Against this background, I gradually recognized how unusual my own position was.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I was still working at Ford. At least within my team and what I could observe then, there was no organizational chaos: no layoffs, salaries continued, and work that could be done remotely moved online quickly. A global organization shifted to remote collaboration in a remarkably short time. Management communicated frequently about supply chains, policy judgments, risk assessments and different countries’ responses.
I worked on supply-chain recovery. For the first time, I clearly saw how synchronized the pre-pandemic world had been: a small, unremarkable factory in Dongguan stopping work could affect the restart of a production line in Detroit. The pandemic revealed both resilience and vulnerability. Suppliers and production lines remained interdependent, but shutdowns, disrupted transport and mismatched restart schedules amplified shocks across the network.
The pandemic did not simply destroy the system. It pressed a pause button that could not be released everywhere at once.
Over the following two-plus years, countries, institutions and societies restarted life at very different speeds. Our astonishment at Western confusion and mockery of “herd immunity” obscured something more important: our idea of a global village had probably overstated its stability.
For a time, the response of foreign companies seemed almost ideal. Supplies, allowances and psychological support continued through various channels. Some firms even entered a faintly absurd competition over who distributed more and cared more attentively.
Against a backdrop of disaster, this produced a hard-to-name contradiction.
I lived in a residential neighborhood at the city’s edge, with low buildings spaced apart. Camphor trees and southern magnolias planted years earlier had grown broad crowns. In summer, their branches met above the roads. On clear days, sunlight filtered through the leaves, scattering small, slowly moving patches across the ground.
Most neighbors knew one another. We visited, exchanged greetings and usually settled matters privately, with little need for outside coordination. During the pandemic, I became newly conscious of how this physical setting and these relationships made everyday life appear exceptionally steady.
It was also then that I began clearing out the basement.
This had not been planned. It happened naturally after life’s rhythm was forcibly slowed. The basement held years of accumulated objects: boxes left temporarily after a move, obsolete equipment never disposed of, things once too difficult to throw away and never opened again. They occupied space quietly, without demanding attention.
The process was surprisingly unhurried.
I brought things out one by one, wiped them down, sorted them and decided what to keep. The air was slightly damp, but ventilation soon brought in freshness. Without large windows or direct sunlight, it was dim, yet everything felt manageable. Outside, the world was in confusion, argument and uncertainty. Inside this largely protected space, I slowly and deliberately restored my own order, sometimes scarcely knowing whether it was day or night.
I did not then understand what the activity meant.
Only later did I recognize a kind of thermostatically protected existence. It was not exceptional personal calm. The basic conditions of my life had not yet been seriously shaken, leaving room to convert anxiety into sorting, organizing and repair.
The basement became a miniature model of my reality.
The wider world was developing cracks, but here everything could still be controlled, organized and repositioned. It encouraged an illusion: perhaps enough patience and internal adjustment could solve every problem.
The feeling was real, but conditional. The thermostat had to keep working.
Later, I began to understand that this unusually stable protective layer may have made changes seem slow to arrive—while leaving them difficult to reverse once they did.