What is it, exactly, that we keep going off in search of?

The global pandemic is reminding us about what Voltaire wrote: Work saves us from three great evils--boredom, vice, and need.  Many of the suddenly jobless are worried about their needs, while those with jobs or money in the bank wonder how they will spend the hours and days that stretch before them.

The novel coronavirus has hit the pause button.  "And it has raised a question we have rarely had the courage to ask ourselves: what is it, exactly, that we keep going off in search of?"

Recall that old joke about the World Bank expert going to Bangladesh?  A World Bank poverty expert goes to Bangladesh and finds a poor twenty-something man simply lying under a few trees during a mid-afternoon.

"Why don't you work?" he asks.

"What for?"

"You can earn more money"

"Ok, what will I do with the money?"

"You can send your children to good colleges"

"Sounds good.  But, after that?"

"You can retire and travel to different places"

"That sounds exciting.  But, what will I do after that?"

"You can say you have had a great life, and simply lie down by a lake and enjoy it all."

The Bangladeshi is confused now. "But, that is what I am doing even now!"

In the sterile pursuit of bullshit jobs, we had no time for family or friends, nor with a moment to just stand and stare.  For what?

Olga Tokarczuk writes about that maniacal life which has now been upended by COVID-19.  She writes, "It has shown us that our frenetic movements imperil the world. And it has raised a question we have rarely had the courage to ask ourselves: what is it, exactly, that we keep going off in search of?"

Writers like Tokarczuk need to help us out by thinking for us and distilling the essence of what life is about it.  She adds in that essay:

We believe we are staying home, reading books and watching television, but, in fact, we are readying ourselves for a battle over a new reality that we cannot even imagine, slowly coming to understand that nothing will ever be the same.

Nothing will ever be the same!

Tokarczuk ends her essay with this:

Before our eyes, the smoke is dispersing from the civilizational paradigm that has shaped us over the past two hundred years: that we are the masters of creation, that we can do anything, that the world belongs to us. A new time draws near.