The day we will all finally be able to safely leave our homes will also be the day we will no longer need to. COVID-19 has dramatically accelerated the process of making nearly every possible good or service available at our homes.
We now have available to us more home entertainment options, and of a higher quality, than ever before. Many of us have become aware of the many ways in which teaching and learning can take place at home. Content migration processes that were expected to take years, if not decades, have been condensed into a few months or weeks. Healthcare, too, is going through an accelerated process of digitization, and even the lumbering machinery of government has been forced into an accelerated process of digitization.
And so the question will increasingly become: If we will no longer need to leave our homes, what are the purposes for which we will want to leave our homes? The bar for opening the door and going outside is going to be set much higher. The idea of our home as a sort of base from which we emerge into the world every day will increasingly become obsolete. A new presumption will emerge whereby staying at home is the daily default.
Pre-COVID-19 the ability to work from home on certain days was something to negotiate with the employer. In the post-COVID-19 world, the home will be the default workplace, and prospective employers will be required to negotiate your coming to “work”.
K-12 schools will see the unbundling of their three major services: mass babysitting, socialization, and actual learning, as the line between school, extracurricular activities, and camp might blur.
And what will these developments mean for gender relations when more men work from home and children spend more time learning at home? Will it serve to further equalize the status of men and women, as both establish themselves equally in the home—or will our roles become stratified in new ways?
The desire for human contact will remain unchanged, and so, one of the most valuable services we will all seek is curated, high-quality social encounters, which will extend from its current niches in luxury networking conferences to become the norm by which we make new friends and acquaintances.
The human need for nature will also remain as strong as ever, and questions about who controls nature, and our equality of access thereto, will become a larger part of our politics.
We are now observing an acceleration of the process of creating a new, more private indoor ecology. As investments, our homes will become even more important than they are today. We will invest more in the technological infrastructures of our homes, and in every aspect of comfort and productivity.
With the pandemic still raging, it is natural that we long for the day when we can freely leave our homes. But in coming years, once that original sense of relief ebbs, we will increasingly ask ourselves why leaving was ever necessary.