It took a global pandemic and stay-at-home orders for 1.5 billion people worldwide, but something is finally occurring to us: The future we thought we expected may not be the one we get.
We know that things will change; how they’ll change is a mystery. To envision a future altered by coronavirus, Quartz asked dozens of experts for their best predictions on how the world will be different in five years.
Below is an answer from Jennifer Hill Booker, a chef based in Atlanta, Georgia. Her modern take on Southern cuisine, combined with her training at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts, has inspired her two cookbooks.
Here in the US, everyone wants their own space, so long as it somewhere other than the one they grew up in. Owning your own home is seen as a rite of passage and the first BIG step in the journey of becoming a successful independent person. Extended families—mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents—living in the same house is looked down on and seen as a failure to leave the nest, a failure to live the American Dream.
Covid-19 has changed that. Speaking from personal experience, the inability to see my sister, hug my mother, and check in on my father was paralyzing. I couldn’t travel to see them so I imagined the worst. Every. Single. Day. I constantly thought that, if they lived closer, I could visit them, I could check on them, I could take care of them. So my mission in a post-Covid world is to have my extended family not so extended. We may not end up living in the same house, but definitely in the same city, hopefully on the very same block.
To read more New Normal answers, click here.