The Absence of the Incidental
One glance at the calendar on my wall reminds me of what might ironically be the most unexpected personal outcome of pandemic social isolation: predictability. The weekdays carry a litany of scheduled events. Zoom call, 10:00am; emails to be sent by 4:00pm, meet friends online for a game, 7:30pm. Weekends are more of the same. Pre-planned grocery store trips carefully coordinated with the shortened library hours to pick up a book while ensuring I have time for an at-home yoga session before dinner. Attempting to be a good citizen by strictly following public health measures—social distancing, mask wearing, and staying in when I don’t have to go out—has made the past 11 months less of a journey and more of an assembly line of standardized daily activities. None of this is to say that I don’t have unstructured time, but the coronavirus seems to have sapped more than just my willingness to tolerate crowded spaces. It has neutered my spontaneity. And I don’t think I’m the only one.
Limited hours, limited options, and limited social opportunities have turned what has been an objectively chaotic time—GameStop stock’s rise and fall, capitol riots, presidential inauguration, and new Covid variants all surfaced within January 2021—and transformed it into a period of seeming monotony with mere blips of interesting (or frightening) stimuli. As a result the pandemic has charged people up to seek a multitude of experiences denied by social distancing. But it isn’t just planned outings canceled by the coronavirus, it is the unexpected interactions and pleasures inherent in walking out into the world and interacting with other people that we have missed out on for nearly a year. We crave the unintentional and the incidental as an antidote to isolation. Creators who can deliver experiences that engage both safety and exciting uncertainty will satiate the part of us that thirsts for variety and relishes in the randomness of human life. Many have predicted a return to the “Roaring Twenties” after the pandemic wanes, but cooped up consumers will want more than decadence.[1] We’ll want unexpected experiences that make for good stories.
PANDEMIC IN THE PAST
In an attempt to wrap my head around pandemic living, I turned to a book produced during an even more violent time of marauding pathogens and high mortality. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio was written from 1349-1351, during the height of the most famous pandemic in western history, The Black Death, in which roughly one third of Europe’s population succumbed to the disease. Boccaccio’s narrative is structured around ten young adults who escape the ravages of the plague as it takes over their home city of Florence, Italy. As they travel to different isolated estates across the countryside, avoiding the densely infected cities, they take turns telling stories on a variety of topics. Ten stories are told per day for a total of ten days, making one hundred stories in all. Perhaps surprisingly, the stories themselves are not particularly grandiose in their construction, and very few deal with the grim subject matter of the Black Death. Instead they tend toward the comedic, heroic, clever, and romantic, all told with common language and lightheartedness.
Despite hundreds of existing scholarly interpretations of The Decameron pontificating on everything from its religious symbolism to its gendered lenses, in the pandemic context of my reading, the stories resonated in a way I hadn’t anticipated. In Boccaccio’s writing I felt not just his commentary on late medieval social norms or Italian politics, but a longing for what he missed during the plague years: the opportunities to be spontaneous in leisure and clever in commerce, the thrill of flirtatious eye contact across a crowded room with a potential romantic partner, and the call to adventure even when the destination is unknown. Indeed, the Black Death must have been quite difficult for Boccaccio, a man who, though unlucky in love, prided himself on his charms with women and indulged in a variety of earthly pleasures.[2]
Not all of the stories in The Decameron are pleasant, nor are they meant to be, but many exhibit a lust for the consequences of human interaction that, even if unintended, make life worth telling stories about.[3] Desire and pleasure, sexual or otherwise, appear as frequent motivators for Boccaccio, and when acted upon often kickstart a winding series of events the characters can never fully anticipate. Some stories chronicle extended ordeals of serendipity and misadventure, as is the case with merchant Landolfo Rufolo who turns to piracy in hopes of regaining his lost wealth, only to escape a shipwreck by floating to safety on a chest that unbeknownst to him, is filled with precious stones. Other stories tell of humorous incidental encounters in daily social life, such as when Madonna Oretta’s path crosses with a hapless knight who generously gives her a ride on his horse, but tells tales so poorly that she prefers to walk instead. If Landolfo or Madonna Oretta had stayed home or practiced social distancing, their stories would be hardly as compelling.
Apart from the coincidence-filled adventures and vignettes of clever wit, Boccaccio’s writing shows that a time of stress and isolation also threatens to distance us from the raw human goodness that we are all capable of when we come together. Stories that tell of a benevolent king helping a sick girl, or of the kindness of those who help reunite two long lost lovers despite their differences in social class reinforce the author’s opening words to The Decameron: “It is a matter of humanity to show compassion for those who suffer, and although it is fitting for everyone to do so, it is especially desirable in those who, having need of comfort, have received it from others…”[4]
LONELINESS AND VARIETY
Over six-hundred-fifty years ago, Boccaccio understood the power of human interaction and lamented a world in which we can’t freely comfort one another. Unlike in the fourteenth century, however, digital technology and the fast pace of modern life today has left many people feeling isolated from one another. This is a problem the Covid-19 pandemic has only made worse. According to Scientific American, one 2019 study as many as two-thirds of respondents reported feelings of loneliness during the course of that year.[5] Studies conducted during 2020 show increases in reported loneliness by as much as twenty or thirty percent.[6]
A sense of solidarity and reconsideration of the importance of relationships may have initially spurred feelings of connection, facilitated by Zoom happy hours and family calls over FaceBook Portals. But the novelty of technology is wearing off and internet-based friendships are running out of steam. The consistency and monotony of the pandemic has left many, especially young people, wondering how to maintain a connection that is actually meaningful and fulfilling when we assume everyone is constantly stressed out.[7] Perhaps this is why Boccaccio has his young storytellers spend so much time not discussing the plague.
When we encounter fewer people, and engage less with those we do encounter, we limit our exposure to the variety of social circumstances which trigger interest in the world around us. Though the severity of the Covid-19 crisis may emphasize the absence of the unpredictable, the human thirst for it is nothing new. Variability has long been recognized as a motivator for consumption by psychologists and designers. The anticipatory excitement of variability has been central to the success of many products: from baseball cards to Instagram, and Happy Meals to scratch off lottery tickets. As Nir Eyal explains in his 2014 book Hooked variability is what holds our attention over time in a world replete with ever-repeating patterns. In Eyal’s analysis, variable rewards, or the regular occurrence of unpredictable associations of positive feelings, are essential to why some technologies and products are so habit-forming, while others are easy to put down and forget.
This is not to say that consumers will crave addictive technology that drip feeds random rewards. Many have had access to those throughout the pandemic in the form of social media. The point is rather that randomness elicits a sort of joy that can’t be replicated in a world of worn paths between the bed, the couch, the computer, and the grocery store. An incidental encounter out in the world can take many forms. It might be seeing with an old friend by chance at a basketball game, or perhaps the unplanned sampling of a strange local delicacy while on vacation. Maybe it is the cautious handshake following an interview with a potential employer, or the afternoon spent browsing at a record store to find what might become your next favorite artist.
There are innumerable other examples in which we embrace uncertainty and incidental experience, but that is only half the point. The other is where those chance encounters may take us. Perhaps we reconnect with that old friend and they recommend a life-changing book; perhaps the rush of flavor from a foreign meal inspires more adventurous travel the following year; perhaps making a good impression gets you the job in which you finally feel you can be yourself; or perhaps discovering a new band leads you to a crowded concert where you catch the eye of a future romantic partner.
THE STEP AND THE STORY
Stephen Hiltner’s recent recounting of his solo travels across America in 2020 succinctly captures how the incidental and random human connections have been drained from our reality by the threat of the coronavirus: “Even in the casual places where travelers still gathered — gas stations, coffee shops, rest areas — there were generally no offhand conversations, no sharing of experiences, no sense of spontaneous connection. Strangers transacted and, still strangers, went their separate ways.”[8] With fewer conversations, shared experiences, and spontaneous connections out in the world, we generate fewer stories in our lives. For now, for me, this is an acceptable cost to be safe and lower the coronavirus infection rate. But it is not a cost we can bear forever.
As a document conceived out of pandemic anxiety, The Decameron is a celebration of the opportunities and uncertainties lost to a life of predictability and isolation. Writing six centuries after Boccaccio, J.R.R. Tolkien, who lived through the 1918-1920 flu pandemic, made a similar connection. Though written from the perspective of chronic worrier Bilbo Baggins, Tolkein’s oft-quoted line expresses the inherent conflict in seeking the unexpected. “‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,’” Bilbo told his nephew, “‘You step into the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no telling where you might be swept off to.’”[9] Tolkien is right. There is risk in heading out into the world. But he also knew there is no other feeling quite like being swept away by a moment: the first step in a story worth telling. After the pandemic relents and we can safely pursue a new normal, the serendipitous and fortuitous may provide just the salve to heal the scars of safety and routine. Until then, the story of how we survive the coming months will be written by all of us.
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[1] Steve LeVine, “Will the 2020s Really Become the Next Roaring Twenties?” Jan. 17, 2021. Marker.medium.com. https://marker.medium.com/will-the-2020s-really-become-the-next-roaring-twenties-5a05ce995499
[2] Wayne A. Rebhorn, “Introduction” in Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. Wayne A. Rebhorn (New York: Norton, 2013), xxxii. Jessica Levenstein, “Out of Bounds: Passion and Plague in Boccaccio’s Decameron,” Italica vol. 73:3 (Autumn 1996), 313-335. See also: The Decameron Fourth Day in Perspective, ed. Michael Sherberg (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020).
[3] Readers of The Decameron should bear in mind that this is a medieval text in which some occurrences may be unsettling to modern readers. For example, while women are given agency within Boccaccio’s stories, their roles within the social order, and how they are treated would be deeply troubling today.
[4] Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. Wayne A. Rebhorn (New York: Norton, 2013),1..
[5] Kasley Killam, “In the Midst of the Pandemic, Loneliness has Leveled Out,” Aug. 18, 2020, Scientificamerican.com. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/in-the-midst-of-the-pandemic-loneliness-has-leveled-out/
[6] Julianne Holt-Lunstad, “A pandemic of social isolation?” World Psychology vol. 20:1 (Feb. 2021), 55-56. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wps.20839
[7] Amy Francombe, “The death of small talk: how the pandemic has made us re-evaluate our friendships,” Jan. 19, 2021, Theface.com. https://theface.com/society/coronavirus-pandemic-uk-lockdown-community-mental-health
[8] Stephen Hiltner, “A Long, Lonesome Look at America,” Jan 11, 2021 Nytimes.com https://www-nytimes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/01/11/travel/a-long-lonesome-look-at-america.amp.html
[9] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 72.
