CORONAVIRUS | THE BIG IDEA
PHOTO: OLIVER WHANGHad COVID-19 not canceled
National Geographic’s summer
internships, Oliver Whang would
have been in Washington, D.C.,
working on our podcast, Overheard
at National Geographic. Instead,
he’s at home in New Jersey, free-
lance writing and preparing for his
senior year at Princeton, where he’ll
be news director for the campus
public radio station, WPRB.I WORRY THAT THE EXPERI-
ENCE OF THIS PANDEMIC
MIGHT CONVINCE PEOPLE
THAT WE CAN KEEP LIVING
JUST FINE WHILE PHYSICALLY
ISOLATED FROM OTHERS.the pandemic, I spent some Saturday nights alone
in my room, face lit by the glowing screens of my
laptop and phone, chatting with friends online and
watching sports highlights.
After college, I’ll enter an increasingly virtual work-
force. Computers are—or will be—replacing humans
across the economy: bankers, truck drivers, factory
workers. Many of the jobs that aren’t disappearing are
moving online. I assume that most of my friends will
work in professions that involve staring at computer
screens or talking on phones. As a writer, I could end
up working from home every day. I’m already spend-
ing half my life online, so that prospect doesn’t feel all
that jarring. Still, it’s a pretty strange reality.
FOR MANY YOUNG PEOPLE LIKE ME—with healthy
bodies and outsize beliefs of invincibility—the
primary fear hasn’t been that we will contract the
virus. What we fear more is the profound uncer-
tainty of our future. There are a lot of frightening
possibilities; new ones seem to emerge every day.
But I think the scariest possibility—beyond this
disease never going away—is that this ubiquity of
virtual living might never go away either.
I worry that the experience of this pandemic might
convince people that we can keep living just fine while
physically isolated from others. I find myself slipping
toward that reality. There are entire days when I don’t
leave the house, when my only human contact is
with my brother as we await a turn in the bathroom.
What if this level of isolation is the future? In this
environment, something clearly is lost. I’m sure of
it, because I feel different when I experience things
directly rather than virtually.
In some ways, being apart brought Ethan and me
closer together. Once we were at colleges in different
states, we began calling each other. I can’t remember
who called who first, and we never talked about
emotions, or about girls, or about philosophy. We’d
just give little updates: “I haven’t slept in 24 hours.”
“I just killed a huge burger.”
I’d never say this to him now—it’s too cheesy—
but it’s true: The distance allowed us to figure out
what we actually like about each other. So we gained
something by crossing the miles virtually.
There’s something you can’t simulate, though,
about the physical presence of another human
being. No screen will ever replace the feeling of
an arm around your shoulders. At the end of mylong-distance chats with Ethan, he’d hang up, and I’d
be alone again in my room, staring at a blank screen.
My fear is that, going forward, some of us will
never completely come out of self-quarantine; that
dread and uncertainty will cause us to lose part of
our physical connection to the world. The qualia.
ETHAN AND I ARE living together again for now, back
in our childhood home. We are forced together—
along with my mother, father, sister, older brother
and his girlfriend—just as the rest of the world is
being forced apart. Proximity with my twin isn’t
bothersome anymore. We stay up late playing video
games, cracking jokes, belly-laughing softly so we
don’t wake others. It’s nice, not being alone.
We still rarely talk about serious topics. When I
told Ethan about Mary’s Room, he just shrugged:
“Yeah, I guess it makes sense.” I was relieved. Ethan
often makes fun of my philosophizing. I’ll go on and
on, confident that I’m exposing some deeper truth,
and he’ll say, “That’s just stupid, dude.”
But our relationship isn’t about what’s said; it’s
about being connected. In the spring we bleached our
hair together, in the same sink, turning it from black
to almost white. I don’t really know why we did it—it
was Ethan’s idea. We look the same now, but different.
On a warm night a few weeks into the pandemic,
we walked out to the train tracks behind our house
and tried to balance on the thin metal rails, as we did
sometimes when we were kids. Ethan was much better
at this than I was. I kept falling off the side, losing my
balance; Oliver the Western Engine, derailed.
Ethan, though, could keep going for minutes at a
time. Occasionally, we’d end up next to each other
and walk forward for a moment, together. The way
was dark ahead of us, a little scary. But some kind
of instinct kept us going, and we moved ahead on
parallel tracks. jWfrom left) poses hang (second
with fellow
staffers of radio station WPRB.NatGeoBooks @NatGeI AVAILABLE THIS FALL WHEREVTHE BOUQUET. TH
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