It’s not every day you get a redo. A reset. A gift. But the thing about most immaterial gifts is you don’t realize their value until you’re faced with the possibility of losing them.

Over the past year we’ve been given the rare opportunity to pause. There’s been insurmountable tragedy, yes, but as a society, we’ve harped on the tragic so relentlessly it hardly needs recapping now. No, what’s important now is that we not forget what we’ve seen.

The great pause

The Great Pause brought us face to face with our own needs, separate from the demands of others, in a way that only desperation and fear can. We saw just how much who we are, and how we spend our time, is dictated by the insatiable environments around us. We were shown how much of our precious selves we give to the Machine and how precious little we get in return.

During the peak of the pandemic, I got so stir-crazy that I began to paint. And I mean really paint. Something I’d always done as a hobby or an afterthought suddenly became a near-daily meditative practice. It brought out a side of me that I’d always known was there but never valued. Because creativity isn’t always quantifiable. And in a capitalist, hustle-minded, “10 Ways to Become a Millionaire” society the unquantifiable is deemed worthless. So you can imagine the self-worth struggles the average American has. We’re a creative, imaginative species in a world where everything is for sale.

But art isn’t worthless. Neither is downtime or daydreaming or gardening or playing outside. They’re necessary for the well-being of humanity. We were just made to think these things meant nothing because the main person who benefits from your happiness and inner peace is you. And there’s no way to sell that. The things we were forced to lean into when we didn’t have work and social obligations to distract us—cooking, baking with family, reading, going for walks, learning new skills, spending quality time together, or even just letting ourselves go through the motions without fear of someone else judging us—these are the things worth living for. More than that, these are life. Which explains why the world speeding back up to its usual breakneck pace and the ubiquitous social and professional obligations crashing back down feel a little like death.

The Great Pause let us see. And I speak only for myself when I say now I’m having a hard time unseeing.

What have we seen?

What am I supposed to think when I’ve just spent an entire year working from home, only to be forced back into the office the moment vaccines became available? Sure, human interaction is irreplaceable, but we don’t even have the option to alternate between working from home and coming in? We’ve all just seen that there’s another option, though. Why aren’t we taking it seriously?

It’s always been hard to not have a job. It’s always been scary and precarious and dreadful. Being unemployed didn’t get harder in 2020, it just got more widespread. So when the government began increasing the payout amount of unemployment benefits to nearly triple what they had been and stimulus checks started rolling out, it certainly made me pose the question, “So you could’ve done that the whole time?” Because of financial destitution under the current system, people have been struggling and dying on the inside long before their bodies gave out for decades and this whole time, there was more help to go around? We could’ve paused evictions and student loan payments the whole time?

We’ve reached a fever pitch on the subject of wage stagnation over the past 10 years and have always been told raising wages would not only be short-sighted, but irresponsible and destructive. Then last year we saw the Fed pump billions of dollars into keeping businesses, including small businesses, afloat. Only to watch those same businesses turn around a lay off vulnerable staff and pocket the money for safekeeping. So scarcity in one of Earth’s richest countries is, as I suspected, a myth.

The Every Man managed to learn just enough about the stock market to flip the entire game on its head and turn the capitalist predators into prey. And once Wall Street got wind of the seismic shift happening to the power structure, heads rolled. Why? Because the Every Man discovering their own innate power—a natural side effect of having the time (quarantine) and resources (the internet) to get curious—threatens the hoarding of wealth that’s been bleeding the middle class dry since the 80s.

What have we learned?

When given the chance, we have access to the same almighty tool the aristocracy has used since the beginning of time: leisure. The freedom to do nothing but what we want to do. Oh, the greatness that gives birth to.

What gift were you given last year that you would’ve never had the opportunity to lean into otherwise? Could be something as small as keeping a clean house for longer stretches of time. Or it could be as huge as finally having the time to sit with yourself or your therapist to work through wounds that require focus and dedication to heal.

These gifts we’ve discovered, they naturally give rise to an inner personal power that, if allowed to grow, could shift entire cultures. The gift of empathy and shared struggle is a particularly monumental one, as it gave rise to worldwide solidarity in response to the injustice that was George Floyd’s murder. Would we have done that if we didn’t have the time? I could give one million examples of what the past 17 months have done for our sense of reality, our sense of what’s possible and our sense of our place within it all. The point, however, is this: The curtain’s been pulled back and now we know there is no wizard, willing all of this to be so by writing the social order into stone.

That’s what we’ve learned. It’s all optional. And together, we have the power to create a new world that works better for all of us. I wonder, though, do we have the will? I’d say that remains to be seen. But we have been shown things you only get to see once in a generation, at least. Once in an era, really. We cannot, nor should we, unsee it.

Now. What do we do about it?