But emotionally, the near future feels uncertain again. Just a few months ago, I felt like the rest of the year was easier to visualize. Now a light fog seems to have descended, similar to the denser one that obscured the future for the first year of the pandemic. I’m back to feeling a mild sense of the “horizonlessness”—the lack of a firm reference point in the future—that was pervasive last year.

Even some experts are surprised by the swerve the pandemic has taken. Before Delta, Andrew Noymer, a public-health professor at UC Irvine, wasn’t expecting a significant resurgence of the virus—or a need to re-mask—until the fall. Earlier this summer, “I was out there saying that it’s okay to take off your mask,” Noymer told me. “And here we are seven weeks later—there’s Delta, and guess who’s masking at the grocery store again, even though he’s fully vaccinated? This guy. I feel the same whiplash.”

The particular cruelty of this reversal is that the state of the pandemic had seemed to be genuinely improving. “Interestingly, it’s often when things are getting better that people get restless and impatient,” Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioral science and marketing at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, told me. “They can’t reach their goal soon enough.”