I wouldn’t call it a breaking point, necessarily, but it feels like we’ve reached a moment in the pandemic when things are starting to change. There’s been a shift, a dawning that normal isn’t just going to come back. That things will not simply get better anytime soon.

While rationally it’s been clear for quite some time that life won’t fully resume until we have a vaccine, there’d still been some wiggle room to play games with yourself: by Memorial Day, by the Fourth, by September, by Election Day it might be different. Confronted now as we are, though, with the onset of the second half of the year, and no significant progress having been made toward mitigating the threat of the virus, many of us are having to come to terms, for the first time, with the looming pandemic long-haul…

For me, strangest of all has been my dawning realization that December 31 — the latest benchmark I’d unconsciously picked to stake my hopes upon — doesn’t mean any more than Memorial Day or Labor Day had at one point. Just because experts can all but assure “we will not reach pre-corona life” this year doesn’t mean that magically things will be like they were on January 1, 2020 by January 1, 2021. By one estimate “the U.S. won’t return to its pre-COVID-19 normal until August 2021”; by another, it won’t be until “2022.” In actuality, no one can really have any idea when normal will resume, or what it will even look like when it does.