Post-Pandemic Culture Shock

The coronavirus pandemic has created a new kind of culture shock. It has affected essential and highly personal elements of many people’s lives within their own environments. A culture shock of this magnitude has not occurred since WWII. When the pandemic ends, societies will be quite different from what they were in the pre-coronavirus era.

In past decades, citizens of Western societies lived their lives and mapped out their futures more or less in line with the expectation of a slowly changing progression from past to future. Individuals might have experienced events that radically changed their lives for the worse—for instance, a serious illness. But such events mainly influenced personal environments. They had hardly any impact on society at large.

The term “culture shock” was coined in the 1950s to describe the experience of people who found themselves disoriented when they went abroad. Immigrants, for example, arrived in societies with unfamiliar cultures and often found adaptation difficult. The same could happen to students who went abroad to far-away universities. Even tourists who visited a country for a short time could experience shock at the country’s radically different culture.

 
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Πηγή: besacenter.org