Essentiality

I wanted to use that title for a thought essay on the COVID pandemic and our President and Governors declaring which of us are essential, and which can be shut down or quarantined. I wondered in my thoughts about whether trying to become essential was causing depression, or whether those who were deemed essential were unhappy to be so.


Taking that a bit further, don’t we all have a deep desire to be essential? We want to matter to someone, to those closest to us and beyond. We want to be important to some great work, to our children and our careers. I know I want to be essential, I sure don’t want to use my time and gifts in areas to be deemed unessential do I? Or maybe I do? Maybe I do want to intertwine the non-essentiality of arts and hobbies and humor into a life that is altogether too controlled by outcomes.


So in March of 2020 when Indiana Governor Holcomb began issuing Executive Orders to shut down interaction in an effort to “bend the curve” on hospitals and the use of ventilators, we heard him use the term essential. Essential workers were the only ones who should go to work, the rest of us should stay home. It was like a joke bomb exploded and everyone thought the same thing at the same time … essential? Aren’t we all essential? How does one choose between the essentiality of a grocery worker and the non-essentiality of a real estate agent? Who makes that call? Does any method of constitutional construct involve an arbitrary or even well thought out process to determine who is essential?


So my brain whirred and I passed on the chance to develop the thought further until this morning, and may have to put it down again soon for a future rumination. Essentiality. As humans I would posit that we all want to be considered essential. As parents we deem all our children essential. For politicians essentiality drives the desire to run multiple times. As business owners there has to be some feeling of essentiality or why take the risks, the stress, the pain? It was like a kick to the stomach of so many employees when they found out that for whatever reason their career path wasn’t essential. Then home, for 8-12 weeks of fear and news mongering, for statistics and charts and curves. Masks and social distances, amazon deliveries daily and anxiety increases. File for unemployment on the same day that your employer files for PPP. Hope that you get that unemployment before the money in the savings account, checking account or credit card available balance runs out. Think about borrowing some money, postponing bill payments, and cutting expenses.


Was essentiality better? Well the essential employees got to work, but got to worry about catching COVID-19 and taking it home to their families. The front line workers were the most worried and some even started to make wartime demands for hazard pay and bonuses. Maybe being essential wasn’t better.


Why weren’t we all essential? Why doesn’t our government hand out checks to people anyway just to meet the basics of human existence? A basic income concept has been floated, and is it really all that bad an idea? Is it socialism just to take care of the least of these?
Mind wandering can go on too long, so some bullets for further development:

• We all want to be essential to someone, to something
• Our guage of essentiality does not necessarily match others’ 
• Being essential might mean you work when someone else does not 
• The front line of essential can be dangerous and create bitterness toward those not essential
• A parent doesn’t want their child so essential that they are in danger 
• God deems us all essential  
• COVID taught us some things about ourselves and how long we would endure to choose pain  
• Essentiality anxiety is real, loneliness is real, depression is real
• Essentiality anxiety may have more long term negative impact than the pandemic itself  

Essentiality - how essential do you want to be? To whom?