Until 2020, nothing had happened to all of us at once.

The Great Depression happened to most of us, but unevenly. World War II happened to all of us, but the experience varied by which side of which border you were born on. The Cold War was supposed to be the next one. The closest it came was an October in 1962 that most of the world slept through.

Then a virus did what no war and no economy had done. Every person on the planet — every infant, every shut-in, every prime minister — was affected by the same thing in the same season. The texture varied. You lost your job, or you didn't. You lost someone, or you didn't. But the structure was identical. The world stopped at the same time and started at the same time, and the year between will be the only year for the rest of our lives in which we could all use a single noun and mean the same thing.

That's rare. Common experience is usually downstream of common geography. We don't have common geography anymore. The only common geography we have left is the planet, and the planet had never coordinated until then.

We didn't use it well. We finished the year arguing about it. The arguments became identities. The identities became tribes. The tribes became how we sorted strangers at dinner parties for the rest of the decade. The thing that should have made us less foreign to each other made us more foreign.

Something else will happen to all of us eventually. We should probably think about what we'd like to do with it.