What frustrates me is the extent to which 2020, a true trainwreck of a year, has sapped my idealism. I’ve been shielded from the worst effects of the pandemic in so many ways — no one should write a navel-gazing column about this election without pointing out that 167,000 Americans are dead, and that number is going up daily — but even I am so profoundly desperate for a return to something like normalcy. Some predicted this when Trump was elected: They said that the badness and the weirdness would be so severe, that they would come in such unrelenting waves, that people would cry uncle and stop caring about anything but making it stop.

Jesse Singal, The Prospect Of Normalcy Is So Seductive Right Now - Singal-Minded