What the View from Your Window is Really Showing Us
February 2020, I decided in my journal, had been a bit “whack”. I declared to myself that March would be calmer; quieter. Little did I know.
On March 17, I saw the first hit to my business.
By my daughter’s birthday on March 22, plans to celebrate at a local restaurant were replaced with Uber Eats, and I’d lost about 25% of my monthly business income.
Like many others, I scrambled to adjust, reframing my thinking about the future, plans for travel; about my daughter’s schooling, my work, how I spend my time — everything.
A few new habits and rituals helped me to steady my horizon again. Zoom calls with friends and family, rediscovering long stretches of time to simply lounge about, reading or writing; daily walks, and in my online world, new, positive Facebook Groups helped to counter the alarming news flooding all of our feeds.
One of those Groups was View From My Window. 1.7 million-strong at the time of writing, this Group was designed by its creators to “connect people from all around the World during these tough times.”
“Every day, through our windows, we have the same view.”
But what I came to see as the posts began to populate my stream, was that in fact we all have wildly different views. And fairly quickly, the undoubtedly well-intentioned concept was starting to present me with mixed feelings.
Post after post, I saw views like this:
Granted, I reasoned, this Group is probably not representative of all of us. Perhaps people with nice views are more willing to join Groups like this in the first place, and there is probably a natural bias towards wealthy, Western countries innate in our algorithms. As I continued to add the ‘wow emoji’ reaction post after post, I was also training my own algorithm to show me more of these incredible views.
Quietly too, I registered feelings of shame — why don’t I have views like that? — and even jealousy: why aren’t I that successful?
But then these views started to come into my feed, too.
A comment on this photo wished the poster “good luck”. Someone local added “That’s the nicer part as well lol no trainers in any of the pubs n clubs around there”. It was bleak — there was no denying it.
My discomfort grew.
Then I saw this post, and I felt even worse.
“Today makes 21 days that I have been isolated away from my family, including my 1.5 year old son. I spent 6 days in the hospital last week on oxygen as I have coronavirus. I am now in my bedroom recovering with pneumonia. This is the view from my bedroom. The building across the street is a school that has been abandoned and closed since is was flooded during Hurricane Katrina 15 years ago,” the poster wrote. “The sun is rising to the left. I have always hated this view but now it’s the most beautiful view in the world because I’m alive and survived this terrible, horrific virus.”
I know rationally that the world is not fair. It is not equitable, and has never been designed that way. According to inequality.org, the richest 1% own 44% of the world’s wealth.
But to see it like this, personalised in my feed, in such a difficult time for so many, was leaving me with a collection of new questions about that inequality. Why are things so unfair? And why is that ok?
How is it that while we are all dealing with the ramifications of this global pandemic on varying scales, some people are doing so from veritable Gardens of Eden, with views that people like myself would happily pay to enjoy in regular times, and drink in with absolute pleasure? Do they deserve more beauty than the rest of us? Have they simply earned it? And yet for others, their windows are a cruel reflection of their limited resources, which they not only can’t change, but which may worsen in time as we see unemployment rates sky-rocketing all over the world.
This is not a criticism of the creators of this Group. This is a just a reflection on how something you learn to accept — global inequality — now seems plainly unacceptable, unreasonable and even absurd, in the same way celebrity culture is being exposed as useless and at a stretch, offensive.
Will I post my own fairly average, humble suburban view to the Group?
Maybe, if only to even up the ledger. I am certainly appreciative of it, as well as my remaining income and the roof over my head.
But more importantly, I think I will continue to carry these new questions about inequality with me into a post-Corona world. What I once accepted as “the ways things are”, I now am starting to look at with a new view.