The Researcher behind Back to Normal
A Subjective Eye on Business Culture in the Time of Coronavirus
(This article is also available as an audio supplemental to the Beyond Back to Normal podcast.)
I spent the first month of the COVID-19 shutdown conducting a qualitative study of the impact of the coronavirus crisis on the culture of business. This week, I’ve begun to release a first draft of the results of that research, in the form of a weekly podcast, under the title Beyond Back to Normal.
In order to understand the study that forms the foundation of the Beyond Back to Normal podcast, you need to understand me, the researcher.
Why? This research wasn’t done by a machine. I make no pretense about it being an objective work of science. It’s not based on hard data, but on the softness of human experience.
My name is Jonathan Cook.
For over 25 years, I’ve worked as an independent researcher of the culture of commerce.
I do qualitative research, which means that I study ideas as ideas, without attempting to convert them into numbers.
As a child, I was fascinated by folklore. I loved the strangeness of it, the way that the stories people tell can feel true, even when the facts within them are obviously false. The myths and legends captured my attention, and the most important thing I that was learning in school at the time was that I wanted to follow my passions, rather than the assignments I was given by my teachers. I did just fine in school, but the educational experience felt tedious. The folklore I read in my own time seemed from a different world, one in which the characters were unmistakably alive.
For first year after I graduated from high school, I attended classes at Xavier University in the city of Cagayan de Oro, on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. I wanted to enter a foreign culture, to discover a place where folklore might still be alive.
What I found, of course, was a culture that, although it was foreign in some ways, was also surprisingly familiar to me. The Philippines had been a colony of the United States for decades, and life there, though different in many ways, was also thoroughly a part of the same modern world in which I had grown up.
I spent quite a while trying to look for the “real Philippines” underneath the modern experience. I wanted to sort out the American influence, and the Spanish influence that had come before that. It took me a long time to realize that what I was looking for wasn’t the real Philippines at all, that the way that the Filipinos around me were living was the reality.
Returning to the United States, I studied anthropology in a continued quest for something that felt culturally authentic, something that could speak to the experience of feeling powerfully alive that I had found in mythological stories, but was more difficult to find in my actual life. I found that I enjoyed the process of the search for meaning in itself. Doing research was stimulating for me, as I found that even in the apparent rationality of our elaborately engineered modern life, there were odd cracks to be found, junctures of ideas that didn’t match up neatly, revealing that people’s lives weren’t as logically planned as we like to pretend they are.
I found freedom within these cracks in the facade of rational modern life. It was in these in between places that people could still move in unpredictable ways, feeling and creating unusual things. Discovering these strange open joints in conventional culture gave me the same enjoyable space to breathe that I felt in my time between classes, the same vitality I had read of in the folklore I explored as a child.
After I left school, I continued my work as a researcher. Under the mentorship of a psychologist, I learned methods of immersive interviewing designed to allow the expression of the emotions that people ordinarily suppress. I branched out into broader, deeper, slower methods of qualitative inquiry, informed by the classic ethnographic approaches of anthropologists.
I have found that people remain, despite all their efforts to fit in with the mechanistic models of industrial society, richly, thickly, warmly, bizarre. Our feelings don’t match what we know we ought to think. Our behavior doesn’t follow the rules. Our individuality defies the averages.
Over a quarter century of work, the research I’ve done for corporations, nonprofits, and governmental agencies has revealed that the age of myth and ritual isn’t something of the past. It hasn’t been destroyed by the materialism of commercial culture. To the contrary, the weird paths of folklore form the warp and woof of the fabric of the marketplace, explaining the strange, everyday deviations from economists’ models of rational transactions driven merely by price, convenience, and rote habit.
I have discovered that, if you take the time to actually be with people for a while, to watch what they do and listen to what they have to say, you’ll find that there is a legacy of profound human meaning hidden within the most apparently mundane products, services, and experiences. We’re still creating myths and enacting rituals. It’s simply one of the taboos of modern commercial culture to acknowledge that’s what we’re up to.
Now, during the COVID-19 crisis, the cracks in the facade of rational commercial culture are widening. We’ve all become estranged from the routines of industrial normality that ordinarily maintain the illusion that our lives make some kind of linear sense.
It hurts to go through this experience. In a sense, you could say that, as the unexpected shutdowns continue for weeks and weeks, we’re growing disenchanted with the way we thought the world worked. We feel lost, unable to find our way back to the familiar paths we’d grown accustomed to taking them back and forth, round and round.
I choose to look at these struggles in a different way. After listening to the thoughts of the people I interviewed for this study, I’m coming to perceive the struggles provoked by the coronavirus pandemic as an opportunity for us to become re-enchanted with the world, not by escaping into the fantasies of the old mythologies, or the new ones to be found in our Netflix streams, but by recognizing the strange, irrational power contained within the everyday lives from which we have become separated.
My research has led me to the conclusion that, when this crisis is over, we don’t need to go back to normal. None of us have chosen to experience the journey of COVID-19, but we can take this involuntary break from normality as an opportunity to consider what makes our lives worth living, compare that to the way we’ve been spending our time, and prepare to reconcile the differences between the two, to tell the vital stories of ourselves in this weird world, before our time is up.
I don’t have the answers for how to make that work, but through this research, I’ve discovered some of the questions, and I’ve learned to listen to what others have to say.
Every question is a quest. I hope that you’ll continue to listen along with me, as the journey continues.
The music that opens and closes each episode in this podcast series is a song called Corona Norco, from the 2010 album To the Dust: From Man You Came and To Man You Shall Return, by the instrumental duo Charles Atlas.