september 1985

Lurking among the jubilant Americans venturing back out to bars and planning their summer-wedding travel is a different group: liberals who aren’t quite ready to let go of pandemic restrictions. For this subset, diligence against COVID-19 remains an expression of political identity—even when that means overestimating the disease’s risks or setting limits far more strict than what public-health guidelines permit. In surveys, Democrats express more worry about the pandemic than Republicans do. People who describe themselves as “very liberal” are distinctly anxious. This spring, after the vaccine rollout had started, a third of very liberal people were “very concerned” about becoming seriously ill from COVID-19, compared with a quarter of both liberals and moderates, according to a study conducted by the University of North Carolina political scientist Marc Hetherington. And 43 percent of very liberal respondents believed that getting the coronavirus would have a “very bad” effect on their life, compared with a third of liberals and moderates.

The little Havanese likes to sit in a window of the one-story house, looking out onto the quiet street in Boca Chica, Texas. From its perch, it can watch neighbors passing by, glossy black grackles pecking in the grass, and palm trees swaying in the breeze. The dog’s presence is usually a sign that its owner, Elon Musk, is in town. That, and the Tesla parked in the driveway.

There are other, more conspicuous signs that Musk has gotten comfortable in this remote part of South Texas, near the U.S.-Mexico border. The hulking manufacturing tents just down the road. The steel strewn on the ground. The mechanical hum of machinery as workers in hard hats assemble spaceship after spaceship.

Musk has built a shipyard here. This is the staging area for SpaceX’s founding dream, the reason Musk got into the rocket business: to put human beings on Mars, not to drop a flag and go home, but to stay and survive. That Mars might be a terrible place to live is irrelevant. Musk believes that humankind should exist on more than one planet, and that we should start soon.

“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.

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“You are … irritating and unbearable, and I consider it most difficult to live with you.” So wrote Johanna Schopenhauer in a 1807 letter to her 19-year-old son Arthur. “No one can tolerate being reproved by you, who also still show so many weaknesses yourself, least of all in your adverse manner, which in oracular tones, proclaims this is so and so, without ever supposing an objection. If you were less like you, you would only be ridiculous, but thus as you are, you are highly annoying.”

Lidia Morawska has been working in her office for months. You might think that’s because she’s an aerosols expert, and her work is crucial for helping bring the pandemic to heel. But really, it’s because she’s an aerosols expert at Queensland University of Technology, in Australia. The country has recorded only three cases of community transmission of the coronavirus in the past week. Although Australian offices and classrooms have lowered their maximum capacities and are still observing social-distancing guidelines, Morawska told me, no one wears a mask to work, except in the rare case of a local outbreak. “Basically, life is back to normal,” she said.

Still, going back to work took some adjustment at first. “It felt strange,” Morawska said. “It was that feeling [of being] in between. What’s real? What’s not?”

“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” Jane Austen begins Pride and Prejudice, “that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” In early-19th-century society—an aristocratic world of inherited wealth—marriage occupied center stage. A good spouse was an all-purpose resource: essential for moving up in the world, as for Austen’s heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, or for sustaining a dynasty, as for the object of her affections, Mr. Darcy.  

School and work were not a path to wealth and status—certainly not for women, nor even for men. Elites were indifferent to education and disdained work. The landed gentry in Pride and Prejudice look down on Elizabeth’s working uncle, no matter that he gets his income from “a very respectable line of trade.” The economic facts on the ground supported their antipathy. The highest-paying jobs tended to be in government. But even at the end of the century, an elite English civil servant made just 17.8 times the median wage, and his American counterpart just 7.8 times. Mr. Darcy’s £10,000 a year from inherited capital was more than 300 times the median wage.