When I was in elementary school I envied the kids that went to parochial school and wore uniforms. I thought it had to be so much easier for them to get dressed in the morning.
They didn’t have to try to figure out if this top matched this bottom or if this orange matched this yellow. I thought it must be less stressful having one uniform to wear every day. (Interestingly enough, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Barack Obama all had their own version of a uniform to reduce the time it takes to get dressed)
COVID time has been like a uniform for most of us. Life during a pandemic has reduced the number of decisions we need to make in a day. We have not had to decide which events to attend, if an event was worth the price of admission, we didn’t have to decide if we wanted to be at home one evening or at an outside event. We have not had to decide whether to see a client in person, it was decided for us. We have not even had to decide what to wear each day. Not really.
The girls wearing the uniform, I can’t speak for the boys, felt restricted and limited by the few uniform choices they had to implement. Lack of choices has an upside and a downside. After a year+ in COVID world, we have had the freedom of choice taken from us. That lack of choices has an upside and a downside.
Soon we will have the luxury and the burden of choices. The choice to go to the office or not, go to dinner or not, or go to the networking event or not. Soon we will look back affectionately at the time those decisions were made for us!
