The COVID-19 pandemic acted as a global stress test—exposing the fault lines in modern society and stripping back the façade of what we believe is indispensable. When lockdowns were imposed and economies slowed to a halt, it became startlingly clear that society does not rely on the vast majority of industries we once considered central to our lives. What remained standing—and crucial—were the essential services: healthcare, food supply, sanitation, utilities, transportation, and communication infrastructure. These sectors became the backbone of survival and continuity. Everything else, as the pandemic starkly revealed, was largely auxiliary fluff, a by-product of consumer capitalism, and a mechanism to keep the majority occupied in a relentless pursuit of financial security.
This is not to devalue those non-essential sectors entirely, but rather to place them in perspective. The reality is that much of the modern economy is not about sustaining life or ensuring societal stability; it is about generating wealth, creating demand where none existed, and maintaining a system that rewards perpetual motion over genuine need. COVID-19 proved that society can function albeit in a reduced state without the vast apparatus of marketing, entertainment, luxury services, and speculative finance. But it cannot function without the people who stock supermarket shelves, drive delivery vans, staff hospitals, or maintain energy grids.
Yet this realisation leads to a deeper question: who looks after the people doing the looking after? The pandemic also revealed how underpaid, undervalued, and overexploited our essential workers are. Society may depend on them, but the system in place treats them as expendable. So while the crisis demonstrated what is truly necessary, it also exposed a moral contradiction: if these roles are essential, why are they not treated as such in terms of compensation, respect, and support?
The challenge moving forward is not just to recognise what is essential, but to reorganise society in a way that genuinely reflects that reality. That means rethinking economic priorities, redistributing value, and re-evaluating the societal status we assign to various forms of labour. It also means questioning a capitalist logic that prioritises productivity over well-being, and that too often marginalises care, community, and resilience the very foundations upon which we relied when everything else stopped.