I’m Thankful for Dua Lipa

As pandemic deaths soared, the height of governmental lockdowns in late 2020 and early 2021 ushered the mental health crisis to the homes of people from Java, Indonesia, to Jackson, Michigan. The Japanese government even appointed a Minister for Loneliness to tackle soaring suicide rates. The Oxford English Dictionary chose not a single word for the benchmark “Word of the Year” distinction but rather highlighted the ways the pandemic altered our shared vocabularies. Fundamentally anti-social, counter-social, and isolating words like “circuit breaker,” “isolation,” “lockdown,” “shelter-in-place,” “Zoom,” “bubbles,” “face masks,” and “staycation” took a new prominent place in the common tongue.

I don’t have to tell you, or anyone, this. We isolated, wore masks obscuring our most fundamentally human feature, and lost loved ones whose funerals were delayed or non-existent. We didn’t see our friends outside of our bubbles, that is if we were lucky enough to have a bubble in the first place. I think it might have been the only instance in my lifetime where the entire world simultaneously shared a feeling: loneliness.

At the summit of this loneliness and less than a month after Japan’s creation of the Minister for Loneliness, the Kosovo Albanian British pop-superstar Dua Lipa released one of the happiest, funkiest, and fundamentally social albums that I can remember.

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