We told ourselves that consuming services and experiences was somehow better than buying stuff, that flying halfway around the world to India and staying in luxury hotels was the peak of sophistication while moving into a McMansion was a signifier of crass consumerism. But the different kinds of consumption are just social markers, of class and political leanings and education.

If I emerge alive from the pandemic — with asthma, I’m not confident — I plan to spend less and rely on myself more. I won’t need so much money. Which is fortunate because I will have a lot less. Savings that were supposed to get me through retirement will be gravely dented.

But plenty of people are in far worse shape. I feel both guilty about the people in essential jobs who are still out there working, and worried about what will happen to them if they don’t have jobs in a country that does so little to help them. If people like me cut back, will that prevent the economy from recovering, and take a lot of jobs with it?

I won’t be surprised if a lot of urban millennials, who were battered by graduating into a recession and finally made a bit of headway only to be slammed by a pandemic, give up on the idea of expensive big cities. Maybe their bosses will decide that remote work is fine and they can save on office space. Maybe they will fan out to pretty little towns where they can buy a house for the price of a studio in Brooklyn.

I grew up in the country outside of a small undistinguished city in Pennsylvania, and I loathed it. Not nature. I loved playing with my dolls under the weeping cherry tree in the spring. I loved jumping from rock to rock in the stream, and looking at the tadpoles.

But it was lonely, and isolated. I thought people would start moving to places like that when the internet was born and promised to connect us all. Urban planners and futurists predicted that people would move away from cities, because they could work anywhere. Not only did that not happen — the reverse happened. The easier that technology made it for us to leave congested, expensive urban centers, the more we clustered together. The urban boom hasn’t really made sense, unless you figure that cities attract companies because they want to recruit the kind of people who live there.

But now that we know that life at home works, will young people give up their shabby, crowded apartments? If their work is really portable, they might.