In an essay published last week in The Point magazine, Justin EH Smith, a professor of history and philosophy at the University of Paris, made an interesting observation about life in quarantine. Without downplaying the tragedies of the current pandemic, Smith, who is “fairly sure” he is experiencing symptoms of Covid-19 as he writes, observes “there is liberation in this suspension of more or less everything”.

“Any fashion, sensibility, ideology, set of priorities, worldview or hobby that you acquired prior to March 2020, and that may have by then started to seem to you cumbersome, dull, inauthentic, a drag: you are no longer beholden to it,” he writes. “You can cast it off entirely and no one will care; likely, no one will notice.”

For Smith, what has come to ring false is his book – a work in progress on the deleterious effects of the internet on community, a subject he’s lost passion for as Zoom and FaceTime prove that sometimes, technology is the only thing that can keep us together.

As Smith implies, disruption and isolation have a way of encouraging us to electively re-evaluate our lives – and that can be generative.

Out of curiosity, I briefly surveyed friends and colleagues on whether they have abandoned habits or behaviors during this pandemic they have no interest in resuming. Many have.

Some who replied to me said they made social resolutions, vowing to care less about ladder-climbing, which seems suddenly inane, or to cut frustrating people out of their lives: “[This time has] helped me cull my channels and unfollow people posting anything false, toxic, xenophobic or racist in regards to Covid and social distancing measures,” said one.

A friend told me the imperative to not touch his face finally helped him break a decades-old nail-biting habit. Another, a self-professed “big online shopper”, has gone cold turkey on luxury consumerism and hopes to never resume her blithe ordering of designer clothes again. “I really don’t need more things. I don’t need a Louis Vuitton purse,” she admitted.

A Sephora store covered up with plywood during the outbreak of the coronavirus in New York City. Photograph: Eduardo Muñoz/Reuters

On the news, I read about everything from “Covidivorces” to society’s collective disenchantment with celebrity during the pandemic. For everything that’s become inaccessible to us, there’s something else we’re simply over.

According to Dr Susan David, a Harvard psychologist and host of a new Ted podcast series on coping emotionally with the pandemic, living through a crisis can be genuinely formative. “People who’ve gone through trauma or struggle in the way that we are experiencing now, that struggle can simultaneously be distressing, and there is enormous growth and power that can come from it,” she says.

When everything is business-as-usual, “what happens is we become hooked into an autopilot mode of living,” says David. “We have all of our habits and our routines. Often, we’re very impacted by social contagion; so, you know, someone else gets a promotion, we want to get a promotion. Some one else wants to drive a particular car – that whole experience of ‘living up to the Joneses’ … [And with] all the things that we’ve got to do, we just don’t have the opportunity to actually be with ourselves, to be with our difficult emotions and to use those emotions,” to alert us to a need for change.

Collectively, we may be experiencing a reconsidering of priorities, the lasting effects of which will not only be personal, but economic

In addition to describing greater levels of empathy and personal wellbeing, David says that people who live introspectively through crises “recognize aspects of their life that they once thought were significant, like what they were wearing and what they were buying, that are now actually kind of petty”.

Collectively, we may be experiencing a great reconsidering of priorities, the lasting effects of which will not only be personal, but economic. As a result, market researchers such as Alex Quicho, the associate director of cultural intelligence at Canvas8, are closely monitoring how our post-pandemic selves will navigate the world.

Historically, responses to pandemics have followed a pattern of five stages, one of which is the adjustment stage, explains Quicho. Most North Americans and western Europeans are entering the adjustment stage now – reconfiguring their lives around new constraints as quarantine lockdown becomes a daily reality.

“Even as they’re experiencing grief as the virus impacts their loved ones, or if their lives are relatively untouched by it, people will be facing isolation, boredom and a need for small joy,” says Quicho. “That’s where we end up seeing a lot of habit change, and the formation of new habits. It is also where people will almost be forced to reconsider the life they had prior. A lot of things will be streamlined or lost, they’ll be driven to give up impulse shopping, or going for a walk and buying things, or going for a daily coffee or a smoke,” she explains.

After the adjustment period follows a time of re-evaluation – essentially, a time in which we decide which behavioral changes we made during a crisis we will abandon, and which we will sustain. Early market research on re-evaluation in China reveals that people intend to resume spending money on many pre-quarantine pleasures like eating in restaurants (82%) and traveling (78%). Yet other industries are predicted to suffer due to potentially lasting, fundamental social shifts.

According to researchers, my friend the reformed online shopper isn’t the only big spender having a change of heart right now – luxury goods may experience the biggest consumer fallout of any post-pandemic market. “A large proportion of people said they wanted to cut back on luxury shopping because their time in self-isolation reconfigured their relationship to things like luxury,” Quicho says of the research. Indeed, 61% of surveyed respondents reduced or cancelled their spending on luxury during the pandemic; after the outbreak is over, 21% said they would continue to reduce – higher than any other industry. Online entertainment is also predicted to take a hit as people re-embrace diversions located blissfully outside the home.

In the coming months we will grow to understand the long-term effects of social distancing. Given experts’ anticipation that the safety measures we’re taking today will become a part of society’s “new normal”, with reoccurring periods of quarantine lockdown, it follows that we, like our world, will change. We are all sharing in misfortune; hopefully we will find some liberation, too.