There is a magazine with that name, and now it applies to many of our lives. Life has not only slowed, it’s also become very basic.

For those not on the frontlines, life revolves around the house – eat, drink, work, cook, kids, sleep, repeat. Everything has become simplified down to personal grooming. No dressing up for work, make-up optional for women unless you need to get on a Zoom call (and even then you can stay in your pajama pants as long as your top looks decent). Expenses have been stripped down to basics, income may have taken a hit.

Celebrities, luxury goods, travel, events, and anything else that might be considered frivolous or gratuitous, have no relevance in our current pandemic world. My eyes glide right past pictures of sunshiny exotic travel destinations on my Instagram feed. Not relevant. Even though food, water, electricity and internet all function normally, we’re still somehow in survival mode because our lives are anything but normal, and may not be for a while yet.

Is back to basics such a bad thing? Did that new pocketbook, those new shoes you had to have, that trip to Disneyland with the kids, the groomed nails that took an hour every week, the salon hair color, all those mindlessly placed Amazon orders for stuff, really make your life happy and relevant? Will you go back to your pre-pandemic consumption patterns when it’s all over? Will you hustle and rush as you did before? Stuff your and your kids calendar again until you fall into bed at night exhausted?

Or will something have shifted?