COVID-19 has brought a new normal, and some might say it brought in a new dystopian

world. A Dystopian society is mostly a fictional society that inflict harmful, oppressive, and a

miserable existence upon its members. A dystopian world is something a lot of people fear,

especially millennials that grew up reading dystopian books and know how they usually end.

Survival will become an absolute, as though we were living in a permanent state of war, which

was stated by Byung-Chul Han (Sigüenza & Rebollo, 2020).

In a dystopian world you see the poor dying and fending for themselves. While the rich

have everything they need to survive as well as protection. You can see these circumstances

happening in todays world. The rich can get texted for COVID-19 without having symptoms,

while the poor are dying at home and having to live with dead bodies until someone comes to

pick the dead up. “What good is the curfew if the suburban trains connecting Paris with lower

income suburbs are jam-packed. The working poor with an immigrant background from urban

banlieues contract and die of Covid-19. You have to work. Home office workers cannot afford

caregivers, factory workers, cleaners, sellers or garbage collectors. The rich, on the other hand,

retreat to their country villa.” (Sigüenza & Rebollo, 2020) Its just like Byung-Chul says what

good is it to close everything down when the poor still need to work and are still contracting

the virus because of it. Byung-Chul also states "The virus is a mirror. It shows what society we

live in." This is just referring to the fact that our nation was broken and the COVID-19 pandemic

has just shown how truly broken our nation is.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought in a new world where everyone is fending for

themselves. In a world of survival of the fittest. These circumstances isn’t new for some, just

like Margaret Atwood has said that she lived through diseases that weren’t curable and so
many died. It is just our turn to go through the same. Many will die but a real dystopian future

might exist for us if we don’t make a change.

References:

Sigüenza, Carmen, and Esther Rebollo Madrid. “Byung-Chul Han: Covid-19 Has Reduced Us to a

‘Society of Survival.’” Www.efe.com, 12 May 2020,

www.efe.com/efe/english/destacada/byung-chul-han-covid-19-has-reduced-us-to-a-society-of-

survival/50000261-4244328