One morning in March 2020, I sat at my desk at home, laptop open, staring at a Google Meet window filled with my team—everyone in their own homes, backgrounds varied, someone’s cat walking across the screen, someone’s child crying in the distance.

The week before, we had been meeting in the office, discussing second-quarter client proposals. The week before that, Taiwan’s case numbers had just started rising, but most people still thought “it probably won’t be too serious.”

Then everything changed.

Not gradually—overnight. Flights stopped, borders closed, gatherings canceled, offices emptied. The life structure you took for granted yesterday completely evaporated today.

It was only later that I remembered Zygmunt Bauman.

This Polish-British sociologist published Liquid Modernity in 2000, proposing what seemed like a very academic argument at the time: the essence of modern society is “liquid.” Work is liquid—your position can be restructured, outsourced, or eliminated at any time. Relationships are liquid—social media makes connections easy, and disconnections just as easy. Identity is liquid—you’re no longer defined by birthplace, class, or occupation, but you’re therefore forever searching for definition.

Bauman used “liquid” in contrast to “solid” modernity. Solid modernity was the product of the industrial age—stable jobs, clear class divisions, predictable life trajectories. You entered a company, worked for thirty years, retired, collected your pension. The path was clear, the structure solid.

But from the late twentieth century onward, these solid structures melted away one by one. Lifetime employment disappeared, marriage was no longer the only relationship model, national boundaries were penetrated by globalization. Bauman said we hadn’t entered a “new stability” but rather “perpetual instability.”

Reading this in 2000, you might have thought it was intellectual pessimism. Re-reading it in 2020, you’d think he was being too polite.

What the pandemic did was not break a solid world.

It tore away the illusion that “this world is solid.”

My company’s experience at the time was very concrete. Before the pandemic, our business model heavily relied on face-to-face workshops and on-site consulting services. Clients were accustomed to “seeing people” to feel work was being done; we were accustomed to “being present” to feel we were delivering value. This wasn’t just an operational model—it was an entire belief system about “what constitutes effective work.”

In mid-March, everything was forced online.

The first week was chaos. Workshops moved to Zoom, clients weren’t used to it, neither were we. Interaction quality declined, rhythm was disrupted, some clients directly paused projects, saying “let’s wait until the pandemic passes.”

The second week was anxiety. Revenue forecasts began to shake, previously confirmed cases were postponed or canceled. Team members started asking: “How long will this last?”—no one had answers.

In the third week, a strange kind of clarity emerged.

I began to realize that those things “interrupted by the pandemic” were never as solid as I thought. Clients would pause projects because their commitment to the collaboration was always conditional—conditional on “normal circumstances,” and “normal circumstances” was itself an assumption, not a fact.

The client relationships we thought were solid were actually liquid. The income sources we thought were stable were actually liquid. The work methods we thought would never change were actually liquid.

Bauman was right. Everything is liquid. It’s just that normal temperatures make it appear solid.

But liquid doesn’t equal fragile. This was the most important lesson I learned during the pandemic.

Water is liquid, but water can penetrate stone. Water has no fixed shape, but it can fill any container. The essence of being liquid isn’t “instability”—it’s “adaptability.”

Later in the pandemic, the team gradually found a new work rhythm. Online workshop formats were redesigned—not transferring face-to-face processes to screens, but rethinking the logic of interaction for online environments. Some clients actually discovered online was more efficient, eliminating travel time and making cross-regional collaboration easier.

My own writing also found a new rhythm during the pandemic. Being confined at home, with fewer social distractions, actually provided more time for thinking and output. Some articles on this website took shape during that period of “forced stillness” in 2020.

This isn’t romanticizing the pandemic. The pandemic caused real suffering, death, and economic loss that shouldn’t be offset by any positive narrative.

But while acknowledging the suffering, I can’t deny a fact: being forced to face liquid reality during that time taught me things I could never learn in the “solid illusion.”

In a late-life interview, Bauman said something that left a deep impression on me. He said the greatest risk of liquid modernity isn’t instability itself, but people grasping at anything that looks “certain” to escape instability—populism, extreme ideologies, simple binary narratives.

The world after 2020 perfectly validated this prophecy. The pandemic spawned various conspiracy theories, anti-science movements, political polarization. People weren’t unaware the world was changing; the anxiety change brought was too great, so they needed “simple answers” to comfort themselves.

But simple answers are never answers. They’re another kind of solid illusion—and more dangerous than the original, because they’re deliberately manufactured.

It’s now 2026. The pandemic has exited most people’s daily lives. Flights have resumed, gatherings have returned, offices are full again.

But I haven’t returned to my 2019 state. I don’t want to go back, and I can’t go back.

What the pandemic taught me is simple but hard to live: accept the liquid, but don’t be drowned by it.

Don’t pretend the world is solid—that’s self-deception. Don’t abandon all effort because the world is liquid—that’s nihilism. Instead, carry the awareness that “everything can change” while choosing things worth your investment—even if they too are liquid.

Because liquid doesn’t mean unworthy. Flowers will wither, but you still plant flowers. Relationships will change, but you still invest in relationships. Jobs will disappear, but you still work seriously.

The only difference is you no longer pretend they’re eternal. And this non-pretending actually makes you more serious about the present.

Further Reading: