Lockdown was not a sabbatical

Did you become a better person during the pandemic?

It’s a question many of us are being asked, in ways large and small, as more people get vaccinated, restrictions lift, and public life starts to return to some semblance of normal.

Sometimes the question is explicit, like when a job interviewer asks if you used lockdown to pursue “passion projects.” More often it’s implicit, present in stories about how to rearrange your “friendscape” after the pandemic or personal finance lessons to learn from the last year.

But overall, as our second pandemic spring turns into our...