This will have a lot of subtle consequences down the line.
But 2020 brought a trifecta of social stress that laid bare some festering social diseases. Both national and global politics, the response to Black Lives Matter, and the pandemic, all in the same year.
I don't know quite how to describe it. It's the loss of an ideal? I don't know. But, I feel it, viscerally. Whereas depression is more of an internally-focused feeling, this is externally-focused.
In the before times, I loved road trips, especially through smaller towns. It was a part of my identity. I've traveled through most of what's west of the Mississippi. I always knew that I had political differences with many of the people in the places I visited, but it rarely mattered. It wouldn't come up in casual conversation. Everyone was friendly. I won't ever be able to see people in those places the same way again.
I happily spent money in small towns as I went. Gas, food, lodging, services, the occasional trinket. I can't do that anymore, either.
I've been fortunate throughout the last 12 months in a lot of ways, and it's still left a big long-term impact on me.
I too, feel the most significant way my mental health has been negatively affected was not due to the lack of in-person face-to-face social interaction, but rather the destruction of my faith in humanity. I will add a caveat that some countries, societies, or even enclaves, have done a lot better job than others.
The pandemic made me lose hope that we will adequately deal with something as abstract as the climate crisis when people cannot even act appropriately when the effect of their combined actions can be seen in the numbers just two weeks later.
I don't want to venture into off-topic political stuff here. And, let's just acknowledge that everything about the pandemic has sucked pretty much whoever you are; the number of dead people, the even greater number of people who have suffered in some other way, whether through illness or isolation or the loss of employment or business or time at school with friends and classmates. You can pick pretty much any aspect of the pandemic and have valid criticisms for how it was handled.
But the worst part of it all was how people reacted to it. That public health and safety were perverted into political identities. That so many people became so aggressively opposed to the welfare of others.
It wasn't a small, isolated thing, and I don't think people should be described as good, and caring, and loving, while they identify with and support so many terrible things.
Both supporters and opponents of lockdowns could read this and agree 100%.
At best they were a necessary evil to prevent an even more catastrophic loss of life. Nobody likes them and there's nothing wrong with being frustrated or upset by them, and as the article points out, they're going to have far-ranging repercussions for a long time.
I work on vaccine scheduling for a large health system. We are now dealing with a large influx of young people lying about having a chronic illness to jump the vaccine line (the requirement for verification was recently lifted).
I’ve grown pretty disillusioned and can now see there is major hypocrisy on both sides.
Oh my god, this. When the pandemic is over, I’ll be left with the knowledge that a significant fraction of the people around me at any given moment wouldn’t lift a finger for someone else if it meant even the slightest inconvenience or discomfort for them. I don’t know how to recover from that.
Man in the High Castle, I suppose.
What messes with me is the missing human contact in person. Skype/Zoom just isn't enough.
Young and healthy lowers the probability not just of dying, but also of a severe course of the disease. Long-term COVID symptoms largely correlate with how severe the course of the disease was. This is something that tends to be emphasized by the actual research, but left out of mass-media reporting, perhaps for the sake of sensationalism.
But with everyone talking about health, the virus and the pandemic, it seems obvious that more people become aware about their own health.