Economy: So many pieces have been shuffled around, intervened with, and exposed to different business climates that what we are experiencing(and will continue to experience) is like strings on a marionette breaking, making it swing out of control. Think of the chaotic nature of shortages that we've experienced - the illusion of smoothly controlled supply logistics is broken. I do believe the inflation narrative will really kick in at some point, but I also suspect it'll be milder than we thought because there are many parts of the economy that have had a reset to norms, which creates opportunities for newcomers with higher quality or productivity to establish themselves. Not every city is going to turn into a Detroit because of one pandemic - the vacant storefronts will get used eventually for something, and whatever the something is, it'll probably represent more effective land use than what came before. So I see it as a case of real GDP, employment, wages rising transformatively in some instances. The foundational premise of minimum wage service businesses, for one, has been getting tested by pandemic-related intervention. When minimum wages get pushed up universally, businesses tend to look for capital deployments that let them pay fewer employees more. That could read as inflation, but also be experienced as a boom, depending on what side of things you're on.

Pandemic: Stop and go behavioral cycles will persist for some time to come. While the death rates are fading wherever vaccine deployment has taken hold, my initial thought that it would feel "over" for me when everyone I knew was vaccinated has not come to pass, because I realized that I don't want a "mild" case of Delta, but neither do I want to stay home. So I go out places still masking and have invested in new fashion masks, and this is probably going to be a generational shift.

Social/Culture: One of the biggest things happening right now is the loosening of the Boomer generation's grip on power and culture. It was going to happen anyway, but the shock of the pandemic gave it a kickstart as more people decided to make their life change now and not wait. In every town people want to be in, there's been turnover, and that is a resetting of the narrative, a opportunity for a new social life. If we take Stauss-Howe's generational theories as true, it's the shift from 4T to 1T - the ongoing resolution of a slowly unfolding crisis resulting in new societal baselines. Nobody I have met in person since reopening, when visiting bars etc., has wanted to connect online or asked "so what do you do" (which was seemingly ubiquitous in the US not so long ago) - cautious interaction, self-rediscovery, resetting of beliefs seems to be the trend. This is going to come with some fallout to "losing" group affiliations - anyone who senses their old group is falling apart, which many of them are(political groups, economic alignments, etc.), gets frantic and reactive. For a historical example, the Turner Diaries is a prime example of the kind of screed written by someone who feels their world has been "lost", framing it as an incoherent apocalypse in which the worst actions are justified as good and sensible. Expect a continuation of mass shootings and the like from people who think that the government has had a Commie takeover or somesuch.