I know what you mean. And I feel for you, as well as countless others who got f___ed over by the virus without even catching it.
Beyond those who died from it, Covid incurred a mental health debt our societies will pay off for years, probably decades, to come. Maybe decades. Suicide attempts among teenagers have doubled over the last 18-or-so months. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
I've had to deal with my fair share of mental health issues, but I'm kind of a loner, so the Covid restrictions were not as hard on me as on others. But as a species, we're very social beings, and being disconnected from others is a recipe for a mental health disaster that - say, 10 to 20 years from now - might look even worse than the damage the virus itself did.
FWIW, my godmother holds a yearly Easter-brunch that she has cancelled two years in a row now and will probably cancel again, come Easter. I'm not a religious person, but that brunch has been a fixture in my year for as long as I can remember. I miss it dearly. Likewise, a close friend of my mother's holds a Christmas party every year, again, for as long as I can remember. Cancelled, two years in a row, and who knows if it will be cancelled this year.
It is important, I think, to acknowledge the pain this virus has caused on all of us, even if we got away.
And we - I mean human beings in general - need to make sense of things, at a very fundamental level. If we run out of sensible explanations for what's happening around us, we turn to the irrational.
On a more abstract level, I think living in a modern industrialized capitalist economy incurs a mental health cost we rarely acknowledge. And Covid has turned up the volume to the max. Unfortunately, when we, as a society, acknowledge this mental health cost, our response is to throw pills at it instead of dealing with the underlying pathology.
It feels like if we don't do anything about it, we'll run into a World-War-II-Holocaust-level disaster far sooner than anyone alive right now should be comfortable with. If I look back at history, though, this has happened before, repeatedly, and we failed to learn the lessons offered to us on a silver platter.
I wish I had something more hopeful to say. So let me say this: Nietzsche once said that we have art so we don't die from the truth. The more I think about this, the more I find this to be true. That's what art is for. Life can be a neverending horror show, but through art, we can transform that horror into beauty. Last but not least, it is a means for us to connect to our fellow human beings, even when the lockdown otherwise disconnects us from them.