Speaking for myself: the biggest consequence for me, in terms of mental health, has been the total erosion of my belief that most people were basically good, and decent, and cared about the welfare of others. It was a choice I made years ago; I wanted to be the sort of person that believed those things, even when there was occasional evidence to the contrary.
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.
> the total erosion of my belief that most people were basically good, and decent, and cared about the welfare of others
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.
In the past, people went off to war and some of them literally died for their country. Today, people won’t even so much as wear a little piece of cloth on their face while shopping for their khakis. We are doomed if the next COVID is 20x deadlier.
I've heard the semi-joke that if this generation was the one involved in WWII, Americans (and many others in Europe and Asia) would be speaking deutsch or nihongo today.
You are drastically minimizing the cost of lockdowns. Demanding that nobody have any physical contact with anyone they don't live with is far more than a slight inconvenience, especially for children, single people, and those with existing mental health issues. It is entirely reasonable to consider whether the benefits are worth the costs, and people who come to different conclusions than you are probably not evil cartoon villains.
I'm not talking about the lockdowns. I'm talking about wearing a mask when in public. Just yesterday I saw a man screaming for being asked to leave a Home Depot because he wouldn't put on a mask. And before you ask, no, his objection was neither medical nor scientific.
Are things really that different than they were before though? I still chat with my neighbors, doctors etc etc... everyone is just as friendly as before. I think it’s just our main connection to the outside world has been doomscrolling... I don’t think the people in this world are that different. They are good, caring, loving... despite what some would have us believe.
It's different in the sense that there was a forced reckoning of idealism vs. ground truth. We learned a great deal more about our family, friends, and neighbors. Sure, they may still be as outwardly friendly as before, but many of them, far too many, aggressively support some really heinous things.
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.
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%.
I don't know of anyone that was enthusiastic about lockdowns or wanted them to happen just because it would ruin somebody else's day.
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 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.
It’s not prejudging at all. It’s judging the real (in)actions of people. Things that people have been doing and not doing for the past year. This is not “I think you might...”, it’s “I know you did.”
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 felt the same way. I live in San Francisco which has overwhelmingly supported liberal policies for many years. The young progressives, who have the most free time and money to “fight” for their fellow human beings, were the ones buying up all the meat, eggs and toilet paper when this thing started.
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.
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.