People Are Revealing The Things The Pandemic Ruined More Than We Realized
Not that you need a reminder, but March marks the fourth anniversary of the first COVID lockdowns implemented across the US. Of course, the pandemic would hit the world hard and really change the way we live our lives — even today.
It was with all that in mind that I searched through Reddit for a thread about the lasting impact of the pandemic, and came across this one from last year where the [now deleted] user asked: "What did the pandemic ruin more than we realize?
The thread went very, very viral getting over 27K comments. Below are the top, best, and most often repeated comments (that I bet you'll agree with):
1."I'm not sure if anyone else feels the same way, but my perception of time hasn't really returned back to normal since then."
—[deleted]
"Time perception — 2019 was five years ago?"
"My brain still thinks that 2019 was last year."—TheAngerMonkey
"The past three years still seem like 'the present' to me."
2."This might just be local, but where I live, a SHIT ton of businesses closed. I mean, half of them were closed. Not just because of the shutdown, they were closed permanently."
"I think the pandemic was the nail in the coffin for A LOT of businesses that were already on the edge of just making it, and others have continued to struggle because, well, things are just more expensive. I've noticed I no longer go to sit-down restaurants because my grocery bills are so expensive. Why go spend $40–50 dollars for one meal when it costs $150–200 every two weeks for groceries? It just doesn't make sense anymore for a lot of people.I think the dining experience changed as a whole post-pandemic. Lots of places HAD to resort to DoorDash-type businesses to make up for losses, and that in itself has changed the dining experience."—NiceMarmot12
3."As a teacher, I can say that it’s definitely affected kids in a way people don’t realize. Kids who had their first year of school (or even second) during the pandemic act quite different than kids who had a normal introduction to school. Many of them seem to have fewer social skills and higher anxiety than kids from previous years."
—[deleted]
"Completely. I’m a college professor and my wife is a kindergarten teacher. Young people have definitely been affected. There are no more B to C students. Just A's and F's. Whatever it took to buckle down and turn the semester around is not there anymore. The campus is a ghost town. Faculty don’t come in when they don’t have to."
4."The health system is wrecked. Way too many nurses got burnt out and left the profession."
"Not just nurses, paramedics got hit hard. At one point during the paramedic, a friend told me 70% of their EMTs were on mental health leave at once."
5."My perception on money. I worked so hard to pay off debt, save up for a new house, get promotions. Now, with the rise of housing costs and inflation I feel like money is literally such a made-up thing and I have no control over anything even with all the right decisions."
6."Independent/smaller/DIY music venues never really recovered."
7."People's driving is so out of wack, my only concern is to make it home in one piece."
"People’s ability to drive. Drivers are far more aggressive post-COVID, and even fewer people are using their signals."
"I have worked in insurance claims for years and years, I don’t talk to people anymore just manage repair shops. But whenever I am checking the facts of loss, for the past three years, things are just batshit. There are hundreds more single car accidents every year in my area than there were before the pandemic. Before the pandemic it was all rear ends from commutes. Now it’s people driving full speed into their garage walls and guard rails."
8."Used car market is completely f'd, as are flight prices."
"It's scary. I have an older car and I'm one accident away from not being able to afford a new vehicle."
9."Night shift people's lives. Nothing is ever open late anymore."
"Just went into the night shift recently and realized this. No food. No errands. There's the gyms and your home and that's your life."
"This is a really good point. I work second shift so I stay up pretty late. Pre-pandemic I could go grocery shopping, run a few errands, grab some food somewhere at night but almost everywhere closes down by 9 p.m. now. Even fast food joints are rarely 24 hours anymore."
—[deleted]
10."The lockdowns happened during my last semester of university. I've never had an in-person job, only work from home, which I realize is a blessing but also makes it feel like... IDK, like it's not real. I have no work friends, have never met my supervisor in person, I do all my work from my desk in my room. It feels like pretend."
"I worked for almost a year during COVID for a company without meeting anyone in-person. It was like a really dull video game until I met people. Now it’s like a really stressful video game. Sometimes I break eye contact in meeting just to remind myself I’m not there with everybody on the meeting, I’m really alone."
11."People seem so much shittier in large group public situations now. I don't know what it is, but etiquette in places like a movie theater used to be standard, but every experience I've had lately has been horrible. People talking, sitting there on their phones, and other just generally bad things."
"I've heard the same about concerts, but haven't been to as many myself. I've heard from others where people used to be polite (help each other up in pits and stuff and so on), they now just don't give a f***.
It's like people are just more rude now for some reason. I'm really interested to know if this is happening everywhere or if I just live in a shitty rude ass place."
"Dude, people treat movie theaters like their living rooms now, it's absurd. And it's all ages too — I understand really young kids, but the parents don't even bother to control them. Last movie I saw, adults were having full on conversations the entire time. It's rude as hell, people have completely lost their manners. When I saw Halloween, a family came in — I shit you not — with a noisy baby in a stroller. Every 20 minutes, the mom was walking back and forth in the front aisle with the baby in her arms."
12."Price of eating out."
"Fast food is now almost the same price as a cheap sit-down restaurant pre-covid."
13."I started to notice that people cough and sneeze without using their hand/arm and just do it into the open, into a room or hallway full of people, directly at people, when they wear a mask they would remove the mask before sneezing or coughing into the open — all without any remorse or understanding why this would be bad or generally why it would be disgusting, no matter if it’s during a pandemic or not. This still happens, daily I see someone doing it. It’s mind blowing to me, absolutely mind-blowing, considering what we all went through and why."
"People are constantly coughing and hacking directly into my f'ing face without covering their mouth at all, then going, 'Uhh, it's OK I don't have covid.' OK cool, good thing there are no other infectious diseases out there."
14."The sense of security. I never know what’s around the corner anymore. It’s terrifying."
"During the pandemic it was literally one thing after the other with Covid, killer wasps, conspiracy theories, threat of wars, mass unrest, violence towards others, etc."
—[deleted]
15."My willingness to waste my life at an office when I can do the work just as well from home."
"I can't wait! I'm returning to WFH next year and never looking back! So done with being in an office. It's mind-melting."
16."Feels like it’s a more 'to each their own' sense of living. People don’t appear to be as connected as before the pandemic."
"The pandemic brought me much, much closer to my wife and son. It also made me incredibly jaded, cynical and much less trusting of everyone outside of these walls."
"I feel like everyone is more bitter now. Like we all saw through the sham of society. Time feels different now."
17."Printed menus. Call me snarky but scrolling through your phone at dinner, whether with family or on a date, is shitty."
"I feel like an old man saying it, but 10000% this. I want a proper menu. I hate scrolling their menu on my phone."
18."Family relations. Vaxxed vs. anti-vax, mask vs no mask, Covid deniers vs. lockdown advocates. Fractured a lot of my family and many others."
"Dealing with this one right now on Thanksgiving. My dad got the vaccine but believes all the right wing rhetoric about it causing blood clots and killing people and believes Hunter Biden is the Anti Christ. He's always been a Republican but it's never been this bad, and it's pushing me away more than I care to admit. I hate how radicalized the right has gotten and it's driving my family apart."
—[deleted]
19."Supply chain. Just in time ordering was a bad idea to begin with, but trying to adapt to the new normal when you are used to full shelves to choose from is almost worse."
"The supply chain is still f'd six ways from Sunday, with no sign of returning to normal any time in the near future."
"I work in manufacturing. People expected the supply chain issues to magically fix themselves by the end of 2021. I keep hearing 'I thought we'd be over that by now.' But this is the new normal. Its never going back to what it was."
20."The belief that Americans are able to come together in a crisis and be willing to make sacrifices for the greater good. We’ll never trust each other again."
"I agree totally. At the beginning of the pandemic, I thought we would pull together as a country and get through this. The pandemic taught me that we're not the country I thought we were. We didn't pull together, we fractured. The political division has only made it worse."
21."My social/work life, after living like a hermit for two years and working from home, it's taking me a long time to go out like before."
"Yeah I distinctly remember in the before times, laughing and saying, 'Oh my god I haven't left the house in two whole days.'
I work full-time from home most of the time now and a week without leaving the house would not alarm me at this point."
22."It ruined me on traffic. For one glorious year, as an 'essential worker,' I had the roads almost entirely to myself, it was beautiful."
"I feel this so hard. I got so spoiled with my commute, now it’s back to the bullshit."
23.And lastly, "The cost of living is pretty f'd."
"Food prices just keep going up. We're buying less than ever, and more generic/less premium version of everything, and yet we're paying easily twice as much as our far more luxurious and full cart of groceries we were getting in 2010."
"Every single f'ing time I go to the store they've raised prices on something. I tend to buy a lot of the same things frequently so I am able to keep track of prices. I was getting this bag of iceberg lettuce for $2.19 a couple weeks ago and they just popped it up to $2.99. That's a crazy jump.I can't afford like 90% of the stuff in there anymore. It's like $5 for a can of GD soup. Soup used to be cheap food that you could stock up on, now it's a luxury item."
You can read the original thread on Reddit.
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.
