This is permanent

The finality of the COVID pandemic is just really hard to process. Everything got worse and it's not a temporary setback. It's not a brief hardship. It's a full on step backwards, The entire world basically took a step backwards. 

Our lives got worse and they're going to stay that way. That’s horrible to think about. 

I think we all want to believ that COVID is just temporary. That this is a glitch or a bad bit, or a short-term whatever. And it's all going to go back to normal sometime soon. I suspect some of us are trying to bring back normal by pretending it into existence. 

Because we’ve lost so many things.

We lost live music as we knew it. Have you seen the impact that COVID has had on the music industry? The music scene is not rebounding. 

Americans lost higher education as we knew it. The US had the biggest higher education sector in the world, and American higher education is getting the stuffing kicked out of it. The higher education revenue model was already shaky and COVID made it much, much shakier.

We've lost years off our lifespans. If you look at average lifespans around the world we've lost months and even years. Eleven countries lost more than a year of average lifespans. The US lost two years. Up until COVID, we saw average global life expectancy get a little longer every year. Not any more. 

These are big losses. And people in higher income country aren’t used to living in a context where losses like that occur. I mean, certainly, we've seen climate change get worse and worse. We've watched the environment be poisoned and degraded. We've seen mass extinction, habitat loss, and pollution levels increase. That has all been stuff wealthy countries could ignore.

And we’ve always been able to tell ourselves - look at medicine, medicine is progressing. We cure cancer now. We are getting better and better and better about preventing and curing all kinds of diseases. So many things are getting worse but we’re taking better care of people.

We just lost that. We just lost the one thing that the human race seemed to actually be getting better at. This is the new normal, and it sucks. And you know what doesn’t help? Business and government leaders trying to fix the problem by pretending it doesn’t exist.