As the Grateful Dead said: “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” Five years ago this week, the country declared a national emergency during the Covid pandemic. The first confirmed Covid fatality in the US occurred on January 20, 2020 in Washington state. On March 13, Trump (45) declared a national emergency. On March 19, California issued the first state-wide stay-at-home order, followed by many other states. Cases surged in the following months, resulting in more lockdowns and restrictions. The first vaccine became available in December of 2020.
On a personal note, I had a daughter who was a senior in high school in 2020, and we had scheduled college visits in Utah for that week. She was excited about her spring concert that was supposed to happen the day we got back. In a surreal twist, when we boarded our flight, the college tour was still confirmed. By the time it landed, the college was locked down and all tours were self-guided. When we arrived, the worker practically threw the pamphlets and “welcome kit” materials at us to avoid coming within six feet of us. Stores in Utah had no bread and no toilet paper. If you knew someone who worked at a store, you would use your insider intel to find out when the new toilet paper was arriving.
On our flight home to AZ, I sat next to a sister missionary who was flying on to her assignment in Kansas. There were several missionaries on the flight. I noted she was wearing pants. She was excited to go, but given that so many people were unwilling to be near others, I couldn’t really imagine what she thought she was going to be doing. I chatted with her, and it seemed she was aware that she would probably be spending most of her time cooped up in an apartment with another sister, someone she may or may not like. She downplayed these concerns in her excitement. I hope it worked out for her, but it sounded like a giant waste of time to me.
By the time we got back to AZ, our daughter’s concert had been cancelled. Within days we were told that the rest of the school year was cancelled. No prom. No graduation. Grades would just be based on the first part of the year. She was disappointed. Around this time, in-person Church was also cancelled (as was early morning seminary–praise be!).
Our business took a huge hit, and we nearly had to layoff our long-time employees until our PPP came through at the last minute, saving everyone’s jobs. Feeling cautious, we decided to move across town where property taxes were lower. I wasn’t very excited about it since we didn’t know anyone there. We did our best to support local restaurants, lining up to get take out that wasn’t as warm and sometimes took too long. But we were happy to help them stay in business.
Over the last five years, people have experienced a lot of changes that were a result of the Covid pandemic:
- Work-life Balance. Remote and hybrid work became widespread. Many people moved because they no longer needed to commute to the office.
- Education. On-line learning increased which altered how students and teachers interact and also made community college courses a more equal option.
- Heath & Wellness. People increased their focus on mental health, sometimes too much maybe (too much self-diagnosis or armchair diagnosis of mental health due to TikTok trends?). Telemedicine made access to healthcare providers easier and cheaper in some cases. People also got used to being healthier due to less social contact, and changed how they interact with others. There was a greater awareness of LGBTQ issues, increased rights, and trans identities gained in mainstream acceptance.
- Social & Family Life. There were issues with divorce and domestic violence as a result of lockdowns. Some marriages failed. Others were delayed. Priorities shifted. There was a loss of community in general, particularly due to political polarization.
- Migration & lifestyle changes. Many people moved to suburban areas from urban ones as working from home became an option, seeking a better quality of life or lower housing costs.
- Religiosity Declines. Church participation in the US dropped to an all-time low and remains lower than pre-pandemic attendance levels. Only 30% of Americans attend religious services on a regular basis. Mormons retain one of the highest attendance rates.
There were also some other shifts under the surface that have driven a wedge between people:
- Social Media. Rather than in-person interactions, people were able to find like-minded people online who not only didn’t challenge their ideas, but who confirmed their worst fears. Algorithms fed us the content that most outraged us, and still do.
- Conspiracy Theories. Hand in hand with social media changes and isolation, conspiratorial thinking took root in unprecedented ways, fostering mistrust of each other, institutions, and imagined enemies.
- Polarization. Families were torn apart due to extreme differences in how reality is perceived. This continues due to ongoing partisanship and fiery political rhetoric.
In today’s post, I’m not trying to solve anything, just take a trip down memory lane with you all.
- How have the past five years changed your life?
- Were there positive changes as well as negative?
- Has your life returned to “normal” pre-pandemic or was it forever changed?
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
A good friend died unezpectedly of heart failure during the first week of Covid lockdowns. There was no funeral. Over the following months others died, some Covid-related and others not, and their families and faith communities were denied the kind of closure that funerals and memorial services can bring. Weddings, baptisms, confirmations, baby blessings, and important gatherings were canceled or postponed. As noted above, church attendance has never fully recovered. So too, a strong sense of community. We’re more isolated in our own silos politically, socially, and spiritually. Should it surprise any of us that our society has become more intolerant, suspicious, and enraged?
The first Sunday that Arizona churches went remote I went to see the Chocolate Falls in remote Northern AZ. They are hard to catch because they only flow after a large rainstorm, which had just occurred. Dirt church is the best church.
My life is better in most ways. My career has taken a positive step and my kids are mostly doing well. I left the church completely and think I’m better off for it although my marriage hasn’t recovered fully because my partner stayed. The marriage is slowly recovering, as is my relationship with my very orthodox parents.
Overall I’d give the last 5 years a 6/10 rating. Covid, Mixed Faith Marriage, anxiety from Trump 2.0 are negatives. Second Saturday and less cognitive dissonance are amazing.
The real question is what’s coming in the next five?? Could go either way. As the wise Dread Pirate Roberts stated “Life is pain, anyone who says differently is selling something.”
I left the church in the years leading up to the pandemic, so I didn’t really notice the church changes. 2020 was a big year for my career – I got laid off in Feb (not directly Pandemic related), started a new job immediately, went remote with everyone else, left that job and started another job where I never met any of my coworkers in person, and then left that job and, tossing caution to the wind, started a business in late 2020. Somewhat miraculously, the business grew through the pandemic and I have been able to support my family and hire some employees. This year is not looking good for us, though. 47’s chaotic first weeks have been disastrous for several of our largest clients. At this point, it seems unavoidable that I will have to lay off nearly half the company in the next 6-8 weeks, and it’s likely that I’ll be facing bankruptcy before Thanksgiving. So it goes.
My elementary school age kids did a year of online learning from their school. Fortunately, this was not ‘regular class but over zoom’, which is such an obviously bad idea. It was probably closer to home-school (though we’ve never been home-schoolers). They would have one short video call with their teachers and classmates, and would do self/parent-guided learning through online platforms for math and reading most the rest of the day. They were at about the right age for this to be OK, old enough to read competently and be able to follow directions mostly independently, young enough to enjoy the extra time with mom and dad. Both of my kids that were in school at the time struggled in some subjects academically post-pandemic, but they’ve been able to catch up in the years since and are doing well now.
We were fortunate to not experience very much death or serious disease in my extended family. We had one grandpa in my extended family pass away. Not a direct relation of mine, but someone that I knew personally and we are close with his kids and grandkids, and they were devastated. He wasn’t that old, and was relatively healthy before COVID, in some ways just in the beginning stages of grandpa-life. He passed late in the pandemic, and had refused the vaccine, so more a victim of Fox News than the pandemic proper. So it goes. He picked up the disease at a family reunion, where all attendees from his generation and their parents got it. The unvaccinated ones died and/or spent weeks in intensive care. The vaccinated ones, even those from the older generation, had mild symptoms, recovered quickly, and to the best of my knowledge are still around.
Covid, when we all realized how non-essential church really was.
I was shocked to learn that a number of families were still meeting as a bigger group to have church.
I had been working remotely for 6 years before the pandemic, “before it was cool”, as they say. I’m still remote, and it generally suits me. It now seems not to suit a lot of CEOs, which I find troubling. I’m not saying this works for every job, but I thought we learned that quite a lot of jobs can be done remotely, sometimes more productively than before, and quite a lot of people (especially parents of young children) got great benefit from it. I think CEOs and managers who think they need face to face contact all the time are really demonstrating they aren’t as good at managing people as they thought. The number of remote jobs available now is still higher than it was 5 years ago, which I consider a positive effect of the pandemic, for someone who doesn’t have any alternative opportunities locally in my line of work should something happen to my employer (my location is currently determined by my wife’s career).
One thing that has changed in my church life is that I never really saw ward choirs come back after the pandemic. That could be specific to my area but I’ve seen it in 2 different wards. I miss it a bit.
If Feb. of 2020 I had my youngest granddaughter born. I wasn’t able to see her for a month and was glad I did because they day after I made it home on a flight from LA, the world shut down and I’d have had a really hard time getting home.
At the time, we had just sent our youngest son on a mission and were “active” in the church. For the few months we had in person church before it was also cancelled. We then had zoom church. Our son came home waiting for his next calling, which came after four months or so. We had a lot of people in our ward that refused to wear masks or get vaccines. Four died, which in a town of 600 is quite a shock to everyone. When a new bishop was called that was one of the antivax-antimask people, we just quit going. No one came to visit. No one even asked us why we no longer came to church until two years later. I just said I was tired of having to defend myself constantly for my views about masks, vaccines, Trump, and my gay daughter and her family and children.
When the pandemic first started I wondered if we’d emerge from it as a nation embracing better healthcare, better housing, and more empathy for helping others but listening to Trump’s address to Congress last night and I’d say we’ve gone backwards by leaps and bounds. When I look at how the Utah Legislature ran it’s Legislative Session this year basing what seems like everything on retaliation for slights against them by teachers, judges, and voters. Finally it seems when I drive or go out in public there is less regard for the law. It could be manifest in the number of those that speed or break traffic laws but it also shows itself on social media and in the regular media with the willful polifferation of lies and half-truths. It seems if you care about others you are “woke” and that’s bad. We now seem to frown on diversity, equity, and inclusion, DEI, and ban books in our schools if they talk about topics that help marginalized students of color or sexual orientation. I just thought with over a millions deaths in our nation alone that we’d come out the other side of the pandemic with more kindness and a desire to help others but I can see that it actually accentuated the divide that’s been growing since the 1950’s.
My life has not returned to normal. I’m sad. I’ve lost friends not to Covid but ideas. I thought I had friends at church but none of them has reached out to me and if I reach out to them, I can see them pull away. I have new friends and new responsibilities, I’m on my local city council, but it’s not the same. I’m closer to my kids, so that’s good. My grandkids are awesome.
Among many other great changes induced by the “pandemic” – one thing that seems to have happened is some of the insanities embraced by all different sides of the political spectrum have been (and continue to be) tested in the crucible of what survivors of the experience consider to be most important in their own lives.
Some ideas and practices have been discarded and others continue to be refined. It seems to me that much of our population have a desire for more streamlined, less burdensome, more practical lives; and are less inclined to allow others to dictate what they eat, think, say and do. Yes, the idea of community has declined and the idea of personal accountability and personal freedom has increased significantly.
Honestly, aside from the loss of life and illness during the pandemic itself, I personally celebrate much of what’s happened – coming out of it.
We wound up in a pandemic bubble of family isolation that we have been creeping gently out of over the last few years. It wasn’t a bad thing for us though. In some ways, 2020 marks the beginning of drastic improvements for my family and myself. Circumstances were that we started family therapy the week the world shut down. We didn’t get into the habit of church attendance when it came back up, and had limited participation in church activities. We sent our youngest to in-person school in 2021, and our oldest back to in-person middle school January 2023.
The modern church leaders would do well to remember those immortal words of Frédéric Bastiat: “When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing his respect for the law”. If the leaders had paid more attention to, covid-19 would not have irreparably damaged the Church.
Somewhat trivial, but I observed 2020 had a profound effect on clothing choices. Prior to COVID, my office dress code was business casual, but leaning on the business side (i.e. more expensive). Then my company locked down, and then adopted a hybrid WFH model, where half of employees were in office while the other half worked remotely on alternating days. So when we all eventually returned to the office full-time, dressing for comfort emerged as the norm. Jeans, yoga pants, and repping one’s favorite college/pro sports teams were tolerated, while such dress would have been deemed unprofessional just a few years earlier. I think COVID gave us all a chance to realistically ask ourselves, “‘just who am I trying to impress, and why does it matter what I wear to work?” We have had enough post-COVID turnover now that a large percentage of our junior employees never knew any different than the lax dress standards we have today.
And since our company went through a merger 2 years ago, nobody is aware of any surviving written company dress code, and nobody really cares anyway. And I’m completely in favor, especially as I realize how much less I spend on work clothing now than I used to
My approach to Church is similar. Before 2020, being late to sacrament meeting would have been unthinkable for my wife and I, for any reason but the most serious illness. Nowadays, we go to Church when we feel like it, which averages out to about once per month, and we don’t feel the least bit guilty. Also, with the exception of a relative’s wedding 2 years ago, neither of us have attended the temple since before 2020. Again, no guilt there.
The last time I attended the temple was February 26, 2020. Nowadays I can be found wearing crocs at the 7-11.
I did not go back to church after the pandemic, no one from church has asked why. A couple of people now go out to lunch with us.
We have a cyclone 100k off the coast, and likely to cross the coast 10 k from us. Forecasters are saying we can expect 150k/hour winds, and 800mm + of rain over the next few days.
we live half way up a hill with forest above us on the hill so we expect a lot of water to come down the hill. We have been sandbagging our house.
I went to get sand bags. The local council provides sand and bags. You help each other to put sand in the bags. I was standing next to 2 fellows who were filling bags. The fellow shovelling told me to have my bag ready when his mates bag was finished and he would do mine. Another person also started putting sand in my bag. I got 30 bags, took them home then came back for another 30.Another stranger helped carry the bags to my car. Great feeling of community spirit.
I think the pandemic was a net negative for me and my family personally, but I will admit that as time goes on the bad stuff seems to finally stop existing and good stuff seems here to stay. Life in so many ways was forever changed.
I was already on the path out of the church pre-pandemic. I was aware that women felt less than in the church, particularly women who weren’t current wives or mothers, and I tried to be an ally and held space for them. When church was cancelled and families were given home church complete with the sacrament and single sisters were given isolation, I was sad. Then when locally we tried to advocate to give them more (can I bless the sacrament in their backyard or over the phone?) we were shut down. I realized then and there that this institution is built for trad families full stop. No one else need apply. When church finally resumed, I was no longer interested.
These last 5 years have been a mixed bag for me and mine. We moved at the beginning of the pandemic for a great job opportunity for my husband right after I graduated with an education degree. We now live on Vancouver Island (just to clarify, Vancouver is not on Vancouver Island), and I’m still amazed I get to live in a climate categorized as Warm Mediterranean.
It took a longer time to settle into our new ward because church was either on Zoom or divided into 3 separate groups attending while spaced out and masked for the first 1 1/2 years.
As a teacher, we’re still dealing with the fallout of those years. Younger students are very diverse in their abilities depending on the support they got at home while school was out, and we’ve got more mental health issues with all students.
The most heartbreaking change has been in my 25yo son. He had autism and congestive heart failure and still lives at home with us. Watching the vitriolic conversations online where people argued about keeping people like him safe…. it broke him. He went from optimistic to not trusting anyone outside of family. While others were complaining about masks, my gentle son’s faith in humanity was destroyed.
The sense of community that was lost after the pandemic came roaring back in the last couple of months for Canadians. I’ve never experienced anything like this before, this sense of unity. It’s not the tariffs, either, it’s the comments about our sovereignty being taken away. We’re taking it seriously and we’re PISSED. All our grocery stores now have labels identifying country of origin, and US products just aren’t selling.
I was in the first year of my PhD program when the pandemic hit. My grandfather had just died a month before. I was alone and friendless and stressed out. But early in 2020, a girl I knew in high school randomly sent me an email and then we became pandemic pen pals. Readers, three years later I married her.
That’s the good that came out of the pandemic for me. The bad is, I feel like I lost two whole years of progress at school to the pandemic, and I haven’t graduated yet 😦
The effect of the pandemic on our family was a net positive. None of us got covid, even now in 2025, no one in my household has had covid. I know others were not so lucky and my heart goes out to them.
Before the pandemic, I was working in the office 5 days a week with a commute of nearly 3 hours round trip. I didn’t spend much time with my kids and felt like a visitor in my own home. When we got sent fully remote I got to know my sons again (also my cats). My oldest son, whom I had pulled out of school a few years earlier due to his inability to handle the social pressure of attending school, really benefited. He had been spending so much time alone, and when I started working from home full time we were able to spend a lot more time together. Not that I was ignoring work, but that he could come in and show me a meme he’d found that was funny, and we ate lunch together, and he just had another human being in the house. That was really good for him. We are really close now and I cherish that connection.
Because I had more time, I developed some new hobbies and made some connections online. Before the pandemic, I was completely off social media. I checked in with Wheat and Tares once in awhile, but it wasn’t until the pandemic that I became a regular commenter, and that has led to being invited on to the blogging staff and I have thoroughly enjoyed that. I’ve been a permablogger for about 2.5 years now.
I quit Church a year before the pandemic, so having everything shut down didn’t change much. Except that I had been trying to find another church to attend. Once or twice a month, I would go to a new church service. A couple months before the pandemic, I found the United Methodist Church and enjoyed it. I watched a few of its services online after the lockdown. I was so sick of interacting with people online that it didn’t last, and I haven’t felt any desire to go back to any church since then.
Politically, I drifted further left. I officially joined the Democratic Party before the pandemic, when Kavanaugh got put on the Supreme Court despite the sexual assault allegations. I joined Tumblr during the pandemic because it’s the only social media site without an algorithm. I got to pick my own community. I really enjoy being on tumblr. Yes, I am one of the oldest people on the site, but since nobody uses their real names or gives any information about themselves in real life, that only comes up when I deliberately volunteer the information. Tumblr has a thriving liberal and queer community. Tumblr is where I learned to accept myself as asexual and found peace.
I went heavy into pandemic hobbies. I learned bookbinding. I branched out from quilting regular blankets into art quilting. I’ve done a lot more writing than I ever have in my life. I turned my entire front yard into a flower garden. That’s still a work in progress, but I never would have had the time or the energy to do that while commuting 5 days a week. I really love how much I create and how much of a priority artwork is for me now.
I hung on to my friends, although obviously I didn’t see them for a couple of years. I was in a couple of group texts, and had another friend I would call regularly. I’m a social person and enjoy having a lot of friendly acquaintances, but I’m really only able to maintain a few close friendships. I missed the friendly acquaintances. I had commuter friends where we rode the train together and never even knew each other’s names but we could talk for 45 minutes at a time. I missed those friendships. Now that I’m back in the office regularly, I have train friends again.
I noticed a couple of people who were already conservative who got a lot more intense during the pandemic. The anti-science anti-vax stuff seemed ridiculous to me, and because I wasn’t on social media that had an algorithm pushing conservative content, I was completely mystified by it. I asked a conservative person if Ivermectin really was a thing to treat covid, and got a lot of weird information from him (my ex-husband, so he was in our pod). Wouldn’t it be fabulous if social media sites quit using algorithms? How much of society’s divisiveness and the rightward drift into delusions could be eliminated by getting rid of the algorithm?
OMG – Thank the Good Lord for the Covid-19 pandemic/lockdown, if that is what gave us Janey as a contributor to W&T ! And congrats to her for turning her front yard into a flower garden; would that more of us would do that. What a different (and more interesting) neighborhood we would have.