A Brief Retrospection on Covid

I was reminded this week that it is more or less the four year anniversary of Covid. It’s a bit hard to believe that it’s already been that long. Like most of us time has very much been split into the before times and the post covid times. I don’t have much to share in any sort of large societal view on this topic, but I do think it’s very interesting to compare my current life to the before times.

In February/March 2020 I was spending my time commuting into work and working fairly long hours, often spending 11 or 12 hours away from home considering the commute, lunch and work. Among other things I was spending some of my weekends at that time door knocking for the Bernie Sanders campaign. Along with volunteering for the Bernie campaign I was getting engaged in local DFL politics. I attended a few local DFL chapter meetings, and was planning becoming even more involved in the caucus/delegate process. It’s difficult to remember how much political hope and excitement I had then. It really felt like the start of a movement.

Then suddenly I was working from home, all in person gatherings were getting cancelled, and Bernie was losing the primary race to Biden. Of course we all now remember how a few weeks of working from home and laying low turned into a year+ of that. Not to mention all of the crazy political and social events that occurred. I still find it really interesting to compare life now to life four years ago during the before times; all of the things that have changed and all of things that haven’t (cough cough Biden vs Trump).

Since then I’ve moved to a new state and from an urban center to a very rural area, I got married, I bought a house, my friends got married, I stopped eating meat, I changed roles at work and work from home full time. It doesn’t feel like it, but I’ve spent more time working in a post-covid world than a pre-covid world. We all have times in our lives that we define as before times/after times, but most of those are quite individual. This is such an interesting case of the whole world all together having a clearly defined before and after together.

Like I said, I don’t have any big picture meaning I’m getting at here. I just found it interesting to spend some time reflecting on the before times during this four year anniversary of the world shutting down.

I’m stealing this idea from a newsletter I read, but here are a few bonus links presented without context. These are things I enjoy, find interesting, funny, etc.
Bonus link one
Bonus link two
Bonus link three