86 My Life Experiences While the World Shut Down

My early Covid experience I would describe as great and very relaxing as I did not have to worry about school, so I would get to sleep in and go to bed late spending all day doing whatever I wanted. Once things became even more serious, I realized that it would be a long time before I would get to see my friends again or even return to my daily life, so to compensate for the lack of school I started working getting whatever hours I could given the limited staff allowed and how slow business days were because of the lockdown. That was how I would spend most of my days during lockdown, but once restrictions started to be lifted and things seemed less serious, I started to go out again and see my friends and attempt to return back to normal life, obviously still having to follow the Covid precautions that were in place.

 There were several major life events that I feel that I missed out on because of COVID. In my mind the biggest of these events would be my high school graduation and attached to that would be prom. As a result of lockdown and still being in a state of mostly online school with a few attempts made by my school to have some in person classes, I did not have any sort of graduation or get to experience a proper prom. My graduation instead of being a big event with all of my family quickly turned into a small video featuring the principal of my high school and the grade 11 pictures of the graduating class including myself, as my school was unable to have photographers come to the school and take our graduation pictures. While a few students held their own little prom parties, these were all just simple small house parties with no more than 10 people with the lockdown restrictions preventing any sort of major party. Another major event I feel I missed out on for several years would be my birthday, not being able to properly celebrate my birthday for a few years in a row was a little tough, and being unable to see some of my extended family and my friends made these usually fun events significantly sadder.

The cultural changes that I have noticed the most both during Covid and after is the increase in people believing in conspiracy theories, especially ones that concern the government lying to the people or trying to hide information. I think the mass amount of conflicting information that came out when Covid was first starting and in some cases just blatant misinformation caused people to become a lot less trusting in their respective governments. Instead, they buy into grand conspiracies about the government hiding all sorts of secrets from us, even if those supposed secrets were extremely outlandish and unrealistic. With the rise of apps like TikTok people could spread more misinformation with fabricated evidence than ever before, contributing to what I believe to be a general decline in people having any sort of trust in any form of government. At the same time, I have noticed a drop in people willing to think for themselves and instead relying on misinformation for all of their sources and views. Another cultural change that I have seen is the increased divide and radicalization of people on both ends of the political spectrum. While I do believe it was something that was already happening for a few years before Covid, the lockdown, the backlash it received and all the controversy surrounding the lockdown and Covid itself I believe helped to worsen this divide and make people extremely radical and in some cases very hateful to someone else just because of their difference in political views. I believe this has made people in general a lot more violent or quick to violent action against others just because of a difference in opinion While obviously these things happened before Covid, I have noticed a large increase in these actions, when people used to have peaceful protests those days are long gone and have been replaced with more violent protests that seek to damage and destroy property to send their message.

The theme I would connect my Covid experience would be blame, while not me personally I saw a massive wave of people, especially early in the lifespan of Covid, that blamed all of China for Covid, as it originated from there. Quickly that evolved from China to all Chinese people eventually to all Asians no matter where they were from. This quickly culminated into hate crimes against Asian people who of course had no part to play in the spread of Covid and were just as affected as the rest of us. Even so they were still targeted, being harassed and even attacked in the streets. This would get so bad a movement started called ‘Stop Asian Hate’ which aimed to stop the hate crimes and discrimination that ordinary Asian citizens faced just simply because Covid originated from China. I would link this to the theme of blame as early on in the lifestyle of any major virus or disease people often look for a group to blame for the origin of the disease or even the spread of it, which is exactly what happened with Covid as innocent Asians were targeted especially in North America despite having nothing to do with the origin of Covid or the spread of it.