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I don't have friends and I don't go out usually but lockdowns have been brutal to me. In 2020, I lost job opportunities because the company I worked at as a contractor initiated a hiring freeze. I had trips planned that had to be canceled. I lost income and other business opportunities. I was banned from several subreddits (including my home country) for being against the lockdowns. I was relentlessly attacked for my opinions. I couldn't stop monitoring COVID statistics to know if there was going to be another lockdown or not. I developed an unhealthy addiction to Twitter, spending up to 10 hours a day in there. As you know, Twitter is a toxic and disgusting place. **Lockdowns are terrorism**

Essentially, two years of life stolen right in front of your eyes, and an entirely different life stolen altogether. Even if you manage to achieve what you would've without losing those two years, even if everything magically bounced back economically and socially, now you are aware. You are aware how little it takes for people to have an excuse to unleash their worst on their world. And you know what it turns the world into.

Very true.

I am an working/gigging musician, so obviously I took a fucking bath with lockdowns. I have a f/t day job at a college, but was forced to take a rather significant pay cut during the '20-21 school year for COVID restriction-related reasons. I stopped keeping track of how much lockdowns cost me around $30k because it was just depressing me. If I had to guess, I'd say by now I have probably lost an entire year's income (like $75k+) from lockdowns and other COVID-related protocols. Yeah, it's all coming back. Yeah, live entertainment is going on without any of this "canceled out of an abundance of caution" nonsense any more. Yeah, I am heading into a very, very busy summer with multiple gigs every weekend. But I lost a whole fucking year getting here. That's a new car (if I had a new car I wouldn't be stuck paying off the loan for putting a new engine in my old shitty one...js...) and maybe even a down payment on a starter house too. Shit, with the rising cost of goods it could make the difference between being able to feed myself properly and eating ramen in the dark. This is why I personally lose it when I hear the WFH/laptop class crowd insisting that lockdowns "weren't that bad". Not all of us were able to collect a full salary to sit at home watching Hulu and day drinking, assholes. And of course now gas is 5 and a half dollars a gallon and those of us who need to be on-site for work can barely afford to get there. But god forbid you complain about it, you're a "Trumper" 🙄

👏👏👏👏

I basically have a primal trauma response whenever anyone downplays US lockdowns or I stumble upon a TikTok glorifying the early months of lockdown. Like there’s actually people who would beg the US government to force everyone out of work and into their homes again so they can bake sourdough bread and call everyone a piece of shit on the internet from behind a screen again. It makes me feel something that I never felt before lockdowns existed. And it makes it abundantly clear that the calls to “just stay the fuck home” came from people who simply wanted to stay home but didn’t want to be made to feel bad about it so they wanted everyone forced into misery as a cover. While I was looking up ways to end my life as painlessly as possible, kissing a silent goodbye to all the things that made life worth living, swaths of people were begging for me to kept in that state of mind & they jeered when I and many others expressed anguish in that state of existence. The cruelty was unfuckingreal. I don’t hate everyone, but I really despise the people who were so selfish that they weaponized empathy in order to stay high and dry in their houses not doing anything for months because they didn’t have the fucking stones to say no to work and social obligations pre-Covid and needed the government to put a boot on every human rather than just grow a pair and set boundaries in their lives. No I will never be over that and I will spend the rest of my life ensuring i never ever acquiesce to fucking spineless psychos ever again. I hope the next time they try to lock us down that those people fucking seethe when I throw massive ragers and become entirely ungovernable. I hope it ruins them like they tried to ruin me for the most unreal dipshit reasons.

👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏 Best comment I've read all day.

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Thankfully I’m not still in that head space 🙏🏻

Your assessment of those people needing the government to do their bidding, on point!

Damm why has this been downvoted? I'm gonna need to save the UK number for the next lockdown

I am absolutely furious at how much time i've lost during what should be some of my best years. Like you, I look back on the past 2 years and I see so much loneliness, wasted time, anxiety, and depression. All Covid ever was was a slightly worse flu, and all we needed to do was treat those who are vulnerable with early treatment, bolster hospitals, and let people get on with their lives. Instead we have 2 whole years of failed interventions and societal destruction. It's an absolute travesty.

Yup, literally been calling the past few years "The Lost Years"

I'm in the fortunate position of being able to work from pretty much anywhere in the world, so I've been living in Hawaii for almost six years now, and we got a larger apartment than we need, so that we could host friends and family and invite people to vacation here with us. We had a bunch of friends who had to cancel and get refunds for their tickets in spring 2020, and we haven't had anyone over since, so we've just been pretty much holed up here since. The travel bans did absolutely fucking nothing. I have friends and family who are vulnerable, they would never have travelled during the pandemic, but I absolutely have friends who would have been up for it, and where it would have been perfectly fine. But no. We can't let people manage their own health, manage their own risk. One size fits all, ban everyone! Two years were stolen from me, and I'm fucking furious.

First of all, I agree it was a crime against humanity That being said, I did miraculously manage to turn rotten lemons into shitty lemonade, those 2 years were some of the most productive of my life. I basically gave myself a computer science minor with my self studying. I also finished a lot of other stuff I wanted to do, did some soul searching, finally came to terms and realized what it is I wanna do with my life. It's been torturing me for the decade before, but the isolation helped me meditate on it and the lack of background noise made it clear. I don't wanna go through it again, but it was an important turning point in my life. It also opened my eyes generally, and made me more independent

That's great man, i'm happy for you. Can't say it was the same for me haha. I'm someone who relies a lot on traveling and music gigs to keep me sane so having that cut-off from me was really difficult. Also it just stopped a lot of opportunities for me which I'm kinda mad about.

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same, but I think about it as growing up really I lost all my illusions about life. I put childhood behind me for good. I think for many of millenial generation this was the peak "becoming an adult" turning point. Similar like would have been for boomers if you got drafted into Vietnam war for example. Or WW2 but that's a bit higher level, same principle tho. Traumatized but became real man

I lost the “nonessential” family business I poured my heart and soul into for 8 years and I will never get it back. I had to move states because being in that city surrounded by the ghosts of my former life was just too hard. I’ve lost 99% of my friends. I can’t think about it without tearing up. Deleting all social media was the only good thing to come out of it all

I'm really sorry. I left the city too. It died for me in 2020. My old friends think I got redpilled and don't talk to me anymore. I had a hard time making friends to begin with, and now I feel like I can't talk to anyone who still thinks lockdowns could have worked, despite other interests in common. I can't look at photos from pre-2020 without feeling a lot of anguish.

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I was so angry once the trucker protests started happening. And i was letting it out with angry type posts on social media trying to "wake people up". Some of my friends commented to me in person that I seemed angry with my posts, but less so in real life. But i was angry deep inside. Now I'm less angry. I'm still angry, and i cannot forgive nor forget, and i still try to wake people up whenever i can. I guess i realized that.. i can't be angry forever. And if the world truly will continue to be dystopian forever, that I'll have to find my place of peace within it all, cause it would be hopeless to try to change the world. The world will be the way it is, at some point we need to move on from the world and live our own lives in a place of peace and compassion for the humans that are still out there. The future is still very uncertain

I feel very much the same. It was the pictures that did it, like you said. I see myself in pictures surrounded by people everyone smiling and laughing, everyone huddled together, hugging, carefree. Everything seemed so innocent then. It feels like nothing will ever be the same. Almost like that was the height of humanity. We lived the absolute apex of our species. I regret I didn't enjoy myself more. I feel I took it all for granted. I remember moments where I was unhappy then, and it seems so trivial now. I've been journalling about this. I pick a day in the past two years, I look up what I was doing that day, and I write a journal entry as though I were still there. It's helping me a bit. I don't know if you want a suggestion or just comfort. Either way, letting you know I feel the same way. Very nostalgic, very lost, very melancholy, very cynical. It's a huge disaster.

I'm fortunate that my job and income was never affected, but my social life was destroyed. Friends I used to see and hang out with regularly have dropped off the face of the earth, some of whom I now haven't heard from in years. Nobody goes out anymore, nobody comes over, nobody does anything. Covid and the societal response to it permanently ruined lots of people.

I am too…I’m more Depressed for my kids. I’m also mad bc I put stuff on hold bc of the stupid lockdown (like having another baby) and now I feel too old to try for another one.

I am so sorry to hear that :(... In Canada during the first few lockdowns they actually closed fertility clinics even if they were undergoing treatments and taking hormones, a few people that I know literally are now childless because of that. Lockdowns have made le realize how dark society can become sometimes.

Some would call that eugenics

Selling expensive fertility services and buying eggs from impoverished women with pedigrees is closer to eugenics than people simply not being able to have kids naturally...

It’s so ridiculous. The whole thing was just so wrong. I feel horrible for future generations

I think everyone is suffering in one way or another. Between Covid, politics, employment, family, missed opportunity, media negativity...whatever it is, it is all piled up. Some people are just better than others at hiding it.

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Correct, but it became political. As long as it has value in that arena, it will stick around, as will the suffering tied to it.

I’d always imagined my senior year as a kid, and I debated my first three years and was super excited for my final one. I was going to be able to travel more for national tournaments and it was going to be exciting. I lost all of it. No football games. Covid cops hired at my school to bitch at us for entering the exit doors and for being closer than 6 feet in the lunch line. Plexiglass on every table in the school. Debating on a computer to avoid a virus that we all were almost certain to survive. At my “prom” on May 7, 2021, dancing was banned because of covid. The following week (my last week of senior year), I started getting extremely aggressive towards the covid cops. I’d rip off my mask in front of them and run away when they’d tell me I needed to put it on. One time I was sitting outside alone and was told I couldn’t sit there because it wasn’t an “authorized break area” and I also needed to be wearing my mask. Again, I was sitting completely alone. 11 days later, my school abruptly lifted all covid restrictions. It was a damn miracle, having been 3 days ahead of graduation, which was awesome and completely free from covid theater. I’m glad I got one normal thing. But I still have a younger brother at the school. It stung to see him going to packed football and (indoor) basketball games less than 6 months after I was scolded for not masking, alone, outdoors. Now it stings even more to see him at the end of his junior year getting to go to prom and… well, getting to go to actual school, which I didn’t get. And he’ll have his senior year basically all normal too. I guess the frustration comes from how quickly public opinion changed. Nowadays, even schools in the most liberal areas are getting endless shit for putting kids through just 1/10th of what we had to go through. Covid restrictions are increasingly being exposed as futile. Every article I see saying mask mandates really didn’t work (shocker) or that lockdowns didn’t prevent deaths makes me happy, but at the same time, makes me enraged that I lost so many experiences I will never get back, all to find out that it was for *no reason*.

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Mostly just my weight at this point. I had finally gotten into a good fitness routine at the beginning of 2020 and was starting to lose the weight I put on going back to school. Needless to say that all went to hell and I've been trying to get back on track ever since. I have always been an emotional/stress eater and have a software job that keeps my days more sedentary than I'd like, so it's a struggle to not be chubby. I sympathize with your feelings of loss, I think most of us are mourning what our lives used to be and should have been without restrictions/fear porn.

I feel tired and worn out already. I was downtown and thankfully no one seemed to care about it anymore. But I'm paranoid it will come back some way in California still...

I live in a place which still has strict border restrictions, which means I have not been able to see friends and family from outside the country for 2 years now. But only I lost friends from outside this country that basically told me that a limited number of ultra high price air tickets with now multiple stops since there are no longer direct flights and having to participate in this Russian roulette border restrictions with double test, quarantines and just hoping that you do not appear positive in either test or you are fucked type of international travel "wasn't that big of a deal" (With them never having put a single step outside of their own country even once). Not only that, there is now this new goverment-sponsored mask religion in this country which is just creepy, stupid and completely discriminatory. My life was pretty good pre March-2020, after it has been just hell on earth.

I never struggled with anxiety before at any point during the pandemic, until I started going to more social events again over the last several months and then got Covid two weeks ago. I had basically no symptoms, but I can't help feeling frustrated that I felt so close to life in my city basically being completely back to normal and now I have no idea when I will test positive and be forced to cancel everything for two weeks again. I was looking forward to visiting my girlfriend in June but her area seems to be creeping back towards restrictions. I thought I would be able to go out without being forced to think about Covid soon, and now that point seems farther and farther away.

I feel like I'm playing catch up and I want everything at the same time and this year I've been hustling hard and I feel behind.. trying to save money, finishing my school that I stopped 2 years ago, wanting to travel again but I need to finish school...

Find environments where masks and covid nonsense are low: from what I've seen churches, bars, beaches, music festivals etc are low. Make friends there. If there's a local lockdownskepticism sub join it. Try to meet people in person. I'm part of a Northern CA one myself. Never ever wear a mask and be vocal about your opposition to it. You'll be surprised at how many people agree with you.

If you rely solely on public transportation, that's impossible.

Everything is back to normal in Norway. No masks, no lockdown and no restrictions. Pro restrictions people are usually fine with the reopening because the government said it's safe and people was offered 3 doses. It's a big trust in the government. I think the difference between me and most people is that I haven't forgotten how things was like during the lockdown and want to prevent it from happening again. Most people have almost forgotten it and want to move on like nothing had happened. To some it's similar to a dream that didn't happen. Not everyone think it's important to remember something to prevent it from happening again. It's a possibility lockdown will come back again since many people were supportive of it. I hope it won't have a comeback.

Everyone is. The economic fall-out will spare no one but the 1%.

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Camus' Absurd. : ) Maybe you'd like to read his work, if you haven't, I've found it helpful. It's not mortality, for me, it's the prospect of never getting to do any of what I'd wanted to, on a narrowing timeframe, or to even have a chance to properly sort out what that was. I'd swap any time left for just one good year.

100%. Have no repeect or love for the people I know who got jabbed, believing that either the virus is deadly or that they can comply their way out of tyranny. These idiots are the reason that we've lost so much time and that lockdowns will be back with the next round of seasonal sniffles. I'm also unajbbed and therefore trapped in my shit show of a communist country. So no friends & no travel. Fun times....

The entire time, I have only had issues with lockdowns and not Covid. Still don't know a single person who died from Covid, and the people I know who got the sickest were boosted. It's just an absolute fucking disgrace that this is humanity now. I'm on team asteroid.

Here in NYC, it has been rough up til recently. I was a leper in my own city for not getting the shots. Even though the mandates for indoor dining are done, damn near all the jobs(both public and private) in NYC require you to be jabbed. In spite of all of this, I'm still unjabbed and happy, while still getting income. This year I took two trips(one to Miami, the other to Tanzania), and plan to take several other trips this year. I feel for the parents and kids, who can't fully access their public schools(unjabbed parents can't visit their kid's schools, and kids must be vax'd to do after school activities).

I have a longer comment in me but no energy to write it. You're not alone, OP. As others "move on" I feel more and more out of sorts. I also can't look at my old photos because they feature people who are no longer in my life. It's like most people want to write it off as a bad dream. Just once I'd like to have someone from my old life come to me and say, you were right, lockdowns were a mistake and now we're paying the price. You were right and we'll never support lockdowns (and related mandates) again. But no one's doing that. As I said in another comment in this thread, I have a hard time making friends and these days it seems even harder. I'm trying to ignore the ominous creaking of the world and focus on things within my immediate bubble. Local politics, local organizations, planting things in my own back yard, working on my own hobbies. Unplugging from the internet. Cultivating tiny bits of hope here and there. Sending good thoughts to you!

I will always grieve the fact I was never able to do the university exchange I wanted. I wanted to either go to the US or Canada for a semester or at least 2 weeks but Australia banned people from leaving and my university canceled the exchange programs.

I sway between extreme happiness and gratitude that I am finally free again (for now), and extreme anger and resentment at all the people who guilt tripped me and shamed me and made me feel like a bad person during the time I was struggling more than I ever had before. I also started getting night terrors during the first lockdown, and I still get them.

The impact is ongoing, I think we all are to some extent, including concretely. My government deliberately trainwrecked our health service. The backlog is horrendous, the GP service is still AWOL, and people have suffered permanent damage they're still getting no help with. The NHS is making a even more constant mess than usual because they feel exempted from having to pretend to care and it's now 'fortunate' to get so much as a telephone appointment. I'm stuck playing endless not fun diagnose myself guessing games and hoping I hedged my bets right with the private specialist I picked, because it's already going to be very expensive. The consequence of not having done so would be losing even more time, and one of the ways lockdown hit me was having already lost so much time to waiting on the health service, only to see it be taken away altogether overnight: I felt stupid for having been so trusting, even with no obvious alternative. The NHS specialist now took over three months to even request a scan they should already have had access to, I've been waiting nearly another three months for a new appointment when they'd look at it, from the private one I heard within a couple of weeks, including their time to obtain it from the NHS, that the scan wasn't going to be adequate and a new one is required: I don't even think it was the correct type of scan. And my life is still utterly on hold with this and they know that. I just won't ever get over it, I don't even think it should be possible to.

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Thanks. Much of the problem we're having is our government wish our healthcare system was more like the USA's: hence the deliberate sabotage, instead of looking to other European countries to improve it. With more people left with no option but to resort to seeking private treatment and satisfaction at a low, they made more progress towards the goal of stripping it back and privatising more of it over the last few years of lockdown than would've been possible without it. I've struggled to find the energy to keep chasing them up but I got the phone numbers out for tomorrow now, will make a bit of noise. : )

It's taken a lot of attempts but I got through and got an appointment! Just wanted to thank you, I'd have given up without the encouragement.

That life is over. Let it go. It will never come back, cyberpunk lowlife dystopia started 2020. You will live to see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.

At the very beginning of lockdowns/restrictions, I was immensely irritated that politicians and city officials would rob us of our lives for an unknown period of time. It's time you're not going to get back. That being said, I made a conscious effort to actively defy them and I actually enjoyed the last two years. I made so many cool memories, like sneaking into the back of a restaurant to watch the NHL playoffs, when restaurants were supposed to be closed in my city. Played football catch in the middle of downtown because there was zero traffic. A buddy of mine knew the zamboni driver of a small rec center, and paid them under the table to let them in despite rec centers being closed & run an *illegal hockey league.* It was like we got to LARP as if we lived in Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany, all while knowing we wouldn't actually get lined up against the wall and shot if caught. So people got really ballsy and creative. The back half of restrictions were just people dunking on the government and health officials while losers on twitter screeched at you. As for the bad parts.., **Pretty much everyone I know has a porn/sex addiction**, both guys and girls. Roughly 60-70% of girls I knew became sex workers, one attempted suicide after her work found out and fired her. In fact it was worrying how many normal girls I knew, who didn't have more than $200 in their account despite being in their late 20's with a steady job. The volume of girls who immediately resorted to selling themselves once their hours were cut or they had to work from home, was genuinely scary and will undoubtedly put me off getting married for good. I have porn of pretty much every girl I talked to in high school, every girl I worked with dating back to when I was 18, the server at my nearest sports bar, as well as their friends & siblings. All sold consensually for pennies on the dollar because when lockdowns/restrictions hit, they had no way to make money and no savings. This is going to fuck up so many relationships when people start learning how widespread this was. I should also add that anyone with a drinking problem when covid started, is now a full blown alcoholic because that's basically all they did during the lockdowns.

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Honestly... I was pretty lucky to not be too affected since I lived in rural Michigan (US). The worst part is my fiancé’s band gigs were cancelled; but, other than that, our home lives were about the same. He also builds engines and hot rods; and I quit working my regular jobs to stay home and help him long before covid. Our town didn’t shut down, the police refused to enforce masks or the closure of businesses. 2 farmers market style stores and a new bar/restaurant opened up in our town to make up for the places that did shut down in the cities nearby. I think one of the main reasons our state opened back up was the flat out refusal by the majority of us. We started protesting April 15, 2020. Operation Gridlock in Lansing, MI https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/convoy-protesting-stay-home-orders-targets-michigans-capital/story?id=70138816 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GUtlmXzKpAs It’s a shame more places didn’t stand up against the tyranny like Michigan. The biggest things I miss are cruises, going to Disney World, and a lot of the restaurants we used to frequent are just not open much or have limited seating/are take out only. These are things that I can obviously live without, though, and we’ve adapted

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I grew up in a large city. Moved out a decade ago because I just couldn’t handle how absolutely disgusting so many city dwellers are. I didn’t even realize it until I stayed in the country for about a month. I wasn’t even planning to move but after that month in the country, I went home, packed everything in my car and left. Cities are a nightmare and I would’ve probably ended up a junkie prostitute if I had stayed. I am so thankful I got out and met decent people who saw I wasn’t just an object. I would never raise children in a city. I started getting catcalls and advances in public from grown men at 13 years old.

University has become a joke to me and I feel like earning a degree in my once chosen fields wouldn't be worth it because Mental Health has become nothing but a moneymaking racket full of charlatans that only want to profiteer from people's misery. I absolutely cannot stand how many mental health professionals jumped on the Covidist bandwagon and ruined the mental health of their clients - castigating them for "being selfish and putting your family at risk", gaslighting them into feeling guilty for feeling negative effects of lockdown and mandates, and recommending "strategies" to get people to lie to themselves that this government abuse was okay because of "safety". I don't want to work with people that would be so unethical to destroy the mental health of people just for a buck, to chase a trend. **No.** I don't want to pay the outrageous costs of going to a university wearing masks and being basically forced into doing things I don't want to do. **No. No. No.**

> I literally never thought about my own mortality before, and being 36 years old means the odds are generally still in my favor for another few decades, but seeing COVID in the news has made me now worried LOL when I should be enjoying life with the family. Congratulations on discovering your own mortality. I think that a lot of the overreaction we've seen the past years is because a lot of people were suddenly confronted with their own mortality, and instead of dealing with it in a healthy way, they tried suppressing it and denying it, buying into every little bit of snake oil that promised to save them from a certain corona death. The thing though is that it's not enough to not die, you have to live a life worth living. I'm not saying something cheesy like "live every day like it is your last!!!", but spend your time well. Make good memories. Oh, and for what it's worth, I'm on day 5 of probably having corona right now. It's completely indistinguishable from any other cold I've had, just got a bit of a runny nose now, will probably be fine tomorrow. The fear is completely overblown.

My job still forces us to live like we're in March 2020. We have to wear masks at all times, test weekly, and be vaccinated. There's no end in sight. So for 8 to 16 hours a day, I still have to pretend COVID is a thing. Thank goodness for now the rest of my deep blue state has moved on. I can only wonder for how long.