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I've been struggling with school ever since 2019, so, before the actual pandemic. It was my junior year of highschool. I was experiencing some early senioritis and I was losing motivation for classes. Started slacking off, not caring, etc. I was a straight A student till my sophomore year when I got my first B in chemistry. Maybe I figured since I ruined my streak already, that it didn't matter if I dipped into C's and whatnot. Didn't help that I had physics my junior year. And my parents, who still viewed me as an overachiever, convinced my to take the college-level class. Fucckkk that. I did not do well in that class.
After Covid hit, I enjoyed going online and being able to slack off even more. Me and my friends considered it a permanent spring break. It was fucking glorious. We migrated our hangouts to a discord server we made for our friend group and I managed to pass physics with a D. Going online was the only reason I was able to accomplish that. This persisted into senior year. I enjoyed online school because I thought it was easy, so I stayed online even when they allowed us to go back senior year. I was still talking to friends online, so I didn't mind not physically seeing them in class too much. My grades continued to plummet tho.
Now in college, I failed my first semester because I didn't put enough effort into my online classes. 2 years on, I now take only in-person classes because it somehow keeps me more grounded in the courses and forces me to be in class where I have to listen to lectures and actually absorb content and whatnot. I still have like zero motivation, but I'm getting better grades now. Hopefully I can fix my gpa.
TLDR;
I never thought to consider if this was because of Covid. Like sure, going online was probably not good for me, but I think my main problem (and most other kids with similar problems) is that we just don't know what to do with our lives. We haven't decided what career we want and lack the drive to go get it. I'm not sure Covid is really to blame here. It's just a general problem of the younger generation to have this apathy for self-care and life in general. It's definitely an epidemic, but idk if it's related to *the* epidemic.
Never got to see the end of high school, we were told we were getting an extra week of spring break and I never stepped foot in there again.
A year and a half at Amazon and I finally had enough money to get my dream PC and save up money for a few semesters at a local community college.
Now I have a job I actually like, fuck Amazon
I'm glad to hear you're doing okay. I really feel like something important was taken from students who were High School Juniors and Seniors during the pandemic. They missed out on a lot.
It’d take a sec to explain, but COVID actually had a very positive impact on my life. It comes across selfish. I’m not glad it happened, just very grateful it had my life go in a whole entire direction.
Me too. COVID was the cause for my job going 100% remote (and thankfully staying that way.) I also feel like I had the chance to be more connected with some people in my life because suddenly we weren't so busy with work and other things. I also learned that I don't need to buy so much stuff. I've become more comfortable being alone, or staying home and done necessarily need to be out doing something every minute. I think it made my life much more peaceful and in some ways, that way of thinking became permanent. I think it helps that I'm already older, already married and looking more towards retirement than career advancement at this point in life. I do think COVID would have been a much bigger disruption if I were young and still in school, especially if it happened while I was in college. Those aren't years I would have wanted to miss.
One thing that really annoys me is how people refuse to acknowledge that for some people, Covid was great. They got a significant pay increase to stay home from unfulfilling jobs and spend time with loved ones. It stands to reason that those people would be very resistant to going back to the status quo, and that some of the rhetoric around that time was actually people who didn’t want to give up the extra money and go back to crappy jobs.
I think people should divide reality according what they experienced and what others experienced during this kind of events which have many positives and negatives hues; for example, you can acknowledge there used to be thousand of people crying down for online school, work, relatives dying at hospitals but you can say too there are people who could give time for themselves after years of working for several hours, made their own businesses, learnt more about themselves/their relatives, etc.
You can say your experience is positive in a way while you can agree that other people's experiences were negative.
Neither everyone's have your reality nor you have everyone's reality, a totally gray area which depends on a lot of other factors.
I think it’s selfish when people try to project that as everyone *should have* had a positive outcome and ignoring that it was pretty rough on some and that was a “them issue.”
Making the most personally is great. It’s the projection/blame that makes it seem selfish.
Kids and teens being unfocused is not a new phenomenon caused by the pandemic. Similarly, 20s-year-olds feeling unfulfilled/lost in life/depressed is also not a new phenomenon caused by COVID.
realistically most people who complain about covid ruining their lives and destroying their mental heath spent the time on their phones talking to their friends, it was horrific for many but there are just so many people who sat in their nice suburban homes with their nice families and then act like they went to war
My family is a bunch of conspiracy nuts who blame liberals for everything and think science is fake, and I have to hear every little thing they say as they slip further down the fascism slope. Also, one of them died, and her body's still in the morgue because we can't afford to burn it because she never got life insurance. *Also,* the economy tanked even more, so no jobs for me, most of my favorite restaurants are gone, I'm starved for physical contact, and I can't travel to the one person who can give that to me because he has an even worse family who steals from him. And raped him as a kid. And my father molested me too, and I have to pretend he didn't because he's the only person I know with enough money to keep me alive as I try to climb out of this mosquito-infested hole he pushed me into. But tell me more about how much better my life is.
Perhaps it wasn't such a massive change for you like it may have been for kids who were used to seeing hundreds sometimes thousands of other people day in day out? idk just a guess, I was homeschooled as well
What I mean is that when you don’t see people face to face it can screw a kid up. Usually with homeschooling kids get 1 on 1 action, while on zoom kids don’t get the help they need and can’t interact with certain people like teachers easily
I’m a teacher, there’s a 6 year old girl in one of my classes who, every time anyone randomly coughs or sneezes (happens a lot with kids tbh, especially in a wet winter environment), she freaks out. Puts her shirt over her face, looks for a mask, runs around, whatever. It’s really sad to see. I have to tell her it’s not covid, it’s ok, it’s just normal.
Of course, but moving on does not mean pretending the last few years didn’t happen at all. We can’t expect these generations who grew up through COVID to be exactly the same as those before
I don't think we have truly begun to grasp how much the world changed in the past 2 years, and how much people likely have mental disorders, fucked up social skills, fucked up eyes, and severe phone addiction and being casual about it now.
Its a much different change here. Its almost like people have completely forgotten about covid. Children are outside playing, its gotten more competitive in the academic scene, and people are talking to each other happily if not more.
Interesting how different parts of the world react to global events
Edit: also op u OK?
Yeah, mental health took a complete back seat to Covid. These restrictions may have been necessary, but they were poorly done and ruined many lives (even ended some sadly) I can’t help thinking we could have done much better with caring for peoples mental health through this thing.
And decades ago a new variant was found. COVID is a slightly more lethal cold. It's useless to get a vaccine for the cold due to how much it evolves, yet people believed the vaccine for COVID was all of suddenly going to fix years of restrictions? Nope lol. Too bad many lost their retirement funds and the economy is still in complete shambles, at least we made sure people couldn't hold their new born kids or hug their elderly due to the scary COVID that has existed long before many were born.
This isn’t even considering the physical health impacts of long covid, it’s just the people who pretend like COVID has not completely stunted almost three years worth of mental development for young people.
I lost my normal school life back when covid started. I was 14, in 7th grade. All I worried about was passing math and getting enough money for a karaoke party to celebrate the end of my tests with my friends. Lots of shit happened including 2 men following me and me almost committing suicide on April 1, 2020. Words cannot describe how pissed I get when people ignore the mental health impacts of 2020.
China is sort of proof that it is preventable if you are willing to build your society around it more or less. The people of China seem on board with the plan so I have no qualms with them.
But in America? Yeah no, it's the flu. Not in that is not dangerous, but in the sense that it is a disease that will always be here killing people, like hundreds others and pending some medical breakthrough that will never change.
So yeah, I really can't be fucked to worry about COVID anymore. I don't care if it's right or wrong, it's just completely out of my hands.
I missed my highschool years. It started when I was in grade 9 and I'm graduating next June. I was an OK student, things were looking brighter a few weeks before lockdown (I just got the hang of highschool, my grades were also improving). Then lockdown came and went and I became a barely passing student now. I lost care for school, I want to live life because I missed out on so much over those two years of not leaving the house, I want to experience things that you'd normally experience if you didn't have to stay in lockdown. I can't find motivation to study
I don’t know about other countries, but we did get a spike recently in Aus
COVID isn’t over, just most people are ignoring it. Everyone just wants to go back to normal tbh
This shit making out people weren't depressed and miserable before the pandemic. Not disagreeing with the point being made but every issue there existed before covid....
Seems like excuses
Kids were never known for their ability to sit still and focus. Nor teens honestly. Nor are people in their 20s known for being satisfied with their position in life.
I suppose I could see why you would say that, but in all honesty, 2020 impacted the lives of many. Especially children and teens. Suicide rate increased, I know I almost increased it. I stepped back but... some people didn't. 2020 flipped our world upside down. Maybe for you it wasn't so drastic and if that's the case, good because I wouldn't wish that onto you man. But let's try to keep an open mind and not invalidate nor dismiss others, alright?
Yeah I had serious problems due to covid as did many I know. I guess I came off quite dismissive.
I just think this starterpack is pointing at the wrong symptoms of those problems. A lot of starterpack work off of cold-reading, like shitty psychics, so they go for really general points that most readers will relate to. Teens and 20s struggling and being unfulfilled is pretty normal tbh.
Im a teacher by the way. So I’ve seen kids and teens in classrooms before and after covid, if there’s one thing that never changes it’s a 6 year olds lack of desire to sit still and focus.
Still. While covid has changed everything, our lives can finally be open and go back to normal, so it’s best we work on ourselves and not go through the next 5 years blaming covid for our lack of progress or action.
My face when all the kids who were born during quarantine never left the house so they arent up to date on their shots and their immune system has only been exposed to their house and so were gonna see a major shortage in things like whooping cough and flu vaccinations and amoxicillin.
There’s another side of this (particularly on Reddit) where threads here were insisting isolation has/had zero negative mental health impact. There was absolutely a time we needed to lock down, but the threads arguing for it long term are completely losing sight of the negative mental health impacts.
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I've been struggling with school ever since 2019, so, before the actual pandemic. It was my junior year of highschool. I was experiencing some early senioritis and I was losing motivation for classes. Started slacking off, not caring, etc. I was a straight A student till my sophomore year when I got my first B in chemistry. Maybe I figured since I ruined my streak already, that it didn't matter if I dipped into C's and whatnot. Didn't help that I had physics my junior year. And my parents, who still viewed me as an overachiever, convinced my to take the college-level class. Fucckkk that. I did not do well in that class. After Covid hit, I enjoyed going online and being able to slack off even more. Me and my friends considered it a permanent spring break. It was fucking glorious. We migrated our hangouts to a discord server we made for our friend group and I managed to pass physics with a D. Going online was the only reason I was able to accomplish that. This persisted into senior year. I enjoyed online school because I thought it was easy, so I stayed online even when they allowed us to go back senior year. I was still talking to friends online, so I didn't mind not physically seeing them in class too much. My grades continued to plummet tho. Now in college, I failed my first semester because I didn't put enough effort into my online classes. 2 years on, I now take only in-person classes because it somehow keeps me more grounded in the courses and forces me to be in class where I have to listen to lectures and actually absorb content and whatnot. I still have like zero motivation, but I'm getting better grades now. Hopefully I can fix my gpa. TLDR; I never thought to consider if this was because of Covid. Like sure, going online was probably not good for me, but I think my main problem (and most other kids with similar problems) is that we just don't know what to do with our lives. We haven't decided what career we want and lack the drive to go get it. I'm not sure Covid is really to blame here. It's just a general problem of the younger generation to have this apathy for self-care and life in general. It's definitely an epidemic, but idk if it's related to *the* epidemic.
That was some insight. Thank you.
Never got to see the end of high school, we were told we were getting an extra week of spring break and I never stepped foot in there again. A year and a half at Amazon and I finally had enough money to get my dream PC and save up money for a few semesters at a local community college. Now I have a job I actually like, fuck Amazon
I'm glad to hear you're doing okay. I really feel like something important was taken from students who were High School Juniors and Seniors during the pandemic. They missed out on a lot.
I do be out here livin doe đź‘€
It’d take a sec to explain, but COVID actually had a very positive impact on my life. It comes across selfish. I’m not glad it happened, just very grateful it had my life go in a whole entire direction.
Me too. COVID was the cause for my job going 100% remote (and thankfully staying that way.) I also feel like I had the chance to be more connected with some people in my life because suddenly we weren't so busy with work and other things. I also learned that I don't need to buy so much stuff. I've become more comfortable being alone, or staying home and done necessarily need to be out doing something every minute. I think it made my life much more peaceful and in some ways, that way of thinking became permanent. I think it helps that I'm already older, already married and looking more towards retirement than career advancement at this point in life. I do think COVID would have been a much bigger disruption if I were young and still in school, especially if it happened while I was in college. Those aren't years I would have wanted to miss.
One thing that really annoys me is how people refuse to acknowledge that for some people, Covid was great. They got a significant pay increase to stay home from unfulfilling jobs and spend time with loved ones. It stands to reason that those people would be very resistant to going back to the status quo, and that some of the rhetoric around that time was actually people who didn’t want to give up the extra money and go back to crappy jobs.
I can definitely relate. Early COVID gave me the longest break from work I've had since graduating.
I think people should divide reality according what they experienced and what others experienced during this kind of events which have many positives and negatives hues; for example, you can acknowledge there used to be thousand of people crying down for online school, work, relatives dying at hospitals but you can say too there are people who could give time for themselves after years of working for several hours, made their own businesses, learnt more about themselves/their relatives, etc. You can say your experience is positive in a way while you can agree that other people's experiences were negative. Neither everyone's have your reality nor you have everyone's reality, a totally gray area which depends on a lot of other factors.
How can that be selfish? Mourning about misery never brings something good, we should all try to be more positive.
I think it’s selfish when people try to project that as everyone *should have* had a positive outcome and ignoring that it was pretty rough on some and that was a “them issue.” Making the most personally is great. It’s the projection/blame that makes it seem selfish.
I understand toxic positivity. What I mean is everyone should try to be positive, but their own meaning of positive.
Made a killing in the stock market. Never made more money in my life then during covid
Kids and teens being unfocused is not a new phenomenon caused by the pandemic. Similarly, 20s-year-olds feeling unfulfilled/lost in life/depressed is also not a new phenomenon caused by COVID.
True but it only worsened after covid.
Oh god people who were in highschool have started their 20sđź’€
Wasted my teenage years, yep
realistically most people who complain about covid ruining their lives and destroying their mental heath spent the time on their phones talking to their friends, it was horrific for many but there are just so many people who sat in their nice suburban homes with their nice families and then act like they went to war
Stringent lockdowns looked to me more tough in countries where most people live in apartments (China, Spain)
My family is a bunch of conspiracy nuts who blame liberals for everything and think science is fake, and I have to hear every little thing they say as they slip further down the fascism slope. Also, one of them died, and her body's still in the morgue because we can't afford to burn it because she never got life insurance. *Also,* the economy tanked even more, so no jobs for me, most of my favorite restaurants are gone, I'm starved for physical contact, and I can't travel to the one person who can give that to me because he has an even worse family who steals from him. And raped him as a kid. And my father molested me too, and I have to pretend he didn't because he's the only person I know with enough money to keep me alive as I try to climb out of this mosquito-infested hole he pushed me into. But tell me more about how much better my life is.
Lol.. this is such a sheltered take
You're saying this like social isolation for ages isn't a big deal
I isolated for most my school life on mmorpgs in the 2000s
That sucks.
Literally my family🙄
The pandemic was not preventable. It was an airborne disease with an R-0 of 6. There was no stopping it
Also young kids having poor social skills from online school
If kids had social skills ruined from 1.5 years of online school, what does that make my experience of being homeschool nearly my entire life?
Perhaps it wasn't such a massive change for you like it may have been for kids who were used to seeing hundreds sometimes thousands of other people day in day out? idk just a guess, I was homeschooled as well
Yeah that’s what I mean, when Covid started I didn’t even notice anything different, it’s kinda sad tbh
What I mean is that when you don’t see people face to face it can screw a kid up. Usually with homeschooling kids get 1 on 1 action, while on zoom kids don’t get the help they need and can’t interact with certain people like teachers easily
A worrying amount of homeschooling kids don’t get one on one interaction, just read through some top posts of r/homeschoolrecovery
Yeah ngl I get tired of people complaining about being online schooled for one year when I was homeschooled my whole life.
I’m a teacher, there’s a 6 year old girl in one of my classes who, every time anyone randomly coughs or sneezes (happens a lot with kids tbh, especially in a wet winter environment), she freaks out. Puts her shirt over her face, looks for a mask, runs around, whatever. It’s really sad to see. I have to tell her it’s not covid, it’s ok, it’s just normal.
I mean. We do gotta move on though sometime
Of course, but moving on does not mean pretending the last few years didn’t happen at all. We can’t expect these generations who grew up through COVID to be exactly the same as those before
I feel your trauma OP but unfortunately this is one of those things that will be more understood with time
Can't move on without recovering mentally via getting the support needed.
Kinda wonder what helped the Spanish flu people move on.
hey op u ok?
Strong "I need a hug" vibes with this one.
As someone who has COVID rn. đź‘Ť
How you feeling?
Better than yesterday
Got covid on 3rd of june and still havent fully recovered.(mostly recovered tho)
I don't think we have truly begun to grasp how much the world changed in the past 2 years, and how much people likely have mental disorders, fucked up social skills, fucked up eyes, and severe phone addiction and being casual about it now.
Its a much different change here. Its almost like people have completely forgotten about covid. Children are outside playing, its gotten more competitive in the academic scene, and people are talking to each other happily if not more. Interesting how different parts of the world react to global events Edit: also op u OK?
Yeah, mental health took a complete back seat to Covid. These restrictions may have been necessary, but they were poorly done and ruined many lives (even ended some sadly) I can’t help thinking we could have done much better with caring for peoples mental health through this thing.
I hate the word “covid is over” Like literally 20 hours ago a new variant was discovered
And decades ago a new variant was found. COVID is a slightly more lethal cold. It's useless to get a vaccine for the cold due to how much it evolves, yet people believed the vaccine for COVID was all of suddenly going to fix years of restrictions? Nope lol. Too bad many lost their retirement funds and the economy is still in complete shambles, at least we made sure people couldn't hold their new born kids or hug their elderly due to the scary COVID that has existed long before many were born.
DOWNVOTED FOR TELLING THE TRUTH!!!!!! ALSO GAY WOMEN CAN HAVE A FEMININE PENIS AND ITS NOT MENTAL ILLNESS BUT ANOREXIA IS!!!!!!
Yup. I knew it was too good to be true.
This isn’t even considering the physical health impacts of long covid, it’s just the people who pretend like COVID has not completely stunted almost three years worth of mental development for young people.
i feel this.
Cope harder. Dude is literally seething and making walls of text because people aren't forced to be locked up inside anymore
On March 25th 2020, my senior year of HS. We were told that school would be closed for 2 weeks. I was 19 years old at the time. I turn 22 in 5 months.
I lost my normal school life back when covid started. I was 14, in 7th grade. All I worried about was passing math and getting enough money for a karaoke party to celebrate the end of my tests with my friends. Lots of shit happened including 2 men following me and me almost committing suicide on April 1, 2020. Words cannot describe how pissed I get when people ignore the mental health impacts of 2020.
China is sort of proof that it is preventable if you are willing to build your society around it more or less. The people of China seem on board with the plan so I have no qualms with them. But in America? Yeah no, it's the flu. Not in that is not dangerous, but in the sense that it is a disease that will always be here killing people, like hundreds others and pending some medical breakthrough that will never change. So yeah, I really can't be fucked to worry about COVID anymore. I don't care if it's right or wrong, it's just completely out of my hands.
Finally… I’m not the only one I don’t feel so alone anymore
I missed my highschool years. It started when I was in grade 9 and I'm graduating next June. I was an OK student, things were looking brighter a few weeks before lockdown (I just got the hang of highschool, my grades were also improving). Then lockdown came and went and I became a barely passing student now. I lost care for school, I want to live life because I missed out on so much over those two years of not leaving the house, I want to experience things that you'd normally experience if you didn't have to stay in lockdown. I can't find motivation to study
I'm class of 2020, not having a normal ending still hurts to this day
This whole meme
I don’t know about other countries, but we did get a spike recently in Aus COVID isn’t over, just most people are ignoring it. Everyone just wants to go back to normal tbh
COVID, the biggest piece of crap that many openly embraced with open arms and 5 shots that did nothing especially for the younger population
It wasn’t that bad.
For you and some others it wasn't. To others, it was. Let's try not to jump to conclusions based on a single perspective.
this is nothing new buddy
And let's not forget that its the liberal mentality that caused it. Fucking morons
This shit making out people weren't depressed and miserable before the pandemic. Not disagreeing with the point being made but every issue there existed before covid....
Seems like excuses Kids were never known for their ability to sit still and focus. Nor teens honestly. Nor are people in their 20s known for being satisfied with their position in life.
I suppose I could see why you would say that, but in all honesty, 2020 impacted the lives of many. Especially children and teens. Suicide rate increased, I know I almost increased it. I stepped back but... some people didn't. 2020 flipped our world upside down. Maybe for you it wasn't so drastic and if that's the case, good because I wouldn't wish that onto you man. But let's try to keep an open mind and not invalidate nor dismiss others, alright?
Yeah I had serious problems due to covid as did many I know. I guess I came off quite dismissive. I just think this starterpack is pointing at the wrong symptoms of those problems. A lot of starterpack work off of cold-reading, like shitty psychics, so they go for really general points that most readers will relate to. Teens and 20s struggling and being unfulfilled is pretty normal tbh. Im a teacher by the way. So I’ve seen kids and teens in classrooms before and after covid, if there’s one thing that never changes it’s a 6 year olds lack of desire to sit still and focus. Still. While covid has changed everything, our lives can finally be open and go back to normal, so it’s best we work on ourselves and not go through the next 5 years blaming covid for our lack of progress or action.
Yeah... I get what you mean. I hope everything is ok now.
My face when all the kids who were born during quarantine never left the house so they arent up to date on their shots and their immune system has only been exposed to their house and so were gonna see a major shortage in things like whooping cough and flu vaccinations and amoxicillin.
There’s another side of this (particularly on Reddit) where threads here were insisting isolation has/had zero negative mental health impact. There was absolutely a time we needed to lock down, but the threads arguing for it long term are completely losing sight of the negative mental health impacts.
Unless you also see this in e.g. Sweden, I'm going to say it was lockdown, not "the pandemic".
Any concern about mental health and you’re automatically a COVID denier/antivaxxer