Someone somewhere needs to articulate the lost quality of life

[Gguin]

Firstly, I am not saying I think there shouldn't be restrictions as needed, masks, reduced social contact. I do. Just to reemphasise that, to prevent people misreading the title, I support and abide and have abided by restrictions, both statutory and advised.
I also hated every single second of the lockdown. I hated what it did to friends. I hated the disregard of single people. I hated the criminalisation of social lives. I hated the lost opportunities for young and not so young people to build or change their lives. I hated the paranoia and judgmentalism. I hated the NHS worship and everyone else can go hang.
And yes I hate this feeling, somewhere between anxiety, depression and a grinding underlying fear of future regret on all that has been lost. I drove past a pub in rural Ireland where I live today and it was shut, boarded up and probably will never reopen. The sign "craic agus ceoil" (laughter and music) was worn and frayed, like a relic of the times when we were able to enjoy themselves with abandon.
All I would like as the latest chapter of shit unfolds is for someone, somewhere to actually articulate the sadness of all the lost opportunities. The friends that have never been made, the months and years spent indoors, the catastrophic toll on mental health and above all this awful feeling that the many of the very things that make life worth living are so expendable and in some quarters, not even mourned.

@CaliforniaDrumming

Can we never mention the bloody world wars again, or the Blitz?

Hear, hear.

I felt like this from the very beginning. To say it on MN was to risk taking a battering.

I’m glad it’s ok to say it now.

I think we’ve done a pretty good job at highlighting risk from Covid but suppressing harm from controlling it

It will start to surface - and of course the extreme cost which will hit all of us and next generay

Generation

Yanbu

@Cyw2018 During last winters lockdown, at the start my DD (3 last Feb) would wake up in the morning and ask what we were doing, playgroup/swimming/softplay/zoo/playdate etc, it would break my heart having to say no, no, no over and over again to her totally reasonable request, until eventually after several weeks, she just gave up asking

Well, it didn't take long before the tired old 'think of the Blitz' comments appeared.

Yes, I know that there are people much worse off than me and that people have survived much worse. That doesn't mean the current situation isn't total rubbish.

I wouldn't say I had a 'fantastic social life' 2 years ago. But I did appreciate casual interactions with my fellow human beings, without masks and 'distancing'. That's gone now. Maybe it doesn't bother you but it does bother many of us, and not because we're massively privileged. If anything, it's the privileged types who enjoy WFH so they can be there for the Waitrose deliver man, who doesn't get the option to WFH, and enjoy artisan espresso during their frequent coffee breaks, who have been quite happy with lockdown.

I do agree and thank you OP for the way you have worded this. I've also supported the lockdowns, restrictions, vaccines etc because I just can't see another way with societal collapse. But I also see the cost of it all and it makes me very, very sad. It's had very negative effects in my own family. I think we do need to acknowledge the tragedy of it.

I'm glad you worded it like that because so often on here those of us who do abide by restrictions get called lockdown lovers and worse when I can't imagine anything I love less. So thank you for this.

I think it feels out of kilter because all media was used to help get compliance - which did work and in low enforcement society was probably needed

But it means all the other stuff is very low down

It’s there and so much has happened to people but it’s suppressed

Because if you didn’t emphasise the above you wouldn’t get behaviour change

Agree with all this.
Bo Burnham's 'inside' on Netflix was a very good creative response to it I thought. Only thing I've seen so far.

👏👏👏 summed up to perfection.

Everyone of the 65+ million people in Britain have been affected to some degree, some far more than others.

The focus has very much been on quantity of life rather than quality and this focus needs to shift because it affects the majority of people

@Ionlydomassiveones

I’m sorry op, I can’t relate to what you’re saying although I know many people feel it including my dd20 who nearly lost her mind and will to live during the first lockdown. That was awful to watch.

Life has changed but not so much for those of us not privileged to have enjoyed fantastic social lives, going out, foreign holidays etc. life is pretty much still the same pattern of work/tea and bed as it was before.

I don’t dwell on the mask wearing or the 5pm press conferences or wallow in the doom and gloom. I think about my aged father who soiled himself as a child as his house was being bombed in the Blitz. His school friends died. What me and my family is going through is nothing compared to him and his family back then. He came through it, so will we.

Yeah, this has really annoyed me.

1. Presenting it as some sort of competition between coronavirus and the Blitz for who suffered the most is really tasteless.

1. However, if you want a competition, far more people have died of covid in Britain than died in the Blitz, and we're not nearly finished yet.

1. I sincerely hope that, when your father was so frightened as a young boy, he didn't have someone standing over him telling him not to "wallow in doom and gloom" because his situation wasn't as bad as that of soldiers at the Somme 30 years earlier or whatever, because that would be utterly heartless, wouldn't it?

I completely agree with you.

Why not, California?

I completely agree 💯

I agree. The fact that 66m people have basically lost over a year of good quality life (albeit to different degrees) just hasn’t been factored in.

I have good days and bad days but still basically feel that the first two years of my son’s life have been taken or at least severely compromised and I will never get that back.

I find the uncertainty and loss of control very hard. That even if I am enjoying something today (even something very simple like taking DS swimming or meeting a friend) within days it could be criminalised and taken away for some indefinite amount of time.

It’s not that I can’t find joy in anything but there’s a shadow hanging over everything.

I also feel that the restrictions have brought out the worst in a lot of people- the nasty self-righteousness about masks, the calling the police on neighbours, the excuse not to see anyone or do anything for anyone and pretence that this is virtue. There is so much talk about protecting people and selfishness but I don’t see much common decency or empathy from people. I’ve seen it in my own family in that they are less trusting of people, quicker to get annoyed or judge and more insular. I know that it comes from a place of fear and that’s understandable but sometimes it feels like peoples moral code has been replaced with following the covid rules.

It doesn’t help that I think it was all completely futile and has done much more harm than good. Perhaps if I believed following these rules was doing good it would be easier.

Totally agree. It's so tedious when people minimize the colossal impact of the covid response. I hope we find the way back to true normal.

@ChristmasRobins well said.

Minimising the suffering of others is heartless and pointless.

I think the sort of effect you describe has happened to people in isolation for all sorts of reasons that maybe the majority don't see (I had extensive cancer treatment for example which has completely changed the way I can live my life, ill will never be the same again nor will my life live out as it was going to) and it's a colossal mind shift and grief process you go through.

I feel like this is happening to the majority of the population currently and it's crap, shit, unfair, indescribable etc but it is what it is and it's no ones fault, no one can undo it and no one can make it go away. Everyone's lives will be different because of the pandemic and in our own way, people will grieve and adapt to a new way of life.

It rips me up inside knowing that Covid is what will define the childhoods of my children and that my youngest can't really remember a time before it. That they had to sacrifice so much to keep me, their disabled mum alive.
We moved to a new village the year before lockdown and I often feel so heartsick thinking those eight years in our old home were the most secure period of our lives as a family that we will ever have. I didn't ever appreciate it like I should have done. I can't even look at photos of the time before covid without feeling sick and heartbroken .

Thanks for starting this thread OP. I needed to get this off of my chest and have this little cry.

I totally agree. I've just got a new job because I actually wanted to be in the office for part of the week. I've done two weeks of chatting with new workmates and feeling the buzz of the office and getting into a routine with my commute and now I'm back to WFH.
And when I think of the little town I live in and the festivals and gigs and social clubs that used to exist, and how QUIET everything is now, and how BROKEN everyone seems, and how bloody CAUTIOUS everyone is about social contact, I think it's a total tragedy what's happened.

I wouldn't minimise the impact of the past 2 years; it has been colossal.

However, the measures were in place also to avoid something else with enormously negative effects on human suffering and loss of life, and I wouldn't want to minimise that either.

I drove past a pub in rural Ireland where I live today and it was shut, boarded up and probably will never reopen. The sign "craic agus ceoil" (laughter and music) was worn and frayed, like a relic of the times when we were able to enjoy themselves with abandon.

What used to have me so upset in the last winter lockdown were the pubs and shops that had shut at the last minute (when London got put into Tier 4 with less than 1 day notice) and the Christmas trees and decorations just stayed up and in the windows for 3 -4 months until re-opening.
There was one pub I used to walk past on my walks where the tree just got browner and scrawnier daily. Another independent shop had a Father Christmas mannequin in the window that just looked so weirdly out of place and desperately sad in March.

It just felt very much like life just paused.. but in the meantime we all got older and sadder like the decorations.

@Chessie678 such a well-articulated post. I agree with every word x

I'm one of the lucky ones, we lived lockdown. Our quality of life and mental health improved massively.