Still simmering.

As she walked into the kitchen, I mentioned to my wife that it’s the five-year anniversary of the COVID pandemic. She stopped mid-step, like a record skipping, and uttered, “Nah uh.” I understood her disbelief and repeated the fact. She interjected, “It doesn’t feel like five years, more like three,” as I was thinking the exact same thing. I don’t need to cite research because once this anniversary hits you—if it hasn't already—you’ll feel it too. Our records skipped have all been skipped.

Maybe I haven’t been paying attention—highly likely—but normally, an anniversary milestone like this gets paraded across the media more than a few times. Yet, I haven’t seen a peep. I suspect it has a lot to do with the endless building stream of events competing for fifteen seconds of global attention. That, too, is a result of the pandemic—doomscrolling became a habit, a reflex born out of fear and paranoia from five years ago.

So much doesn’t make sense right now because the world is at a boil. But we don’t feel it as much—we all got into the water when it was cold, maybe room temperature. I don’t know about you, but when I look around and see what’s happening, it feels like we’re all just trying to tread water. Everything is in flux. Despite moving beyond the pandemic, little has returned to what it was. We’re still simmering, still trying to get back to some sense of before—whether that means a civil society that isn’t consumed by good-versus-evil narratives or something as simple as reasonable egg prices.

A lifelong friend lost her job recently. She’s doing what we were all told to do, raised to do—submitting application after application. I half-jokingly suggested she’d have better luck making money playing blackjack at a casino. And then I added, “You should seriously consider the possibility that you’ll never be an employee again.” As she works to build her own business, that thought should be empowering—something to celebrate. But for so many still simmering in the aftermath, it doesn’t feel like opportunity. It feels like an existential reckoning.

Everything about our society is in a state of divergence, and it will be for some time. Even if there were radical regime changes across the world, trust has eroded to the point of burnout. And that kind of damage takes time to repair.
There’s no fast-forward button for where we are now. But at some point, we need to stop treading water and find solid ground—wherever that may be.