Why does it feel like life hasn't got better after COVID?

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After the pandemic, all I seem to hear or see is more doom and gloom I mean you've got wars like in Ukraine going on, still talks about world war 3 as a result, cost of living particularly in some of the wealthiest countries in the world like the UK and the US, hearing stories of people choosing heating rather than eating, because in the UK we now have a labour government, some people on the right make out as though they are going to take us back to life like 1970s, a decade which I never lived in. I don't know who or what to believe when all you see might not be the whole story or entirely true when I see newsfeed on my phone.

Yeah the world's changed or is changing

Well never go back to how it was before. In fact I can't remember how it was before

I just call it the olden days

Economically, the other big thing that hurt your economy hasn't changed and most of the pressing concerns that existed before COVID were just being kicked down the road and some of them are getting worse.

A portion of the structural economic problems being seen in the most advanced economies were predicted by the late stage capitalism hypothesis. Enshitification and shrinkflation of consumer goods, increasing concentration of wealth, the commodification of everything, constant emphasis on increasing profit margins in all sectors, along with the socialized costs of certain externalized costs becoming too big to bear, etc are all pretty much what was described as late-stage capitalism.

I think it goes back further than Covid. We've been on a downhill trajectory since the 2008 financial crisis, in the UK at least.

Some people did suggest that Covid would teach us a few things that would lead to a better world. One of those things was that working from home would become the default way of earning a living. Might have slowed global warming down a bit, getting shut of all that travelling. But the bosses didn't like it, and governments wanted those ripoff sandwich bars to get their captive market back, so they cracked the whip and we obediently went back to the workplaces.

the long term legacy of COVID 19 is enormous. Especially in promoting remote education, work from home and Amazon delivering everything you would normally go to a shopping mall to buy.

^
Yes the mail order thing and the death of the high street shops was no doubt accelerated by Covid - opinions vary about whether that's good or bad. Personally I quite like it because the high street shops had mostly become crap before the pandemic anyway, though I suppose losing them also chips away at the competition against Amazon's drive towards a monopoly.

As for working from home becoming more common, I guess it depends on your employer's attitude, and some of them have been butts about it:
https://financialpost.com/fp-work/amazo ... yee-rights

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-ord ... he-office/

https://www.columbian.com/news/2024/oct ... t-so-much/

Another thing is I continually wash my hands. I think a lot of people who lived through 2020/21 wash their hands every time they go outside.

I do that too, but I did even before the pandemic. Probably down to working in communal laboratories all those years. The pandemic reinforced it, and to this day I hate it when communal toilets are designed such that it's impossible to avoid touching the door handle on the way out. I was never comfy with that situation, and wondered why these things were allowed, but now it's even worse.

Plane tickets got cheaper for a little while, but they're more expensive than ever now.

I lived through the 1970s and I think in some ways it was better than it is now, in the UK at least. Workers had more power, the roads were less congested, clothes looked better, public transport was better, more industries were publically-owned, and wealth inequality was good compared to what happened afterwards:
https://ifs.org.uk/articles/income-and- ... d-5-charts
No wonder the right-wingers don't like the idea of going back to that.

I never understood how sitting on a public toilet was a sensible idea during COVID? tissue paper was never a good barrier. During 2020-22 period I avoided public toilets completely and my working outside revolved around being careful so i never needed to use one.

Right wingers believe in Darwinism and survival of the fittest so hardly surprising. One other thing about the 1970s is population density was much smaller. the competition for jobs, university places and schools were no way what they are like now. traffic? I mean the genie is well and truly out of the bottle

High prices and frequent product recalls are in part because companies no longer have the pre-pandemic staffing levels for production and quality control. And now with bird flu being a big issue, we need this more than ever. The Trump tariffs aren't going to help matters either.

Despite Covid being far more manageable w/ vaccines and treatments, people still believe conspiracy theories about vaccines, and now one of those people is secretary of Health and Human Services.

A bit hard to explain, but in mid-size US cities, public transportation is usually limited to serving weekday commuters who work in the center (although most people have suburb-to-suburb commutes). Businesses in the central districts of such cities often depend on the presence of daytime workers for their livelihood. Otherwise downtown retail largely left for the suburbs/malls by the 1980s.

Large cities such as Chicago, NYC, DC, etc. don't have this problem so much. There's a greater number of people who both live and work within the area served by public transit, so downtown retail etc. persists.

So COVID did a real number on those medium-size US cities, because once office workers started working from home, the central business districts shut down, and commerce there died, and has never recovered. So this is one example of permanent damage done by COVID-19.

^^^ Agreed. Impact is still being felt in Melbourne city (the most impacted site for lockdowns in the world). Employers both private and government have been struggling to get workers to cease WFH even 4 years after. the impact is felt hard on traders working in the city who both survived lockdown and those starting new businesses.

It was a highly destabilizing event that exacerbated societal divisions.

When a very bad things happen most people desire that things return to exactly the way they were before the bad thing happened. It usually does not work that way because individuals and society are changed by these events by varying degrees. Many things do return to normal but it is never exactly the same. Even sans traumatic events things change.

It is wishful thinking that things would be better just a few years after COVID.

A lot of experienced workers vanished from the workforce, as COVID affected mainy the older workers.
They did not have the opportunity to teach new workers their skills.
Even those who merely retired did not come back to the work force to teach new workers.

It may have helped the DEI backlash as women and minorities had more job opportunities.
Skills became more important in deciding who gets the job as someone has to do the work.
But these new hires weren't as skilled as the old workers.