Editorial | Six years on and we haven’t escaped COVID

Illustration by Sami Seyedhosseini, Cartoonist

COVID-19’s long, shadowy hands are still playing puppeteer with our lives.

At a purely cultural level, the year-plus of on-and-off lockdowns and Zoom schooling did nearly irreparable damage to society. It also shifted worldwide politics and economies in a way nothing had before it.

We are now fueled by isolation and hatred, and our society is a lonely one. In 2022, the U.S. surgeon general declared loneliness to be an epidemic. A 2025 survey conducted by AARP showed that 40% of surveyed adults over 45 reported loneliness. This is a symptom of being inside for months over COVID.

Loneliness is an evergreen issue. It will not go away by closing our eyes and hoping that we can foster connection in darkness. In the U.S., the individualistic culture that already existed was only exacerbated. We lost multiple third spaces outside of work and home that people could engage with their community in.

For example, before COVID, streaming was only a part of our content consumption. TikTok was barely a thing. Now it has become such a key piece of the cultural zeitgeist that every other video creation app had to implement a similar feature to stay relevant.

People want to watch things in the comfort of their home. They want quick, mindless entertainment. Movie theaters — a key third space — have been put on the back burner.

In 2019, 76% of Americans went to the movies. In 2025, that dropped to around half of all Americans. Increased ticket prices and growth of accessibility in streaming services has made it entirely easier and more comfortable to stay home.

Gen Z is trying to bring back this part of our culture, representing 39% of all moviegoers. Having spent our high school years inside and away from friends — many of us developing strong social media addictions — I think we want a way to break free from this curse.

College offers a unique opportunity for the connection many young people crave — but when it’s over, how do you fend off loneliness? What are the spaces we have to make new friends and find common ground?

The national minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 since 2009. A quarter of families in the U.S. are living paycheck to paycheck, and others are a few bad months away from joining them. This makes it harder to go to increasingly expensive bars, concerts or sporting events. Being social costs you.

Uncertainty has dominated the national sentiment around the economy since COVID brought a period of layoffs and inflation. And now, in the second Trump presidency, the job market is hitting a new low.

The problem is that our country is hellbent on electing old white men — who lack any innovative or creative ideas — to solve complicated and unprecedented affordability issues.

We have politicians who are controlled by billionaires. They want to wage wars and genocides rather than fix the economy. And yet, many people can’t see past partisanship to realize that the system itself has to be changed.

COVID also allowed far-right groups to radicalize young men. With nothing but time on their hands, they found online spaces that were formed largely in response to Black Lives Matter protests and COVID regulations in 2020. Left-wingers, scientists and journalists were framed as enemies of the state. Republicans were seen as political victims who were forced to wear masks and take vaccines. White people were apparently being replaced.

This in turn has let fascism grow across the world. In the U.S., in Argentina, in Chile, in Italy. More and more far-right leaders are attempting to consolidate power. Their stances are emboldened by online spaces — take, for example, the male podcast community in America, which helped to get Trump elected a second time.

There is an “us versus them” mentality that has festered to new heights, and it is only serving to separate communities that should be hand-in-hand. The plight of coal miners in West Virginia, of black communities in Detroit and of immigrants in Southern California are more similar than they are different. But instead of going to war with corrupt billionaires, we fight our neighbors.

This is what isolation does. I find that people just want to be able to buy groceries and pay their rent. But it seems like creating enemies is much easier than getting by.

I’ve also found that COVID made us lazy. Doing nothing soothes the soul. Cancelling plans is the norm. It’s okay to stay away — to live on the outskirts of society. None of this is healthy.

Hell, even work is an ever-shrinking space for connection. Working from home has become prevalent after we were introduced to Zoom in 2020, and while this offers flexibility and comfortability in people’s schedules, it also takes us further away from our communities.

How could workers ever muster up the connection and sentiment needed to fight for better wages — perhaps even form a union — if they can’t consistently interact with each other in person?

The problem of an isolationist society isn’t only about lacking spaces to have fun with friends, it also makes it harder to challenge those in power.

ICE protests over the past year have shown that people are still willing to step up when needed to help each other, but I imagine more meaningful change could be made if we had a culture that prioritized togetherness more than alone time.

Many of these issues were prevalent before COVID. But the pandemic widened the rift in our society. And I’m not sure when, or if, we’ll pull it together again.