Lock-ins began for most of us in the Spring of 2020. Pandemics have occurred before, but there hasn’t been anything like this in my lifetime. As COVID-19 infected the world, we dealt with everything from losing loved ones to disruptions in our everyday routines.
Throughout all this, there’s been an underlying assumption that it will all be over soon. There’s been a persistent belief that science, nature, or something else would allow us to put this pandemic behind us. Things like restaurants, movies, offices, travel, and more will return to familiarity someday — we just need to wait it out. When this would occur kept pushing-out, but the expectation remained that the pandemic would fade into a distant memory.
