I leave it to others to figure out what the physical health effects are. But I can tell you that here in Melbourne, the mental health effects are still acute. Individually, nobody I know has ever recovered, even if they think they have, and collectively, the whole city has a completely different feeling, a pall hangs over it, and there's a feeling like it has some pent up anxiety just below the surface.
I think millenials and zoomers will need to be gone before its effects aren't felt at some noticeable level.
This is all made much worse by the fact that nobody feels like they can talk about what happened. There was no catharthis or discussion, everybody was just expected to return to living like they ised to. And nobody dares open their mouth, because whatever side of the fence they were on when it came to the lockdown, they don't want to deal with the response that anything short of unquestioning praise for the measures will garner them.
It's sad. The city is a shadow of its former self, as are most of the people.
> This is all made much worse by the fact that nobody feels like they can talk about what happened.
Many if not a majority of people still don't feel like they can. One way that characterizes the entire pandemic for me in a way that I think is inseparable to the pandemic itself: the company I was at forced a team "race discussion" right at the outset of when society was in chaos and the two Chinese women on the team said this feels like the Cultural Revolution and that they'd left China to escape it, only to feel like it's cropping up again.
All I know is that there's a strident progressive authoritarianism that has tried to suppress opposition at any cost and march through the institutions enforcing strict rules against wrongthink.
Thanks for sharing. I have lived in two European countries in the past 4 years, and the silence is palpable. No one wants to talk about what we were put through. Everyone is trying to move on, but it doesn't feel the same.
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[ 1810 ms ] story [ 4763 ms ] threadI think millenials and zoomers will need to be gone before its effects aren't felt at some noticeable level.
This is all made much worse by the fact that nobody feels like they can talk about what happened. There was no catharthis or discussion, everybody was just expected to return to living like they ised to. And nobody dares open their mouth, because whatever side of the fence they were on when it came to the lockdown, they don't want to deal with the response that anything short of unquestioning praise for the measures will garner them.
It's sad. The city is a shadow of its former self, as are most of the people.
Many if not a majority of people still don't feel like they can. One way that characterizes the entire pandemic for me in a way that I think is inseparable to the pandemic itself: the company I was at forced a team "race discussion" right at the outset of when society was in chaos and the two Chinese women on the team said this feels like the Cultural Revolution and that they'd left China to escape it, only to feel like it's cropping up again.
All I know is that there's a strident progressive authoritarianism that has tried to suppress opposition at any cost and march through the institutions enforcing strict rules against wrongthink.