My Experience with COVID Culture

 I think I speak for pretty much anyone when I say I'm ready for this COVID stuff to be over with.  I'm tired of masks, I'm tired of not being able to go everywhere I would want, I'm tired of hearing about vaccines and politics.  People can go on about how much negative COVID has brought to the world.  Too many people died from the virus.  However, I think the lockdown helped shape me into who I am today.  It was months of sitting around by myself (if you don't count my parents and brother) so I pretty much had every part of me vulnerable to outside influence.  While some of it sucked, I was able to extract some good things out of this period of time.  I learned a lot about myself and my relationships with other people.

The main thing I learned is that my introverted mindset is not worth it.  Remote learning was a disaster in my opinion.  Being completely honest, most lectures went in one ear and out the other when listening to them in bed (sometimes the lectures didn't even go in one ear).  Homework had no incentive other than getting a grade.  No one was truly learning.  I learned that physical interaction (face to face) is a necessity for me and always listening to someone through a computer or phone was unfulfilling.

Perhaps the best memory for me from the lockdown periods was the video gaming.  Obviously, there wasn't much for me to go out and do.  When the season came around, I golfed, but I didn't play baseball.  Golf is a very individual sport hence why we were able to play it during COVID.  So I still missed the interaction with different people (I don't consider the club pros and random pairings as interaction).  Video games were there for all of us when we weren't able to do anything else.  Fortnite made a comeback for me, and I would play it most nights with a select group of friends.  This got difficult as the Black Lives Matter protests began as they all pretty much had differing views from me, but I tried to get past that.  From this, I also learned that I hate political discourse because it doesn't change anyone's opinion of the topic but rather their opinions of each other.  While there were many days and nights of laughter when playing Fortnite, there were bad nights of argument as well.

I think everyone was over-exposed to current events because we had nothing better to do than watch tv or go on our phones.  I don't even want to know how much time I was spending on my phone back then.  It was TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat intertwined between all of those, and then over and over again through that cycle.  Political discourse raged: COVID isn't real, masks don't work, All Lives Matter.  So many polarizing things were thrown in our faces, we all had to take sides.  There was so much information coming at me that I knew I had an opinion but my reasons were all over the place.  Every hour of every day there was something pulling me in each direction.  This is an ongoing problem now regardless of COVID because younger generations are so attached to social media.  I was "lucky" enough to have a personal experience with this sort of thing and I have come mostly out of it with methods of how to go about it.  But there are other younger and more impressionable people that don't know how to deal with this sort of over-stimulation and it is having negative effects on public health.

I also got into Tinder which is very unlike me.  I spent my freshman year (when it was actually normal) kind of loathing over the breakup I had before coming out to school.  Nothing was wrong with our relationship; no fights, no anything.  But it ended because we were going to different colleges.  I had a tough time accepting that because I don't believe in "right person, wrong time."  In the meantime, I enjoyed my experiences meeting new girls at school (my teammates were the ones doing all the hard work when meeting them).  But, nothing came out of meeting these girls at school so when I was alone in lockdown I thought it would be interesting to try out.  And, following the same pattern as above, not much came out of Tinder either.  Only one meaningful match occurred and it was with someone I already talked to (we matched "as a joke").  Later on, I stopped taking Tinder seriously and started goofing off a little too much with it.  Luckily, a live human girl was introduced to me so I had an excuse to delete it.  I have since not needed to use it.  I have learned that trying way too hard to put myself out there for girls isn't my thing either.  I don't like hookup culture and I don't like having to try and be something I'm not to appeal to other people.

Lastly, I discovered some new music that I still enjoy today.  It wasn't really from new artists but I dove into their deeper cuts and their less popular albums.  Some songs definitely remind me of different periods of the COVID lockdown period.  They are bittersweet memories.  A lot of music I learned came from TikTok as well, which was big during lockdown.

I learned a lot about myself during this period in my life.  A lot of it was a painful process, but it proved itself necessary.  Humans aren't meant to be stuck in boxes their whole life staring at screens that feed us information.  We need physical interaction with other life and experience with nature.  The popular saying "idle minds are the devil's playground" became a reality for a lot of us because we had too much free time to be influenced by outside factors.  We had all the time in the world to be mindless and drained of our expression.