I previously reflected on 2020, paradoxically both a scary and calm year. The world was entirely shut down and life moved a lot more slowly, for better or worse. Since then, the pace of life has dramatically accelerated and 2021 through 2022 have blurred by. For many people, the end of 2020 marked the end of the misery of the pandemic. For me, that misery never hit suddenly, but trickled over time through 2021, motivating big changes in 2022.
The Post-Vaccine Party
The beginning of 2021, saw another lockdown. Covid cases had been rising at the end of 2020 prompting outdoor drinking and dining to be shut down again. After having experienced a taste of freedom, it felt like I was suddenly back to March 2020. I hated feeling like things were out of my control, and this motivated me to make a big move, moving from my apartment with roommates to a one-bedroom. Okay so maybe this wasn’t the biggest move, since I only moved a few blocks away. But finally moving into my own space felt like a big step up. I got very lucky since the beginning of the year saw ludicrously low rents (at least for San Francisco), as people didn’t think the city would come back.
During the first quarter of 2021, I was also impatiently waiting for my vaccine. I was jealous of a few friends who were already vaccinated, as they worked in medicine. A trip to Lake Tahoe reinforced this feeling. As my partially vaccinated group made our way into a casino, we saw more people crammed together than we had ever seen during the pandemic. While my vaccinated friends were unbothered, I felt uneasy, even as the person who constantly broke the covid bubble. While life seemed to return to normal for many people, it wasn’t there for me yet.
I was so ready for a return to normal life that I cut in line to get my Johnson & Johnson vaccine in April (not realizing that vaccines would open up to all a week later). But I didn’t care, once I was vaccinated, I felt like I was finally out of the pandemic. Finally, I could make up for lost time.
The summer of 2021 felt like a big party. With bars and restaurants reopening, I was finally able to revisit all of my favorite places. I expanded beyond my covid bubble, catching up with old friends and making new ones. I traveled constantly over the summer, from coast to coast and even spending a month working from Mexico City. While the Delta variant flared up, I could care less, Covid was over for me.
The Covid Hangover
But as summer rolled into fall, I was starting to feel unhappy. I constantly compared my life to where I had been in 2019, and what I was expecting a post-covid life to feel like. While I enjoyed reopenings and traveling, I didn’t feel like my life was “back to normal” yet. I soon realized that I was burnt out from work. It’s not like I was working crazy hours, but there were two reasons why I felt unhappy.
For one, I felt drained having worked from home for nearly 2 years. Socializing is a big reason why I enjoy work, and I missed the friends I had in the office before the pandemic hit. The fact that our office reopening was delayed and that we were moving out of our San Francisco HQ meant there was no reason to look forward to that social life ever coming back.
Additionally, I lost motivation in my work itself, and workdays started to feel meaningless. When I first started, I was learning a lot, making new friends, and watching the company grow. By the end of 2021, I had gotten a promotion and felt like I had learned what I wanted to. I lost interest in the product I was working on, and the growth of the company started to falter as people ditched their phones for real life.
While my weekends were great, not feeling good about 5 days of the week felt shitty. As 2022 rolled around the corner, I knew it was time for more changes. To start, I began this blog. Since I wasn’t inspired at work, I wanted to create something that would feel meaningful to me and that I could share with my friends. I challenged myself to writing an article every 2 weeks (after having faltered from so many hobbies), which I’ve more or less managed to do.
At the beginning of the year, I also got a lot more involved with YIMBY Action. Housing policy and building better cities are causes close to my heart, and being involved with a group doing good was energizing. Volunteering with several campaigns was a unique and new experience for me, giving me the opportunity to meet a lot of interesting activists and volunteers.
And finally, I quit my job without one lined up. I took the plunge against the advice I had heard from so many. This shocked my coworkers and even myself. Working at Zynga was actually the best job experience I had had, so why leave? While I wasn’t completely miserable, I was still burnt out. I knew I needed to make a big change to push myself out of complacency and take a risk to find something truly exciting. And I was lucky that I had enough saved to hold me over.
Spring of 2022 was a blur, with a mixture of job hunting and social life. I wasn’t the only one making changes, as several of my San Francisco friends moved out, heading to New York, Los Angeles, and other places. In April, I finally contracted Covid, a milestone in its own way. And in July, I finally started a new job at a startup, finally seeing coworkers in person and feeling excited about what we’re building.
Three years later
It’s crazy reflecting on how quickly the last few years have gone. Each year definitely felt progressively faster, judging by the number of paragraphs I wrote for each. So is life “back to normal”? Did I make up for lost time, and am I finally back to the post-Covid life I imagined?
Absolutely not! So much has changed, from some of my favorite businesses being closed to close friends moving out. In addition, the world itself feels more chaotic. Recessions in tech feel like a dark storm cloud, and god knows how long the War in Ukraine will last. So when will the post-Covid “normal life” hit?
And that’s when I realized, it won’t. In fact, this is normal, this is life. I had spent several years of the pandemic waiting for a return to normal when it was staring me in the face. While I spent some days in 2020 enjoying the present, much of my time after that was spent either reminiscing on the past or looking forward to the future.
I had defined March 2020 as the start of my “pandemic era”. But as 2022 comes to a close, I think it’s time I stopped dividing my life into neat little categories to compare with. Heading into the new year, I’m looking forward to just experiencing life as is and welcoming this new normal.