Covid rocked the world. For so many people on earth, life was just going along as usual and then suddenly, there was crisis. Suddenly, life changed. Suddenly, there were lockdowns and mask mandates, travel was restricted and blocked, businesses and employers and employees struggled to change policy and many businesses collapsed, social distancing was imposed and people were separated and isolated, there were interpersonal conflicts all over the place, there were vaccine mandates, people were put through experiences where they felt they had no choice when it comes to their own bodies, people were dying, there was censorship going on, people were flooded with conflicting information and the list goes on and on. The human world slipped into extreme distress. People were consumed by uncertainty, confusion, fear and loneliness as they lost a sense of control over their life experience. Glad we are over all of that right? I mean it’s been five years after all. Life has pretty much gotten back to normal. Hasn’t it? Well, the answer is no. In fact, this is one of the biggest gaslights that is happening in human society the world over. Society and human experience with it, is not back to normal after Covid. So, allow me to un-gaslight you. 

1. There is no “after Covid”. Unless a person is warned about the possibility of something bad happening, they become aware of the possibility of it by experiencing it first-hand. For example, unless you are warned about sharks in the water, you become aware of the possibility of shark attack by seeing one or experiencing one yourself. From that day forward, you know it is possible and so, you are living with a negative potential. This makes swimming a different experience. A worse one. For almost everyone, what happened in “Covid Times” was not something they could have ever imagined to be possible. It never crossed their minds. But now that everyone has experienced it, everyone knows it CAN happen. And so, the fear of it or anything like it happening again, is something people are living with now. You can consider this the foundations of a collective societal case of PTSD. This makes living in the world a different experience. A worse one. 
2. There was something happening underneath the Covid crisis. That something was a massive power grab. Covid was used as a tool and politicized in a power game that has been going on, but that most people didn’t actually perceive until Covid. You can think of this power game like a massive, unfortunately very real game of Risk. The world has fallen under the control of select individuals (and the corporations they control) who are obsessed with power for power’s sake and who do not actually have the best interest of “others” (such as the people of the world) in their mind or their heart. This has created a kind of modern power struggle that we only believed to be “in the past”. And they are playing a very strategic and dangerous game with each other and with citizens. It is as confusing a game as the power games that go on in any royal court. These games include both covert and overt tactics. And part of this game is that you are being told that everything is back to normal and everything is moving forward towards more freedom, towards new innovation, towards technology that will revolutionize the world, etc. That the horrors of the past, things like whole groups of people being targeted for hate and dictatorships and wars, are something we all learned from. And so, they are a thing of the past. But we didn’t learn from them. The reality is that we are headed towards repeating history and towards re-creating the nightmares we thought could never happen again. Most people can feel this reality. They can feel this power game being played over their heads. They can feel that things are not ok at all. They are feeling the danger everywhere. They have simply succumbed to normalcy bias. And it doesn’t matter whether Covid is not the current thing being used in this game anymore. This power struggle is not only still going on, it is heating up. We are in a time where uncertainty as to what the world will look like politically in the future is at an absolute all time high. So, the world doesn’t feel “good again”.      
3. It doesn’t matter whether you were a supporter of government control during the crisis or whether you were not. Either way, it is undeniable that during the Covid Crisis, much of the world got its first taste of what government control looks and feels like. What people found out very fast is that the government along with any other authorities, can simply decide something, which you are at the mercy of; regardless of whether you think it is in your best interests or not. SO many people felt what it feels like for an authority, such as a government, to play a zero-sum game against them. This made people feel that control, freedom and having a say is an illusion. Even the people who think their government should have been stricter so as to keep people safer felt negatively at the mercy of their government. And so, the divide between the people and authority figures, especially the divide between the people and their governments cannot be overstated. During Covid times, the collective lost trust for authorities and lost trust in the government. The tension and distress of living under a government you don’t trust and feel can be against your best interests, instead of for your best interests, is serious distress to live with.
4. Covid caused people to slip into perceived powerlessness. A state where people feel they don’t have control over their life experience, most especially bad things happening to them. And this has caused both fear and a kind of apathy in many people. Many people feel there isn’t really a point to putting a lot of effort into trying to attain what they want or to build things up in their life, if it can all just be taken away without a fight. This perceived powerlessness has happened for many reasons. One of these reasons is that people were blindsided by the whole thing. Another reason is that many people felt that they had no control over a microscopic organism harming or killing them. Another reason is the many control measures that governments took and forced businesses and individuals to take as well as the many super painful consequences that came from that. It is a very painful state of being to live life feeling like you have no control over it.    
5. People lost their trust. So many people in the world now have no trust for anything. I’ve already explained how Covid caused a loss of trust for the government. But that isn’t the only thing they lost trust in. Covid caused people to lose their trust in the media, doctors, businesses, schools, friends, family, neighbors, their own bodies and the universe or what many people call God. The Covid crisis was a crisis of feeling like you could rely on nothing to act in your best interests. That trust never came back. The result is that humanity is in a deep state of distrust.    
6. Because of all of these points I have mentioned previously, Covid caused humanity to slip into more extreme protector personalities. We all have aspects of ourselves, you could call them sides to our personality or parts of our personality that are in charge of keeping us safe. We adapt to the specific unsafety’s of our life by developing these aspects of ourselves. But our protector personalities are out for one thing: Our own safety and our own best interests. Because of this and because of the way they show up in the world, they create more unsafety for others. This brings about a kind of spiral whereby one person’s protector personality causes the protector personality of another person to come up. When a big unsafety happens, like the Covid Crisis, this process is amplified big time. And pretty soon, we are living in a deeply inflamed world where everyone is trying to protect themselves from everything and everyone else. Since Covid, people are really stuck in their protector personas and the world has become a much harsher, colder, more painful and more narcissistic place to be. 
7. Covid caused people to slip deeply into uncertainty. Uncertainty is a really painful thing for the human system. The crisis itself came with so much uncertainty. Not knowing what was right or wrong to do, not knowing if you had the correct information, not knowing how long lockdowns would last, not knowing if people would be ok or not, live or die. Not knowing how things would turn out. Not knowing if you would see people you were separated from again. Not knowing if you had job security. Not knowing if there would ever be an end to the crisis. Not knowing if life would return to normal or never would be normal again. The Covid crisis made tomorrow totally uncertain. This has made it so that people feel no control over the future and as if they cannot plan for the future. And now that humanity has had an experience like this, it has taught humanity that they can always be blindsided by something bad. This makes the future feel uncertain, and in a really bad way. People are deep in the angst of this uncertainty. Very few people feel certain that the future will be good. Living with this kind of uncertainty (and even for many people doom) about the future, is tormenting. People in today’s world are coping with this psychological/emotional pain in lots of detrimental ways.   
8. Major effects to the economy. People often don’t realize just how much of a bomb Covid was to the economy. It has been largely devastating to global economics. There has been recession, unemployment and inflation. Some people’s financial lives, especially if they worked in an industry that was directly affected by Covid measures, were totally destroyed. Economic recovery, much less economic growth, is in fact proving very difficult to attain.
9. Covid really warped people’s sense of time. During the crisis itself, people experienced it like people often experience a trauma, as one big blurr. This was compounded by the fact that many of the things that cause a person to be able to track and relate to time, things like routines or changes or clocking into and out of a job or celebrating holidays were suddenly gone. This was compounded by how surreal everything felt to people as life as they knew it suddenly changed. A surrealness that isn’t totally gone. Covid disoriented people. It messed with every different way that humans relate to time. And warping of time means trouble with memory as well. And people are still experiencing this.    
10. Covid did not bring people closer. It ruptured human connection and relationships. Human beings are a relationally dependent species. Humans have dependency needs. If you want to learn more about this, watch my video titled: Dependency Needs, The thing That No One Will Accept That They Have. The Covid Crisis absolutely wreaked havoc to people because of this. From all the interpersonal conflict it caused to loss of relationships all together to social separation to quarantine to social distancing to fearing proximity with one another. It made people deeply lonely. It made people feel detached and disconnected. It made people fear each other. It decreased social support. It effected the way people enter into relationships with each other. It has negatively affected the way that children have developed socially. It has normalized people to interacting via technology. Covid was socially traumatizing. It made relationships worse and it made people worse at relationships. And people now have to integrate and heal from that trauma. We need to find a way to come back together. And because of all this trauma, people are in a far worse state of mental health. You see increased rates of anxiety, depression, stress, PTSD, suicidality and other forms of emotional distress in the world today. 
    Covid also worsened equality by increasing the many divides that existed in terms of gender, labor market, health care access, economics and race.    
11. In this same vein, Covid contributed to a pushback on globalization. In essence, it created a conscious and unconscious swing towards nationalism. It has caused countries (both governments and citizens) to go in the direction of erecting barriers and separations between themselves and others. Things like multilateralism, exchange of trade goods, travel, exchange of ideas between people and immigration are under a progressive crack down. And this is changing the human experience on earth in many really negative ways.      

As with anything, in a world of contrast, where positives come from negatives and negatives come from positives, there are positives that have generated from the Covid Crisis. This could be its own separate discussion. And some individuals experienced positives changes in their lives as well. But if you are feeling like things went south in 2020 and haven’t gotten back to normal, stop wondering if you are crazy. You aren’t crazy. You’re just living in today’s major gaslight.