Get Those Pots and Pans Ready—It’s Been 5 Years Since the Pandemic
I remember like it was yesterday heading to my local Irish pub for one last cottage pie on March 16, 2020. The news was getting worse by the hour, but it still didn’t feel real. Just a week before, I was on a dance floor, disco ball spinning above me, dancing along to If I Can’t Have You. I turned to my friend and asked, “So…does this mean we’re all just going to be working from our couches now?”
"Ooohohohooouuaohh," they sang, twirling with hands in the air.
“I mean, I’ll probably be more productive…maybe….”
And now—somehow, it’s been five years since the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything.
The world technically “moved on,” but let’s be real—none of us came out of that completely unscathed. We adapted…ish. We lost something essential in 2020—our sense of time itself. The past five years collapsed into a blur of days, refusing to sit neatly in memory. The way we work, socialize, and even exist in public is different.
Remote work became the norm. Some friendships didn’t make it. Others somehow deepened through socially distanced walks and pixelated happy hours (Anyone else remember that House Party app?👋) And some relationships were built from the ground up, muffled behind masks and endless laps around the park. Sometimes, gaining a spot in someone's COVID bubble felt a lot like making it into their Myspace Top 8—an unspoken hierarchy of who you trusted enough to breathe the same air.
You know that feeling when you keep writing the wrong year in January and have to scratch it out? Sometimes, time still feels like that for me. I’ll say “a few years ago” and seriously mean 2019, only to realize I’m talking about something that happened before the world shut down. It’s like my internal clock split into two categories—one neatly labeled The Before Time (TBT) and the other a chaotic, overstuffed manila accordion folder where the last five years somehow feel both nonexistent and endless.
From time to time, I still expect things to snap back to how they were before. I’ll walk past a cafe I used to go to all the time, half-expecting to see my old self inside—squished into a too-small table, iced coffee sweating onto the paper menu, splitting a stack of pancakes with friends while we debated what to do with the rest of the day. But then I remember — some of those places don’t even exist anymore. Some of those friendships don’t either.
I read somewhere that when your routine gets upended, your brain stops marking time the same way. Turns out there is something to that. A study by Sylvie Droit-Volet et al. (Experience and Memory of Time and Emotions Two Years After the Start of the COVID-19 Pandemic) found that our brains kind of stopped tracking time correctly after 2020. When we were stuck inside, days felt like they’d never end, but now, looking back, it’s all one big blur. That’s called time compression, and it’s why some moments in the past five years feel crystal clear and others vanished like they never happened. To be honest, it’s how a lot of us survived.
Maybe we won’t ever get back to before. That version of time—or of us— just doesn’t exist anymore. But we are here anyways— five years later, still here, still figuring it out.
We found new routines, new places, new people. And for those of us still here, I think that’s worth celebrating.
