When the world jumped the shark |
It feels like the world jumped the shark in 2020.
Before COVID, most of us carried a quiet assumption that the world was basically stable. Not perfect, but stable. Institutions functioned. Daily life had its own rhythm. Even crises felt contained.
Then suddenly the entire planet went into a kind of suspended animation.
Lockdowns. Empty streets. Masks. Distance. The constant drumbeat of numbers and warnings. Governments making sweeping decisions about movement, work, school, even family contact.
Whether one agreed with the policies or not, the experience itself was a profound psychological rupture. Human beings are social animals, and almost overnight we were asked to treat one another as potential vectors of danger.
Isolation on that scale does something to the nervous system.
People often underestimate how physical the experience was. Loneliness and uncertainty are not just emotional states — they are biological ones. They alter stress hormones, sleep cycles, and cognitive processing. Researchers are now studying the neurological and psychological aftereffects of the pandemic: anxiety spikes, attention fragmentation, lingering fatigue, social mistrust — from lockdowns and from the virus itself Which we now know is deeply neurological and left many sufferers........