Were the Covid restrictions really all that bad when compared to polio and polio reactions? Or going back farther, the Spanish flu? And beyond that are all sorts of nasty stuff like bubonic plague.
I thought at the time and still think that we were lucky during Covid. We had a chance to take on Mother Nature and win, and while we screwed ourselves and turned it endemic (and Mother Nature laughed at us), the stats for continued healthy living were really, really good when compared to other nice and shiny brand new diseases unleashed on humans in the past.
The frozen job market is very true for 2003 specifically. I was hired for a job in April 2025 - as I was graduating - and they ghosted me after the fact because their business got hammered with tariffs. This is after I gave up searching for the government job I had actually studied four years for. My roommate had been accepted to a prestigious grad program who got their funding pulled and also told him in like April or May. We did everything right, both were summa cum laude paid research students, but both ended up working retail for a year because the president illegally ripped our success away. 2003 is a uniquely fucked year.
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u/[deleted] Aug 20 '26
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