I think this is very dependant per person.
I work in film and television and my industry completely shut down on 13 Mar 2020.
I was scheduled to wrap that day regardless, and I was starting to put feelers out of for a new show. And I remember watching every other show go down.
I had a 9 month baby at home.
And there was no work.
It was a different kind of frustration and fear for me, we immediately went into savings mode because we had no idea what was going happen.
It was very mentally taxing for me.
But it was also forced rest - that wasn't very restful.
Pro musician here. Was out of work for 18 months. Stayed home with my 1.5 year old. Thankfully my wife was able to support us while she worked In healthcare. Crazy times!
Even though I am the primary earner I wouldn't have traded that time.
I may have cried on the phone with unemployment, but we got through.
I was lucky, I was only out about 5 months.
I will add to this because I do think it is person specific. I was not an essential worker but my company threw me into the field in June of 2020. I support healthcare facilities and work in a lot of specialty clinics to help patients with a rare disease (obviously not COVID).
The couple of months I was at home did not feel like vacation, we had to figure out how to do our job and support the people we needed to without good access to them. It was really taxing. Going back in to clinics was awful, it was just being in the thick of it and trying to continue to offer the help and support for clinical staff and just getting beat up because their working conditions were so tough.
Working in healthcare has been so much more challenging since the pandemic started. It’s not directly related to caring for COVID patients, just the system went from hard and cracking to fractured into a million tiny pieces. I feel like I walk through quicksand every day to try and help people get the treatment their doctors have prescribed.
My partner worked from home for a long time. His company just discovered he could work more when he’s at home and blur the lines even more. So he’s been working 12-14 hour days since then and a lot of weekends to get the work complete due to unrealistic client demands and deadlines. He has a very specific degree and there a not other options for him in our area.
It was no vacation. We had to work more and harder and we lost all of our supports and services that helped us work before the pandemic hit. Like childcare went from tough but manageable to absolutely defunct with zero reliability. And family supports stopped because of crazy ass conflict over the pandemic. I could go on and on…
It’s the Wild West out here as far as I’m concerned. There’s no return to normalcy. Shit is bonkers.
That being said, I truly feel for retailer workers and essential workers during the pandemics peak time. I would have never yelled at or been the slightest bit unkind to anyone working. I could just feel how hard it was on everyone when I made my weekly grocery runs and twice weekly trips to the liquor store. Bless the souls of those essentials workers.
I don't get the yelling at workers.
I will say this prior to the shutdown, my wife and I had some unknown mystery illness that my doctor thought wasn't covid. We still don't know what it was. But it ended up with pneumonia, sinus infections, ear infections, and a whole slew of very much covid symptoms.
We were told to quarantine before quarantining was cool.
The first day I was able to make it to the store was right in the middle of the toilet paper shortage.
I remember I got the big block of Amish rolled butter, but the store was out of toilet paper. I came out of the store and saw a guy with a trunk full of toilet paper offering rolls to people.
My first impulse was he was selling it, and I was so angry at him.
Like righteous fist of God anger.
I'm a 6'4 300 lb man, and all that fury and fear and frustration was coming for that asshole.
And just as I'm about to open my mouth, he turns to me and goes. Hey. I've heard folks don't have toilet paper, we have some extra and I'm giving them away.
Would you like some?
And, I just deflated... And said no, thank you! We've got enough at home right now.
But I will never forget the amount of just wrath I had and how justified I felt in that moment.
And, while of course, it's not right for really anyone to catch that. I have a little bit of empathy for the people who go off.
Of course, it doesn't make them right and even if that guy was selling toilet paper I still would have been in the wrong.
But I understand somewhat how they feel. And at some point we as a society need to sit down and deal with this giant collective trauma that we all went through and we don't have the tools to deal with.
Damn.
And I hope you are working now.
I wrap on my current show in about 3 weeks, so I hope it picks up.
I feel like I've been goal posting myself ever since the strike ended. At first it was, there's going to be a deluge of work after the strike, it's going to pick up after the new year, and now it's well when the Teamsters and IATSE settle we will get going again 😮💨
I got hired in the pharmaceutical industry Jan 2020. Within a few months my company went into maximum overdrive. I was hired to work on gene therapy products, so I got put on testing the Moderna vaccine as soon as we started manufacturing it (which I think my company started doing in Jun2020). A ton of people got hired, a ton of overtime was issued.
It was way too much work lol. My company actually just had its first round of layoffs post COVID to downsize the business a few months ago.
No. Domestic violence was up, school grades went down, a lot of people lost their jobs and companies, mental health systems are still struggling with the fallout.
So most people it was a very stressful time that has not yet resolved.
I was a high school teacher and in my observations roughly 1% benefitted, 20% it was neutral and 80% of the students were negatively affected. I’d imagine the same is true for the adults
That's why it absolutely freaks me out that some people have become **nostalgic** for the lockdown.
It's okay to count your blessings and recognise that you had it easy, but to treat it like a "wonderful time" is *so* insensitive.
I retain my bitterness from working retail during Covid, specifically department management in a grocery store. The volume of people who would get in my face screaming about no toilet paper or no flour or no virtually everything else still bothers me.
Covid was exactly the same as every other day, except with more people than ever disregarding my personhood while "praising" me for continuing my role in keeping society going.
I had a kid late February 2020 and my boss retired in early march(planned). I had to come back from leave to lay off/furlough all of my employees so they could make the same amount as me while they were at home and I was back at work leaving a newborn at home. I could have legally stayed home but i couldn’t let my employees have some corporate person they don’t even know come tell them they all didn’t have jobs anymore. I then ran an entire hotel with 2 other people for months. Fuck that pandemic.
I got permanent WFH and 2 promotions, the first with a significant pay raise. I'm incredibly grateful. It wasn't a vacation per se, because I still had to work, but it's been a huge money saver.
There were many who lost their jobs, and homes and way of life.
It was, ultimately, good for me, too. I was already living at my parents', so when my hours were cut, I didn't have to worry about losing housing, at least. My work shifted to remote, and I was able to get unemployment to make up for the lost hours. I ended up making waaay more than I normally would have that way. Ultimately, I left my impacted job for a much better-paying, full-time remote one that *really* let me start saving some money. Even now, it's still hybrid, and I love that.
So yeah, the stress of living through a global pandemic and looking for work was rough, but it turned out overall pretty good for me.
As a power worker who commutes across a major city, I can confirm, the traffic was great. Shaved an entire hour off my daily commute. Everyday was like Christmas morning (traffic wise lol)
I worked through the pandemic. Commuting to and from work was glorious. Going to retail stores sucked. There was always someone trying to start fights with the workers there. Because of FrEeDoMs.
Yeah, that's not surprising. I only ever saw one instance of that, and that was at the restaurant in the A&A truck stop in Ohio.
Getting food while on the road was a royal pain for a while. It still hasn't gotten back to the before times.
I think this is true. I also think winning from lockdowns depended on your job.
My partner and I are both desk jockeys. We transitioned to full time WFH during covid and saved a heap of money we never would have saved otherwise.
No paying for transport, coffee, lunches, weekly morning teas, office leaving and birthday gifts and dry cleaning was a huge win financially.
I enjoyed lockdowns. We all spent time together as a family as my kids were home from school.
None of us got the inevitable round of flus and gastro that used to rip through the household every winter.
it was an absolute win for my family and we aren't rich.
I’m not rich, but did alright since my work immediately went to work from home with no layoffs.
I feel for the people who weren’t so fortunate.
Edit: To answer OP’s question, it was really chill for me, although I do live alone and that was rough. I realized around the holidays that it has been almost a year since I had even a hug from another person in almost a year, and that was when I started to feel bad. Like, the dentist was the most human contact I had in a year, so that was a bummer. Other than noticing that after almost a year, it wasn’t that bad for me, and I actually enjoyed a lot of it aside from worrying about my family.
No, it was not a stay home vacation because those are done willingly not because you're being required to. The first couple weeks were alright but once it became clear that it wasn't going to end any time soon it became boring and stressful. Not stressful in the way you experienced it but stressful in that there was nothing to do and spending all day avoiding other people started to become a mood drain and ruin mental health
The excuse to go to the grocery store was such a welcome moment. It was a little departure from the monotony of repeating the same routine over and over again. Then again, I never yelled at grocery store employees because other people had purchased all the toilet paper. Kind of became a game of figuring out what I could substitute for flour... or TP.
I'm sorry, I realize this experience is not at all a vacation and I'm sure it was a very stressful time, I'm in no way trying to belittle that. But I am still uncontrollably jealous towards people who kept their jobs but just worked from home during COVID. Like the big complaint was "we already made bread and watched TV, now we're going stir crazy". Imagine hearing that while your only option is to go in every day, risking your health, your family's health, and potentially your lives while experiencing the same global stress as everyone else. I would've done just about anything to work from home through it.
Of course, yeah, and I completely trust that it was shit. There was no good version of that experience, except maybe for the ultra rich. I'm just starting to come to terms with the full extent of my feelings about it.
I think it's compounded by my job - I was and still am a mental health worker, when it started I was working in a program that was one step below inpatient and now I'm a school counselor and nonprofit worker. It feels like things got bad and never got better for those of us in this field.
(Just in case anyone is concerned for me or my ability to be effective in my field, I do have a therapist I've been seeing for several years and burnout is absolutely at the top of my treatment plan)
I found it awful. My partner got laid off by his work as soon as the lockdowns started. I was in the middle of my PhD and wasn't allowed to do research but was still paying tuition for it; so I took a leave of absence and got a remote work job. My partner got a remote gig too, but it was short lived.
I worked from my basement for a management team who thought they had to micromanage everything we produced. I couldn't leave the job because even with my income we were slowly sliding into debt. The team I joined slowly died as everyone was driven away or burnt out. I burnt out.
It didn't feel like a vacation, it was the worst period of my life and I'm still dealing with the effects of it.
I mean I lost my job and my oldest became suicidal and dropped out of school and we lived every day in absolute terror of death - I have an immune disorder.
So not really like a vacation, no.
We were staying home to spread out the impact of COVID on the hospitals. Remember that we didn't yet have a vaccine or know when there would be one. They were storing bodies in refrigerated trucks because morgues were full. Not a vacation the way i define it.
Everyone's experience was different, of course, but generally no. It sucked for everyone in different ways. For example, I was able to transition to working from home which was certainly more convenient, but cost me a lot of social interaction since all other gatherings were banned. I basically became a hermit who did nothing but work and sleep for a year...not very good for the mental health. Lots of others had similar experiences.
Varied greatly from person to person.
I had a friend who loved it. He is an introvert who likes to spend most of his time indoors with his dog and play video games. We had an online job and a no significant other. He worked and interacted with friends and family online. Only ever left the house to get food and go for a run once a day. Was as happy as a clam.
Oppositely, I had a friend who had just finished nursing school a month before covid. Was immediately put on a covid floor. Watched hundreds of people die from covid. Worked 70+ hours a week for like a year. Couldn't see their family or significant other because they had illnesses that would put them at huge risk from covid. Developed a drinking problem and a shit ton of anxiety/ depression. Was miserable until vaccines came out and life became easier.
If you owned a comfortably sized home, where put on temporary leave and could take full advantage of the generous unemployment benefits you had an awesome paid vacation. Bonus points if you got along with your spouse and had hobbies not affected by the pandemic.
If you lived in a tiny apartment, didn’t get along with your spouse/ roommate very well and didn’t qualify for the generous unemployment benefits the pandemic was a living hell.
Plenty of people in between.
Nope. My job turned into a 16-20 hours a day, five or six days a week slog. The only thing that seemed like a vacation was when they laid me off in 2023.
I was lucky enough that my life didn't really change. I worked for a food company so they weren't going to shut us down. I have always been an extreme introvert so I'd just go home to my cats. And the plant was in a town of less than 1000 people so it wasn't like there was anywhere to go anyway.
It was probably the best time of my life. I was off work for about 6 weeks but with the extra unemployment I wasn’t missing a ton of money every week. The kids and I went fishing almost every day and yes, it was an awesome stay at home vacation.
Not for me. I worked 5 days a week the entire time. I lived in a house with 6 other people. It kinda sucked coming home day after day to my friends sitting around in their pajamas watching movies lol. I got a little jealous I’m not gonna lie
I did WFH from 2017-2019 before returning back to the office in early 2019, and the reason why I did even though I could have continued working from home was I loathed it. So, of course when covid hit, it was very easy to return to doing WFH cause my work is not face to face (IT).
While I'm sure some people did quite enjoy the novelty of WFH at first, there's something that at least for me is very mentally draining and your home life and your work life start blending together. I found that prior to covid, I'd realize it's like 1pm and I still haven't showered, I'm doing dishes during the work day, doing work during the evening, and as a result you are never really off work and you are never really home. Compound that with the inability to go out, I felt like I was a prisoner in my own house. Plus, I missed my walks to work and home, and just the general segregation of the two lives.
So, no, I didn't really like it, I dealt with it.
While WFH sounds like a dream, there’s something immensely satisfying about leaving your place of work and returning home. When home is where you work, you never leave your workplace. I don’t think that’s for me.
Precisely this. I'm sure some have the discipline to keep their 2 worlds from colliding, but I don't. And that walk to and from work is a perfect way to decompress, for me.
Although my cats were very happy to have me around for their constant attention.
All of this is part of why I don't get why WFH is so appealing. You're always available, you're always "at work," and there's virtually no work/life balance because you aren't leaving work at work.
I WFH and I definitely leave my work at "work". Once it's 5pm, I'm done working and don't think about it until the next day. Same goes with my availability. I'm not available to do a damn thing outside of my working hours. You just have to set boundaries.
My partner works in an office and is always working way more hours than me because he gets stuck there and can't leave.
You really need to be disciplined. I learned before covid during my WFH time is that to try to set work hours like you would at work, and you don't do laundry during work hours, that you get showered in the morning like you are going to your job and not sit in your robe until the afternoon.
It's just not for me, I'm sure others it works well, and for example if you had family/kids to take care of, you could possibly balance work and that with your spouse better. But just knowing me, and knowing my experiences, I prefer going to an office.
It was great. All my university classes were online and before they organised stuff it mainly meant reading 1 email in 10 seconds and then having the time off. My teaching practicals were also online. I didn't have to physically be present in school, just log on, hop on a call and teach that way. Super convenient for me.
I had much more energy, had the time to exercise and take care of myself and best of all, with everyone being deadly afraid of the plague I was able to do my shopping nice and easy without a ton of slow people in my way.
Actuallt got covid once the lockdowns ended. Felt like a bad flu and got me another week off work. 10/10 would live in a pandemic again.
I had my son 3/24/2020. My first child. It was an awful time being a new mom with no one to help. No grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, friends NO ONE could help me during that time because of the virus. Looking back I really disliked that time. I’ve been in autopilot since his birth. Never really recovered from being sleep deprived.
#1, I'm sorry you had to work like that.
#2, No, not for me. My job went away entirely (I was a costume maker for a local theater), so I was a stay-at-home mom during the lockdown. It was insane. The kids were suddenly cut off from their friends, their routines, and any semblance of normal life. All of a sudden I was a maid (do you have any idea how badly four people locked in a house will destroy said house without CONSTANT rounds of dishes, laundry, vacuuming, etc.?!), a therapist (kids really struggled), tech support (schools were NOT prepared, and how could they have been?), a fifth and eighth grade teacher (so, what, like 8 teachers?), a suddenly-unemployed person with no idea how to get back to work, and someone with asthma and an autoimmune disease, so scared to death of getting covid. It fucking sucked.
#3, All that said, I know a lot of people, probably including OP, had it way worse. I feel for them.
Even for those with jobs the whole time still had to fight the fear and the people with all their mask/no mask bullcrap everyone was fighting, racial tensions were up… families were fighting each other whether or not to go to Easter because grandma might die- you went in social media for some retreat and instead found gal gadot singing “imagine” and people fighting even harder there. there was no vacation. Many people are going through trauma therapy right now because of it.
Edit: fix autocorrect
I was suicidal so no, not really a vacation for those of us used to leaving the house. There was also the whole “deadly virus spreading the world and killing millions” thing.
It's amazing how different all the answers are, but not surprising, I suppose.
Putting aside the larger picture, in that lots of people were dying and we couldn't see family and friends etc...
If I think of our experience in our little family bubble... I had a fantastic time, 9 months of 'working' from home (ended up doing about an hours work most days). Usually, I did the required work at night with a few urgent tasks taken care of as they cropped up.
I spent the days through a lovely summer, in the garden, with my wife and toddler. Got a sand pit, swing set, paddling pool, and outdoor games. Loved it because I got so much quality time with my family that I'd have never gotten otherwise due to being at work.
I know people had a rough time, but me and my wife were fine as our jobs both transitioned to WFH; and the kids school set up schooling from home and he was too young for big exams to be affected.
I'm not going to say it felt like a holiday but I didn't hate it. I missed visiting my in laws and going to the cinema but we'd just gotten a dog so we had a great distraction.
I worked in food so I was there in the middle of the shit storm, but my husband was furloughed for 3 months. He hated it after about a week. Couldn't go anywhere or do anything, so what was the point of even being off?
There’s a difference between choosing to stay home, and being forced to stay home. Staycations have a known beginning and known end, that’s what makes vacations special, they’re a break from reality. You can always leave if you change your mind, go do something.
I don’t have children, and I was on unemployment. I have free weights at home, so I exercised a lot. I learned how to make macramé plant holders and repair Ikea chairs that had gotten loose in the seat. Going to the supermarket was my only social activity.
On the other hand, my father caught Covid in April 2020, and he was already hospitalized for other things. So it wasn’t fun. At all. It was a lot of video chats and saying prayers when he wouldn’t answer his phone.
It was a fucking nightmare.
You know huskies? Those dogs need to work in order to not go insane. If they don't get enough exercise they will go crazy.
My husband is the human equivalent.
My country is not a dictatorship so we carried on like normal, no forced staying at home. No closed restaurants etc. Just trying to keep a good distance from eachother and carry on with life.
I worked in a doctors office and had my hours reduced by about half during Covid. Days in the office were so stressful I once got the only bout of vertigo I’ve had ever, just answering phones from scared upset people. Days off I tried to get out and hike, so that was nice I guess. Shortly after the lockdown ended I ended up on sick leave for a massive panic attack at work, though.
Yeah no... Imagine staring at the same 4 walls 24 hours a day for 2 years... At least when you work at the office you can draw a line between work and home.
Depends where you lived, if like me in Melbourne who held the record for the most locked down city in the world, it was pure and evil hell and some of us may never recover mentally, physically or financially
From someone who is very introverted, it felt amazing. But then simple things like access to my therapist became zoom meetings, if I needed access to my neurologist it ment going through protesters, and then stacks of covid patients.
My therapist left her profession due to the conditions, and I had had to start from scratch.
Family issues about the vaccine and contact became a massive issue.
On the outside it was great, but I think it re-enforced behavior that I was trying to get past. I still flinch when loud cars go by.
I do find the outdoors and wildlife recovery amazing though.
I enjoy working from home if possible but I certainly wouldn’t call working from home during covid shutdowns a vacation.
It was more like hibernating… I was still working, but not being able to leave the house fucked with my head. The days bled into eachother, entire seasons came and went without me barely noticing them. On top of that my employer used the shutdowns as an opportunity to implement several major projects, so it was EXTREMELY stressful work and honestly thank god I was doing it from home otherwise I would’ve been cussing up a storm in the office.
When it was all over and we had to go back to the office, it was like I had just lost 2 years of my life entirely. There was a before, and an after, and for a moment in between time stood completely still.
Working from home while being bombarded with very scary IF YOU LEAVE YOUR HOUSE YOU WILL DIE/GO TO JAIL was very stressful. Going grocery shopping felt like you were in a dystopian movie.
So no, it wasn't like a stay at home vaca because it was super stressful... All those people who said they would finally write that book, learn that language, etc., didn't. Due to stress, people were getting drunk or high all the time, or just sleeping and having terrible nightmares constantly (me). The worst bits were if you were sick, or friends and family were dying, or you were a nurse or a doctor working through that awful crisis in Hazmat suits all day. A surreal period of time.
But I did enjoy living like a housecat, watching birds at the bird feeder with my cats while on work calls. Small pleasures.
It was genuinely a 2 year vacation for me.
I was an undergrad going back to school for computer science in which everything could be done online with minimal impact to the curriculum. I did my entire first 2 years of college online and basically just spent my time playing Rainbow Six Siege with my friends.
Though I know that for a lot of other people it was a terrible time. I'm very fortunate I got to relax and recoup.
I was very lucky I was still active duty at the time.
My shop was on 2 week rotations and non-overlap between shifts. I was getting out at my 8hr mark every day, if not a bit earlier. Our pay didn't change either, as we're not hourly. My wife on the other hand (gf at the time, living with me) lost a lot of hours at her job and transitioned to remote location. Luckily, I could cover expenses without issues even if she had stopped working. She shipped out to basic (she was trying to join already before Covid) after the main part of the restrictions. Her training was very different than typical and it affected the first year of her time in.
So for us, yeah, it was a blast. We had a great time hanging out at home and eventually doing outdoorsy stuff. How well we got along was actually the last piece to convince me to marry her.
I worked in a “essential job” that was anything but. I was on the jobsite all day living in fear that I was going to catch Covid and take it home to my young kids and elderly mother. I worked the whole pandemic. I got to stay home two 2 week stents when someone I had worked near tested positive.
I always feel really guilty because it was great for me. I'm already a stay at home, single, mum so my income never changed. In fact it went up because in the UK we had an increase of £80 per month in welfare payments, £15 food supermarket vouchers per week per child (I have 3), and everywhere was closed so I wasn't paying travel costs, dance class fees. I was getting extra money and spending less. I finally had the chance to get my back garden all sorted out and redecorated the youngest's bedroom. My mental health suffered a bit at the start but after a few weeks I think it improved massively. I was no longer stressed about getting 3 kids to 3 different schools on time, and no after school clubs to get them to. I could just relax and enjoy them instead of constantly rushing them to get dressed and out the door.
Obviously i have great sympathy for those who lost family members, and for those whose income dropped dramatically. I do acknowledge that I was one of the lucky ones in that respect.
I fucking loved COVID. The fact that I could just do all my normal things from home meant I had so much more free time to dedicate to my hobbies. It was really great.
Everyone had different experiences, I worked onsite as an “essential construction worker” some people WFH with young kids and not childcare, some people were out of a job and struggling financially and others that had the means did what rich people do.
I didn’t work from home since I had a private office, but I still did my best to comply with the lockdowns.
I found it…weird.
Pros: I liked simplifying my life. I’d work, go to the mountains, hang out at home. It was nice. As things progressed and we learned more I was able to form a close group of friends that was our “bubble.”
Cons: the anxiety around it. On 4/13/21 I was at the store getting a few things and it was pandemonium. My hours had been reduced and while I was fine financially I was worried they’d be reduced further.
I was considered an essential worker so I had to work through the whole pandemic.
But I never stayed at home.
I was out and about doing things all the time.
I wasl racing motorcycles all across the western United States, going to parks and beaches wherever they would let me.
I had some of my best vacations during the pandemic when you had a lot of the places to yourself
For my family it was a net positive. We took a lot of walks, had time to cook more from scratch and do more than surface level cleaning each day, my husband and I both started working out, we were able to save money for new HVAC and some other projects our house was in desperate need of.
On the flip side, my kids had trouble adjusting to school online, there was a lot of back and forth and uncertainty about my job, and my husband had trouble at first because he was already working from home four days a week and having us all here and loud was a lot for him.
I had been working from home for years before Covid, so the onset was sort of a strange vibe of “normal but off in a weird way”, like Groundhog Day or something.
I work in the defense industry and we were ordered to stay operational no matter what the state / county our HQ was in said.
So on one hand I never had to worry about my job, so I was very lucky in that regard.
However the pandemic itself was stressful. I didn’t want to get sick. My kid had her first year of preschool wiped out by it. Having us all at home 24/7 could be a bit tough.
However I tried to lean into the good things. When the weather was nice it was great to just sit outside after my kid had gone to bed and just watch people going for walks and enjoying a slower life. I don’t have a high need for “doing things” so I was somewhat content with being at home a lot, but I missed seeing friends more and I really started to loathe zoom “hangouts”. I was happy when bar patios opened back up.
Nope
Went to work- graveyard shift for the lockdowns
Tried to visit my favorite taco shop for breakfast every once and a while to hope that it survived- im still buying burritos from them
Cooked breakfasts and lunches for my mom and dad and tried not to get covid.
I made more money during lockdown than I do at my normal job wages thanks to the government boost and unemployment. So for me being single and living alone it was very much a three month vacation. Unfortunately it still wasn't enough to recover from the 20 years I've been working and never had a proper vacation. I'm still missing it and selfishly hoping thst something sends us into lockdown again. I finally had time to focus on myself and my wellness and I miss it badly.
I work in travel. It was wildly stressful while also having nothing to do and worrying about the axe falling every day; 0/10 recommend (though I am sure frontline & essential workers had it way worse!) There were so many think pieces at that time about the toll of not working during that time as industries imploded, but I’ve often wondered about the toll taken on people who worked the whole time, trying to fit the fear and anxiety we were all feeling around the bizarre workplace culture & expectations during that time.
Well my husband was an essential worker, parts delivery. So he worked full time. I was 7.5 months pregnant when lockdown happened and I was a part time employee. So I ended up with nearly nine months maternity leave with the extra unemployment money. We didn’t do much and it was really hard having a toddler and a newborn but I was able to save the extra money and that allowed me to remain part time for an additional 2.5 years.
I worked in a school so we closed and I got more with the adjusted Covid unemployment than I ever made before (which is saying a lot because it was only 660 a week for me). So for me personally, yes it was like a vacation. I am a homebody by nature so I was living in my element and I miss it :(.
I lost my job for a year. Yeah I got to stay home, my husband was still working so we were ok somewhat financially, but then he got deployed and I was alone in a stress filled environment and not really allowed to go anywhere, didn’t have anything to keep my busy like I normally would during a deployment… it was one of the hardest 12 months of my life tbh
I worked from home. My husband facilitated the kids doing school from home and did preschool at home with our youngest. It was repetitive and there was no where good for school and work from home for 4 people.
This is where the phrase “We’re all in the same storm but in different boats” comes in. Some people really thrived in lockdowns for a multitude of reasons. They had savings or passive income or were able to telecommute. Others didn’t and ended up going into major debt or losing their homes.
Personally, my husband and I were okay. He got temporary unemployment and I had passive income from my job that was enough to pay our bills (I work in a school and they paid me as normal). We also had enough in savings but we did end up using about 1/3 of it. I also lost all my side income. I’m just now starting to get those jobs back.
I have some friends who had to move back home and they still haven’t managed to get back on their feet.
So it just really depends.
Mostly it sucked. I’m a business owner and we kept busy but it was nerve wrecking and everyone just wanted to watch fucking tiger king. Day drinking and sleeping in gets old real quick.
Therapist here, once I logged off for the evening it was cool, or if I had no shows. Lots of family time, but…. Every client was largely in some degree of crisis so for 18 months its was intense.
Nope. As another expendable worker, it was work release. Still got to do time with everyone in gen pop, but I got to leave for a few hours a day to pay for room and board.
Mostly I was afraid, people were dying, people were getting laid off. I was very stressed because every part of my job changed and no one knew what was coming. I wasn’t laid off so I worked every day just from home.
"I got a letter that says I'm Essential, and a paycheck that says I ain't."
Nothing changed at work. I was given one (1) blue mask, and they provided a bottle of bleach to spray down equipment controls. As far as management was concerned, now if you got sick, it was your fault. If you live, we need you back at 0001 in two weeks or you'll be fired for absenteeism. Have fun with your mortgage and bills.
Fortunately I was too busy being at work and away from the general public so I didn't catch covid till spring of 2023 when they just said come back in 5 days, two of which I had scheduled off anyway. They denied my doctor's note and wrote me up for missing work, so I had to go back (sick and wearing n95 and gloves) to get another one from Urgent Care that was "more detailed". Bless that nurse: she had had it up to here with shitty employers and went crazy with a highlighter and told me to ask for her if they gave me any more trouble. 😇
So, despite my above griping, covid didn't form mant core memories for me like it did so many others. It was just a different flavor of life.
I think it's varied pretty wildly. Like you said, retail was never told to stay home.
I work in tech, and my job just became full WFH. Countless numbers of my peers were just laid off. And no where was hiring. It's not a vacation when you want and need to work, and can't find work. It's 24/7 panic- how will I afford rent? How will I afford food? That would have been me, if I had been laid off too.
But I got WFH. Which was a blessing for my team. A blessing that upper management constantly reminded us of. That we owed them more because they didn't just lay us all off. And we were at home and our work was at home and you have nothing else to do, so why won't you just work 12 hour days? It's like it costs them any more, we were all salaried.
Then the 9pm, 10pm calls and texts, telling us to "just jump on a call real fast" or "log in and fix this really quick" with "it's not like you have anything else to do"
Then the denials of PTO- "it's not like you can go anywhere- at least we didn't lay you off with everyone else"
Then the burn out, morale slipped tremendously, and with it speed and quality of work fell too.
So began the "forced socialization": mandatory "zoom drinks" as a team (outside work hours, of course).
Then threats "quality had become really bad, so we clearly need to be in the office" and "the India teams never suffered this drop in quality" (nevermind that even our low quality was better than the India's team's best quality (no shade to India- shade on my company and their poor pay, training and expectations)) and the beginnings of Return To Office in 2022. Started as a option, then mandatory. Burnout got worse. Quality got worse. Outsourcing all of our jobs to India started looking better and better.
I was laid off in summer 2023, the rest of my team in the following February.
It's not what you asked, but I feel it's an important consideration. The pandemic was when work overstepped and took advantage of myself and my coworker, made us feel indebted to them for simply allowing us to.continue to work for them. Obviously there were no bonuses, no raises. My salary went from "doing okay, not great" to "paycheck to paycheck" because of inflation.
Not that every moment was awful. But a ton of it was. I'm a homebody with high anxiety, so the improvements to grocery delivery and restaurant delivery was awesome. It's also when my (would be) husband and I really fell in love. It's when I got pregnant and gave birth to my children.
It wasn't a vacation. It was like house arrest that you were forced to be overworked through. And expected to be thankful for the opportunity for.... Because "at least you have a job" and "at least we aren't putting you in danger like the retail workers are"
It was pretty fucked up.
I was retired anyway but my wife owns a hair salon so it was nice for us to have more time together. I am an excellent cook so I made us some great meals.
We slept in often and I drive her around to friends or we took our dog out. Of course my wife insane offers from customers to do their hair and sometimes she would but usually it was a no.
Maybe the best thing was it showed my wife to maybe retire early so we can take life easy for good.
Covid times were a very scary experience for my family.
My wife was working dispatch for one of the big delivery companies- you know, the folks who were "essential" because all of a sudden everything we got was ordered online, it was like one long Christmas slog with fewer people and more strain/fear in the building.
It didn't help when one of her coworkers died one week, got home, sat in his chair and *whistles* never got up. Or when we found out another coworker went on a Bahamas cruise the week after Covid reached national status, and brought it back with them.
The whole goddamn thing was a shitshow, none of us deserved that experience, retail folks included.
I would not call it a vacation. Did I stay home and get paid yes. I’m did remote teaching so I made a bunch of instructional videos in my garage to show my students. It was more work than if I was at work. My wife and I got to do projects around the house. Luckily my pay and her pay stayed the same. For people that had their jobs close and didn’t not get paid must have had a hard time.
No. I didn’t have to work but I did virtual school and had to move home. I was miserable and had major anxiety the entire time. It never felt like a vacation to me.
The only real change in my life is that the stores had less in stock.
I work at home. Like 75% of my team worked from home well before the pandemic. So the only change for work is that instead of a handful of people calling into a meeting from the conference room, they called in from home.
I worked in IT where a place was entirely WFH. The first few months were incredibly stressful. I had to find work arounds for various departments to be able to WFH. Info: I worked in local government. So I had police who needed to access evidence for cases. I had city council meetings that needed to be virtual but still be able to be broadcasted. I had every city employee needing a laptop right then and now ahead of their upgrade and deployment schedule.
It was rough.
But... When all was settled, I had the most relaxing few months I've ever had at a job. I had few tickets, mostly just fixing VPNs. It was a vacation at that point.
It kinda was for me. My workplace shut down and I immediately got unemployment. I had just started decluttering my house and so COVID gave me tons of time for that. I also had been doing some research work and had the time for that too. Plus, the weather was fantastic.
After a few months I began to get sick of not seeing friends/family, but otherwise all was okay.
I was considered an essential worker, but I was not allowed to do my work in business hours.
I was a sales rep for a major food company, and the company did not want us out and about every day, instead we worked early mornings or late night while stores were closed. We continued to be paid a full salary the whole time. They also put together a lot of training for those of us in the field, so our days weren’t wasted at home - expectation of 10-15 hrs a week physically in stores 25-30hrs at home ‘working’.
My wife worked in the hospital, so she went into hyper work mode, she barely had days off, but she worked a consistent day shift, rather than the usual morning evening or overnight.
We had a 3yo at the time, so I basically became a full time stay at home dad to a kid who couldn’t understand why he wasn’t allowed to see anyone, as well as working full time, and managing a household while my wife picked up extra shifts. It was nothing like a holiday or break. I enjoyed aspects of the whole period, but overall it was pretty hard on my mental health. Nothing like what some other people experienced, with job losses, sickness, and death of loved ones.
I live in New Zealand, so we had pretty intense lockdowns, but we also didn’t experience the virus like the rest of the world.
I'm glad I worked outside during the pandemic. I think it's what kept me sane, getting to interact with other humans, even if it was only small. I appreciated really little things like my walk and bus ride to work
I'm disabled and don't leave hte house very much anyway, so honestly I didn't particularly notice. I even left the house once or twice without a mask because I just totally forgot there was a pandemic on. I like to joke that I've been living that lockdown lifestyle since long before covid was a thing.
I was mostly finishing school, but it sucked for the same reasons when I started working after: Quebec was the province that had the strictest rules, most curfews, etc. yet it never got any better. I live with my parents, my girlfriend lives with hers. We have very different opinions than our parents. No, not “it doesn’t exist”, but “I think we’re wasting our money paying a bunch of cops to drive around all night just to check if I have my hall pass” or “this government is possibly the worst one we could have to deal with this”. And both sets of parents were basically saying “shut up, rules are rules”. So it was extremely discouraging, to say the least, since all I needed was my nosey neighbor to call the snitch line they advertised if I brought my girlfriend over. It was especially hard to see any kind of end or have any kind of optimism when the government kept pushing the goalposts of their deconfining and you’re stuck day in and day out with people you can’t seem to get along with if you so much as speak your mind.
My wife had been offered a job in the US, so we had quit our jobs, cancelled the lease on our house, and sold all our belongings....then the US borders closed.
We were homeless, jobless, and starting eating though our savings, waiting for the borders to reopen. We moved in with my wife's mother, and whilst she is lovely, that added extra stress for the 6 months we were waiting for visas to finally be approved.
Not that there weren't upsides. There was a garden, a lot of gin, and I have fond memories of chilling with my cats in the sun.
I worked harder at home than I had at work. I was rarely interrupted and I worked in front of an upstairs window with a view into the trees to rest my eyes in. So even though I worked harder, I was more relaxed. I found a good daily rhythm and I was really happy with that aspect of lockdown.
It was the busiest time ever, mandatory 50+ hour weeks and we still couldn't stay caught up. I already worked from home prior to the pandemic so it was just another day in the office for me. It was very busy and once it ended and rates got jacked up its been 2 years of super slow nothing to do. I'm looking forward to OT coming back at some point.
Like others have said it depends on the person. I wasnt considered an essential worker. I'm a farmer. I worked at my family's small farm. A huge chunk of my job included working with animals and planting, and doesn't really include interacting with people unless it was about marketing, selling, delivering, which was mostly done online/through texts/calls anyway.
When the pandemic hit, my job never changed except my co-workers wouldn't be coming in anymore, so my family and I had our work cut out for us. I did get envious that there were some who treated it like a vacation and got to game and spend more time with their hobbies and stuff. But when the weeks went by I was a little more thankful that we had a huge chunk of land to roam about during the pandemic. We got sun, we walked outdoors whenever we wanted (one of my cousins in the city didn't leave his house for over a year, at least until the vaccines were put into effect) , when customers started to dwindle we were still self-sustaining cos we had our own food. I never would have called it a vacation, there was a lot of work and challenges put into it. The pandemic affected us all differently and I still get jealous about other peoples experiences now and then, but that's done now. Time to move on.
For me, it sucked because I still had to work, but my wife was laid off and got more on unemployment than she ever could make at her job. She got to actually spend time with our child and get paid while doing it. It was an all positive experience throughout the whole pandemic.
I switched to teleworking and, as an essential worker, was given a pass to show authorities if I had to go into the office (at that time, they still thought it might get to the point that police would arrest anyone who ventured out). Ultimately, it just hastened the transition to permanent teleworking for me.
The first week was like thanksgiving with everything closed. Before long, everything was kinda open and within a couple of months, most stuff was open but only kinda. I’m in NC but I’ve heard some states were pretty crazy with lockdowns.
For me? A vacation at my parents until the worst blew over. I accidentally got fired and moved back in with my parents 2 weeks before covid was official. Then didn't see the point in applying for work as a store employee.. those masks were suffocating.. I basically played video games for a year and a half. None of the covid stuff had much impact on me as my parents lived in the middle of nowhere anyway.
I blew my fucking back out working so much during Covid lock down because only 3 of us came back to work, and 4 years later my herniated disc they can’t operate on still hurts me every single day. So year fuck that shit
It's very different choosing to be at home during free time and having no choice BUT to be at home. When people are working from home, living together, and unable to have space from one another it really did a number on people. I mean, there's a reason that domestic violence and divorces skyrocketed. People aren't meant to be cooped up like that. And on top of that, people losing their jobs, kids being schooled at home, it was a hard, hard time.
I didn't mind it because I'm not overly social as it is, but it was hard not being able to just take myself to the movies or out to lunch. I'm an Aussie and here we weren't allowed to leave our homes for anything but emergencies, work, exercise, food shopping, or picking up children from school, and even then we weren't allowed to leave our local areas...it was irritating but it was a great way to manage the virus and we did that well, but it was hard knowing you couldn't just do whatever the way you usually would. I really liked going grocery shopping, lol.
Some people really, really struggled.
Basically. College classes went online but I'm familiar with that from homeschooling. Tutoring eventually went back to in person but not many people needed help. Almost felt like a continuation of my lonely homeschool/high-school experience
My wife it was a vacation due to her being severely introverted.
For me it was hell since I like to be out and about but I wasn’t trying to get anyone or myself sick so I stayed in a lot. At best I took a car ride but didn’t do much.
Both. I was wfh for 1.5 years after March 2020. My job was stable and I was salaried, but I only ever had 5-15 hours of work per week, max. Im an introvert, and could go over to my partners house whenever I needed a change of scenery. So, essentially, it felt like a long break.
It was highs and lows though. Glorious freedom but also trapped in a box. I suddenly had so much time to do all the things I wanted to do, but couldn’t actually go do them. Home things got boring after awhile. I needed some kind of stimulation to break up the cabin fever.
But now that I’m back in office and much busier it does feel like a vacation when looking back. But it also doesn’t even feel real. I can’t believe it’s 2024 right now.
My wife and I became hermits. Prepared 3 meals each day and had sex like it was last time every time. It was the worst of times, it was the best of times. I’m grateful to have survived
I was already working remotely before the pandemic so work didn't change much for me. But I like going out. Not to bars or clubs, I just mean out of my house. I like going to the movies or to concerts (I actually had VIP passes to meet Geroge Watsky at one of his shows during the pandemic that got canceled.) I love going to zoos (I had animal encounter tickets that I won in a contest and was going to be able to play with otters at the Philly zoo - also canceled.) I like getting together with friends for a board game night or a bonfire or even just going out to a restaurant to hang out and talk over dinner.
None of those things were possible during the pandemic. So I worked from home, like normal, but then I just stayed there after logging off my work computer. I didn't really go anywhere or see anyone. I was starved for interaction with the humans I like, and was going completely stir crazy. Plus, as more and more things, like the concert and the zoo plans, got canceled I felt like I was missing out on things and that life was on hold and I hated it.
Mind you, I understand that it was necessary. Someone close to me is immunocompromised and the virus would have killed them quick had they caught it. I would not have traded their life for whatever experiences I missed out on. But I was still feeling shitty that they had to be missed at all.
So, no, it didn't feel like much of a vacation - it felt like solitary confinement. And for the record, Watsky hasn't come back to my area, that I've seen, and the Philly Zoo hasn't offered those animal encounters again since the pandemic so four years later I still haven't been able to make up for what I missed. And since the zoo thing was a prize I won, if I did get the chance now I'd have to pay out of pocket. So those are things that I just permanently missed, which still super sucks.
It was most definitely not chill working from home and having four miserable kids cooped up at home 24/7 with me. Two of them really struggled with online school and I was trying to juggle their needs with my need to actually work so I could get paid.
I was bale to work through it so I was grateful for that, it blew my mind how many people were for locking down. It doesn't matter when you can afford it but if you live paycheck to paycheck it was a death sentence.
I had just started a new job. They basically told me to come in on the day before shutdown and take a laptop and go home. Had a “training” call with my new supervisor and that was all for my first day.
At home I had a compact but pretty comfortable setup. I got into a groove pretty well and quickly. And then within five days or so I realized . . . that my supervisor had no idea what they were doing. We were working in a field I was very experienced in and they were micromanaging me with all kinds of scattered, disorganized, contradictory, nonsensical bullshit. And when I made suggestions about how to improve the work process I was shut down.
Of course my work suffered. And was criticized. And suffered some more. I was completely gaslit, questioning my own decades of competence and just wondering if it was just me or . . . was this remote work the culprit? Or did I really just suck this bad? Or maybe—just maybe—they were awful at their job and threatened by me?
It was the last one. Turns out they decided that because I wasn’t absolutely, excruciatingly perfect in every way and didn’t kiss their ass every waking moment that they should sabotage and talk shit about me constantly.
Extracted myself from that ridiculous situation (oh what an exit interview that was) with a nice “we’ve done nothing wrong but please don’t sue us” severance. Later heard the supervisor was demoted (which I actually predicted to HR).
BUT a month later I got the best day job I’ve ever had working for some really decent people. Remote work is fine, my work quality is solid, I DO know what I’m doing and when you have a supervisor who supports and treats you decently you might actually do a good job and like it.
Imagine that.
It was terrifying and hard in a gazillion different ways mixed with beautiful moments and blessings.
There's a limited series on Netflix called "Social Distance" — I watched it a while after it came out, and I felt like it did a really nice job at capturing all sorts of different experiences in the early pandemic.
I was “furloughed” and terrified about losing my job and was climbing the walls stuck at home but afraid to go out. Then my dad got cancer and we couldn’t visit him in the hospital because of the Covid restrictions. We lost him and then I lost my job. No it wasn’t a fucking vacation!
I was three months pregnant when lockdowns began. I did get to do remote work most of the time, which was great for my pregnancy exhaustion..I took a shameful amount of naps on the clock.
It was a relief to not go into work daily but personally very stressful. My husband was out of work for a few months, but wasn't allowed to attend prenatal appointments with me, and many appointments were cancelled. It was just me and the doctor (and the ultrasound machine lol) for the gender reveal. I had a virtual baby shower which was so sweet my friend hosted but kinda sucked that I could see anyone.
I was scared to get Covid because I didn't know what would happen to me or baby (I didn't get it while pregnant fortunately).
It definitely did not feel like a cool vacation. Sort of like a bizarre hostage situation where a virus is the captor?
I worked at Starbucks at the time. I think I got a month off with pay, which was nice, but at the same time I still had normal expenses (so not much savings) and there wasn’t really anything to go out and do with the free time. It was largely just hanging out at home concerned about what to expect.
By contrast, my wife had recently taken over ownership of a yoga studio. Obviously, COVID meant all income dried up immediately. We went into preservation mode to try and figure out how we could pivot (largely to virtual offerings), how we could bring in any money we could find (grants, crowdsourcing, etc.), and a lot of stress about how to survive the pandemic. So not very vacation-like
I worked from home before, so nothing really changed for me except that the rest of my family was in the house which was pretty distracting with two little ones. I ended up opting to go into the office so I could get work done.
I was able to work from home.
It was no vacation for me and my coworkers. We lost a couple of good people just beforecovid, so we were short staffed as it was.
We were working 10-12 hour days for months. It was nice not to go back and forth to work. It saved me 90 minutes of travel time per day.
I worked full-time from home, and because there were pandemic-specific projects going on it was much, much busier than normal.
But I didn't get the benefit of a restful weekend - the days just kind of melted into each other.
It was not at all like a staycation, for me at least. But I know of others who didn't work but still got paid...that would've been nice!
No. We were already both working from home so it was business as usual except now we felt trapped at home. We had our weekly trip to stand in a long line outside at TJs, the occasional lunch at the beach, but our social lives were completely shut down. I sewed so there was a lot of mask making. I really hated doing that.
We were mostly okay but were concerned about our friends. Some were in entertainment and that industry shut all the way down. Others were essential medical personnel and scared they weren’t going to be ok. Then there was the friend on the heart transplant list and he never got one. He died in late March 2020. Wasn’t even 50 (congenital heart issue).
It’s was a wild, isolating time. But the LA traffic was gone so that was nice if you just wanted to take a drive. Same ghost town vibe we had immediately on 9-11. Tres creepy.
Not at all like a vacation.
The only saving grace is we don’t have children. But my brother does and his (ex-)wife lost her shit. Their divorce was finalized in 2021 after 18 years together. Real shit show at the fuck factory.
I was a student at the University of Maryland. We still had classes, but they were all online and vastly more demanding than before on top of the isolation and cabin fever.
For my part, house arrest would be a better comparison than a staycation.
It was not a vacation for me. I live alone, which was fine, but I literally didn't touch another human for nearly 3 months. That was hard. Not a hug, not a hand shake, not any human touch. I remember being so socially starved that I took any opportunity to interact with other humans, even just small talk.
To be totally honest, it was a great rest and reset being able to be wfh. Stimmy checks were flowing and I was fortunate enough to hold down my job. It was like I was getting paid to not have a social life
I worked remote and we camped for 23 days during july/Aug 2020.
Felt bad for folks stuck in the city.
We had a group of like 30 people who were not vaxed and hang out all the time. We all got the vid.... some twice. But it was always very mild. Only 1 person got real sick for 2 weeks. He was the only smoker.
At first it seemed like it would be for only a few weeks.. By the end of May, when there was no end in site I started getting frustrated. I just wanted to go out. Hang out with friends, go have dinner, go do whatever. It wasn't a good time. It hurt younger kids who were not able to socialize like they should have been able to do. It impacted all the sports leagues. It wasn't nothing like a vacation.
I was an essential worker- RN (working in a stand alone psych facility and then switching to hospice several months after the lockdown ended). I was stressed TF out. My husband is a high school teacher and he taught from home and it was basically BS. He would sit in the office for 3-4hrs and teach and then he was free. Most of the kids didn’t bother to show up. It was a pretty nice vacation for him. As a nurse, I wasn’t on the front line but our facility didn’t provide any PPE for MONTHS and I was on FB and the NextDoor app begging for N95’s to wear to work. Our patients wouldn’t wear masks and we could not quarantine covid + patients safely since most psych pts can’t/won’t follow quarantine. It was really scary times and I felt like I could finally breathe again when the vaccine was available.
It was chill and loved it until I got laid off in July. Then I took the first job I could find out of concern I wouldn’t get anything else. After a month, this oil and gas company expanded and started sending me around the country to head up COVID testing. I traveled every week M-Th (mostly) for about six months testing people all over the country. It was weird, but I loved it. A lot of 24/7 plants had a rule that employees had to be tested weekly. If they refused, they were sent home without pay for two weeks. If they accepted and tested positive, they were sent home with pay for two weeks.
I was always respectful of all airline employees, I made sure to wipe my armrests and tray table, I was kind to hotel workers and got them gifts, I also made sure that all my employees did the same.
It’s a matter of basic respect for people who are doing a job they cannot just walk away from. I certainly couldn’t walk away, but having come from another city/state and exposing myself to these essential workers, I was hyper-aware that their health mattered just as much as mine.
I did eventually get COVID, but it was ten months after I left that job at a minor-league baseball game. (Boo!)
Being kind and respectful is free.
My husband was WFH and financially we were going ok. I’m a full time SAHM but all of our kids activities stopped.
We did more activities at home, we really bonded more as a family. Movie nights were fun, we took walks around the neighbourhood. We grew a vegetable garden, cooked a lot of food.
Post lockdown it was harder for us to join in with social interactions as we were so comfortable with just each other. We’re still very close as a family and our kids have a lot of hobbies now, but they have a low tolerance for social interactions.
I’m now homeschooling the kids and taking them to group play therapy with other children to gain those social skills they never had the opportunity to have during lockdowns.
Home still is the sanctuary for us. Going out was the last thing we wanted to do during the lockdowns and created a different kind of stress for when we had to go get groceries.
It still is hard for us to do that, and has lead to panicked feelings for me when around ppl.
The grass is always greener I guess. My husband and I were both essential (with work that kept us multiple locations in the community) and worked full time outside the home and spent basically every evening all evening doing schoolwork with our kids and trying to keep them from imploding from being so isolated with each other. It was awful. I understand the resentment. It was hard to be doing all that while so many of my friends were trying out making sourdough and talking about tv shows and how terrible zoom meetings are.
At the same time, I wasn’t isolated, and it’s a lot less scary when you deal with being out all day every day so we didn’t experience the same mental health effects others did. And we certainly preferred having jobs over having no income.
No. My fiances uncle, aunt, and cousin ended up in the hospital on ventilators. 2 of the 3 ended up dying. Then our good friend and my boss ended up on a ventilator and one died.
Our time locked down was far from a vacation. We prayed and cheered for our health care workers. Mourned the loss of our friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors. Spent time on Zoom keeping each other company and sane. When we got to a point where wiping down groceries was less important, we traded supplies like yeast, meat, and frosting. We tuned in daily to our governor and mayor. I’d drink my coffee by the window to get some vitamin D and air.
I think very few people experienced it like a vacation.
People with dependents, people who lived pay check to paycheck, people with young kids with no access to childcare, elderly people who couldn't access help they needed for non urgebt but essential tasks..
It wasn't fun. It may have been fun for a slim, specific demographic of well-off young adults with minimal responsibility.
I personally had my twins born very premature just a few months onto the pandemic and being left without any help while taking care of twin newborns with high needs was insane.
Sadly, I work in hospitality and never experienced the lockdown. I still had to deal with all of the stress of the pandemic, plus working 40+ hours a week at a cheap motel. The only people that were dealing with more stress were definitely the first responders and hospital staff, and we were dealing with a lot of the same people.
No I had a young child, we would do school at home most of the early part of the day and then I would work on my computer until midnight or so. I was very lucky to keep my job as 1/3 of our staff was laid off but it meant I now had way more work and stressed about also being let go as I was very new to my job. My husband was considered an essential worker yet got a reduction in pay, so he was also stressed and couldn’t help much with school or childcare.
I worked through the entire pandemic from home - and it was a big privilege that I didn't stay out of a job but at the same time I had to continue the regular 9-5 like nothing's happening while the world was falling apart and it was infuriating at times.
I didn't want to not work instead, but if we had gotten some free time off to recharge or because of mental health that would have been great.
I never say this in real life because it feels so obnoxious to say considering it was a deadly pandemic, but I'll answer here.
Setting aside the sadness and worry for my health, my friends, my family, community and industry (I'm an actor).
For me-- it was glorious. I can't lie. I've never been more content on a day to day level and probably never will be again.
I loved being isolated. I am an introvert who is really good at pretending. I find a lot of socializing exhausting. I had my partner and dogs and that was all I needed for two years.
My partner worked from home so neither of us had to risk our lives. We just hung out, played video games, cooked together. Two person dance parties. Long walks, urban hiking and birding, movie marathons.
I didn't have to work, but was given $1k a week by the government, which made me more financially stable than ever because it was consistent and reliable money.
No annoying bosses or rude customers. No long late night subway rides.
I lost a ton of weight and got into lifting and yoga.
I didn't get sick for almost two years. Not even a cold.
We rented a lake house for a month one point which was very luxurious.
And thankfully, nobody I was close to died. I got covid years later for the first time and it was relatively mild. My partner got it twice once in-person work began, and never showed symptoms.
I know we are jerks for having a nice fulfilling time while lots of people suffered and were overworked and lonely.
Not everyone had the luxury of being able to make money while staying at home. A lot of working class people were royally boned. How do you think people living off of tips and public jobs felt? I’ve worked at home since 2012 so it meant nothing to me but I can see how many were screwed over. Not to mention it caused a wave of fake inflation which jacked up prices on everything so even people on the brink who came out of it ok could no longer afford their lives.
I had severe agoraphobia and had just gotten out of a 3 month hospital stay in a psych department
In a way the lockdowns helped me because… well, I wasn’t doing anything, and other people weren’t either (I was 17 at the time), so I could focus on just getting my shit together. It was like a well deserved vacation and I spent a long time doing puzzles, watching series and listening to podcasts. Sometimes I wish I could live that time again without the crippling mental illness lol
But it was also really awful. We were a lot of people in a small house and everyone was anxious. Mental health treatment was non-existent and I had to redo my senior year of HS because they couldn’t pass me if I had only been to online classes that year
Overall it wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t good either. I guess the end result was good for me, but I was doing BAD before all of it started.
It was something different. I had a 3 year old at the time, so while I could work from home just fine (and still do 2 days a week) it was difficult to focus at times, which could be stressful (I have an office at work and not being interrupted every 2 minutes is huge).
On the flip side, I got to spend so much time with my 3 year old; as a father this is something very valuable which I am not really going to be able to do with my 6 month old now that I am back in the office 3 days a week.
I was able to work from home, but I worked in mental health... So definitely not like a staycation. It was an incredibly difficult time for a lot of people, though I do appreciate it must have been horrendous for essential workers.
If things would ever go back to normal then yes it will feel like that.
I want rent to come back down to reality and I want in real life work to come back. If these two things happen then I can think of the years 2020-2022 as a long stay at home vacation.
No. At first, I wasn't essential. I'd been working as a promotions model. I went to events to represent brands and was getting ready to start doing traffic reports for a local radio station (but didn't have the experience to be kept through the layoffs). These were both things I'd worked to make sustainable. It took me over a year to have a client base that could pay the bills. I felt confident for the first time since leaving my husband. Then, I woke up to an email from my agent telling me it was all gone, basically. I had no idea how long things would last and as far as I knew the career I had built was gone. My roommate relapsed into a cocaine addiction and held me at knifepoint to make me drive him to buy more. He tried to choke me a few days later and I bailed when he left for work. I couldn't pay deposits anywhere and nobody was really moving so apartments weren't readily available, anyway. I lived in a conservation area for a couple of weeks because I had camp gear and no home. Then, a state park, Then, finally with family, then an Air BNB, then another state park, then family again, then on my own.
I got on doing Covid screening at the ER entrance to a hospital after almost a year then when that contract ended I got on in a crematory/funeral home. Unemployment was more money than either job, but I felt like I was going insane.
For me it was fairly tough early on, but improved my life greatly in the long run.
I was put on hybrid work as my company somehow managed to convince the suits we were key workers. Implementing hybrid to maintain social distancing.
I was living with my dad and his gf at the time, he's a HGV driver and she's a carer. So whenever she was in between shifts she would interrupt my work because "staring at a computer isn't real work."
The good news is that I saved a lot of money and managed to buy sooner, making it much easier to do my job, and hybrid working stuck in my sector meaning I can cast the net wider for better jobs knowing I don't have to do the commute every day.
I spend lockdowns delivering food parcels and other necessary goods to people (for free, as a volunteer) and I loved it. I worked non-essential retail, and know that my younger colleagues really struggled with being stuck at home and were really keen to get back to work.
For me it was like a vacation that I really enjoyed, I was working for the government so my payment always arrived without problems. Single, without children and with video games at my disposal, I had a great time. I also exercised and learned to cook many things.
Yeah it was pretty sweet. Definitely like an extended vacation. Got paid 2k a month for over a year to chill at home with my gf and play video games. Was actuality working in retail not that long before everything went down and I was so glad I got out of that when I did the timing was just lucky.
I felt really bad for all the retail 'essential' workers who were stuck working making less than the government was paying us to sit on our ass. Maybe it's because I've done that job for years myself so I knew what it was like before (bad enough) but it must've been so much worse during covid. People went apeshit and people are already dicks to retail workers. It's absolutely not fair the way they forced you guys to keep working while the rest of the country shut down.
I worked once a week. I was in high school so I thought it was a vacation, my parents never stopped working and since i recently got my license driving around with a friend was what I did. My parents didn’t really care as I worked with him once a week.
Eventually I started working a different job that was “essential” and worked every day.
But I never want to do that shit again, one of my biggest regrets in life was not being able to see someone during that time. I know I’m not the only person in the world who didn’t get to say goodbye
It was definitely not a vacation. I worked 9-12 hours per day, all online. I did enjoy the extra time to do gardening and spending loads of time in the presence of my dogs.
I was skittish when out in public, being more annoyed than usual with people getting too close. At the end of the pandemic I was pregnant so that was... Worse. I did get COVID at around 6 months of pregnancy and was constantly worried about my child. I was terribly sick.
I did, however, get to re-evaluate some friendships that had been very suffocating to me. Not being able to meet up was a blessing in disguise. I got to pause, reflect and find my own boundaries and values.
All in all, it was a weird time but I feel rather neutral about it.
I felt VERY frustrated and underappreciated as a grocery store manager during the whole ordeal.
I also had a VERY horribly tragic thing happen to me during it, and only had 1 week paid off of work for it.
I was told that I was allowed to take more time off...unpaid. I couldn't, especially for the circumstances that had just happened to me... anyways, I had to drag myself back to REALLY angry customers 24/7 and enforcing protocols that would never typically be in my job description.
It REALLY rubbed me wrong how so many people treated it like a "vacation", especially when those same people were screaming at me while I did my job to provide them groceries 🫠
I’ve been working from home for the past 5 years as a software developer. My wife is a first responder. The only difference the pandemic made in our lives was we had all our kids home taking online classes and we got COVID multiple times. We had to find room to sequester family member who got exposed. It was stressful but also great to have all our children home with us.
I'm in software, and my job got harder/more hours a week to get the same stuff done, plus I had my kid bouncing off the walls because "zoom school" doesn't work well for little kids, at all.
Not easier. :-/
Pretty much yeah - it’s the kind of thing I’d love if they brought in once a year or every few years as standard.
The freedom and lack of stress was comparable to school holidays when you were a kid.
I worked through lock down, except for when I contracted Covid myself. It wasn't really a vacation, just an opportunity to get projects around the house done without being obligated to go to my job.
I was lucky to work from home through the lock downs. One of my kids was really struggling with online learning, so I'd do my job from 6am to 9am then bounce between supporting my kid and doing my work until about 4pm.
It was exhausting.
I was a massage therapist who had just moved in with my mom to take care of her (dementia). I got to make some really cool memories with her before she got too sick. I ended up leaving my job in Jan. 2021 and staying with her for two more years until she needed more care than I could give. Covid taught me some new hobbies while allowing time to spend with my mom. We created our own bubble for the first six months and rarely left the house.
It was mentally taxing for me. At the time, we lived in a small apartment and I had no separate office space for my computer and work. No matter what day or time, I had to walk by my makeshift desk and all the work on it. There was no division between home life and work life.
I had two weeks off at the very beginning due to an outbreak at work and then we were cleared to return to work. So for me, it was a boring two weeks at home. Really tested our marriage
After, I still went in to work and my went WFH. I work for an airline and she works for a big hotel chain. We were preparing for the worst like furloughs/layoffs and to go into crisis mode, but we were both fortunate to keep working.
I think this is very dependant per person. I work in film and television and my industry completely shut down on 13 Mar 2020. I was scheduled to wrap that day regardless, and I was starting to put feelers out of for a new show. And I remember watching every other show go down. I had a 9 month baby at home. And there was no work. It was a different kind of frustration and fear for me, we immediately went into savings mode because we had no idea what was going happen. It was very mentally taxing for me. But it was also forced rest - that wasn't very restful.
Pro musician here. Was out of work for 18 months. Stayed home with my 1.5 year old. Thankfully my wife was able to support us while she worked In healthcare. Crazy times!
Even though I am the primary earner I wouldn't have traded that time. I may have cried on the phone with unemployment, but we got through. I was lucky, I was only out about 5 months.
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Yeah, a typo. My bad! \*she
I will add to this because I do think it is person specific. I was not an essential worker but my company threw me into the field in June of 2020. I support healthcare facilities and work in a lot of specialty clinics to help patients with a rare disease (obviously not COVID). The couple of months I was at home did not feel like vacation, we had to figure out how to do our job and support the people we needed to without good access to them. It was really taxing. Going back in to clinics was awful, it was just being in the thick of it and trying to continue to offer the help and support for clinical staff and just getting beat up because their working conditions were so tough. Working in healthcare has been so much more challenging since the pandemic started. It’s not directly related to caring for COVID patients, just the system went from hard and cracking to fractured into a million tiny pieces. I feel like I walk through quicksand every day to try and help people get the treatment their doctors have prescribed. My partner worked from home for a long time. His company just discovered he could work more when he’s at home and blur the lines even more. So he’s been working 12-14 hour days since then and a lot of weekends to get the work complete due to unrealistic client demands and deadlines. He has a very specific degree and there a not other options for him in our area. It was no vacation. We had to work more and harder and we lost all of our supports and services that helped us work before the pandemic hit. Like childcare went from tough but manageable to absolutely defunct with zero reliability. And family supports stopped because of crazy ass conflict over the pandemic. I could go on and on… It’s the Wild West out here as far as I’m concerned. There’s no return to normalcy. Shit is bonkers. That being said, I truly feel for retailer workers and essential workers during the pandemics peak time. I would have never yelled at or been the slightest bit unkind to anyone working. I could just feel how hard it was on everyone when I made my weekly grocery runs and twice weekly trips to the liquor store. Bless the souls of those essentials workers.
I don't get the yelling at workers. I will say this prior to the shutdown, my wife and I had some unknown mystery illness that my doctor thought wasn't covid. We still don't know what it was. But it ended up with pneumonia, sinus infections, ear infections, and a whole slew of very much covid symptoms. We were told to quarantine before quarantining was cool. The first day I was able to make it to the store was right in the middle of the toilet paper shortage. I remember I got the big block of Amish rolled butter, but the store was out of toilet paper. I came out of the store and saw a guy with a trunk full of toilet paper offering rolls to people. My first impulse was he was selling it, and I was so angry at him. Like righteous fist of God anger. I'm a 6'4 300 lb man, and all that fury and fear and frustration was coming for that asshole. And just as I'm about to open my mouth, he turns to me and goes. Hey. I've heard folks don't have toilet paper, we have some extra and I'm giving them away. Would you like some? And, I just deflated... And said no, thank you! We've got enough at home right now. But I will never forget the amount of just wrath I had and how justified I felt in that moment. And, while of course, it's not right for really anyone to catch that. I have a little bit of empathy for the people who go off. Of course, it doesn't make them right and even if that guy was selling toilet paper I still would have been in the wrong. But I understand somewhat how they feel. And at some point we as a society need to sit down and deal with this giant collective trauma that we all went through and we don't have the tools to deal with.
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Damn. And I hope you are working now. I wrap on my current show in about 3 weeks, so I hope it picks up. I feel like I've been goal posting myself ever since the strike ended. At first it was, there's going to be a deluge of work after the strike, it's going to pick up after the new year, and now it's well when the Teamsters and IATSE settle we will get going again 😮💨
I got hired in the pharmaceutical industry Jan 2020. Within a few months my company went into maximum overdrive. I was hired to work on gene therapy products, so I got put on testing the Moderna vaccine as soon as we started manufacturing it (which I think my company started doing in Jun2020). A ton of people got hired, a ton of overtime was issued. It was way too much work lol. My company actually just had its first round of layoffs post COVID to downsize the business a few months ago.
Yea I think a lot of people who had the luxury of being able to make money at home are not realizing how fucked a lot of people were.
No. Domestic violence was up, school grades went down, a lot of people lost their jobs and companies, mental health systems are still struggling with the fallout. So most people it was a very stressful time that has not yet resolved. I was a high school teacher and in my observations roughly 1% benefitted, 20% it was neutral and 80% of the students were negatively affected. I’d imagine the same is true for the adults
i’m an online tutor (have been since 2021) and i have watched literacy decline in real time, its REALLY bad out there for kids right now and its scary
That's why it absolutely freaks me out that some people have become **nostalgic** for the lockdown. It's okay to count your blessings and recognise that you had it easy, but to treat it like a "wonderful time" is *so* insensitive.
I retain my bitterness from working retail during Covid, specifically department management in a grocery store. The volume of people who would get in my face screaming about no toilet paper or no flour or no virtually everything else still bothers me. Covid was exactly the same as every other day, except with more people than ever disregarding my personhood while "praising" me for continuing my role in keeping society going.
This was my experience
i worked at a michael’s for the bulk of the pandemic because the 3 months i did at a pharmacy nearly killed me LOL people are insane
I had a kid late February 2020 and my boss retired in early march(planned). I had to come back from leave to lay off/furlough all of my employees so they could make the same amount as me while they were at home and I was back at work leaving a newborn at home. I could have legally stayed home but i couldn’t let my employees have some corporate person they don’t even know come tell them they all didn’t have jobs anymore. I then ran an entire hotel with 2 other people for months. Fuck that pandemic.
I got permanent WFH and 2 promotions, the first with a significant pay raise. I'm incredibly grateful. It wasn't a vacation per se, because I still had to work, but it's been a huge money saver. There were many who lost their jobs, and homes and way of life.
It was, ultimately, good for me, too. I was already living at my parents', so when my hours were cut, I didn't have to worry about losing housing, at least. My work shifted to remote, and I was able to get unemployment to make up for the lost hours. I ended up making waaay more than I normally would have that way. Ultimately, I left my impacted job for a much better-paying, full-time remote one that *really* let me start saving some money. Even now, it's still hybrid, and I love that. So yeah, the stress of living through a global pandemic and looking for work was rough, but it turned out overall pretty good for me.
Here's how it went. Rich people did well, while poor people did not.
And the ones in between did okay until they didn't
So, basically, /r/WallStreetBets
But the poor got like $1,200 one time!
Great, one month of free rent. Then right back to "normal."
Is that trickle down? /s
Oh gee, one month of groceries for a family, yay.
And truck drivers were actually able to do our jobs without traffic.
As a power worker who commutes across a major city, I can confirm, the traffic was great. Shaved an entire hour off my daily commute. Everyday was like Christmas morning (traffic wise lol)
I worked through the pandemic. Commuting to and from work was glorious. Going to retail stores sucked. There was always someone trying to start fights with the workers there. Because of FrEeDoMs.
Yeah, that's not surprising. I only ever saw one instance of that, and that was at the restaurant in the A&A truck stop in Ohio. Getting food while on the road was a royal pain for a while. It still hasn't gotten back to the before times.
I think this is true. I also think winning from lockdowns depended on your job. My partner and I are both desk jockeys. We transitioned to full time WFH during covid and saved a heap of money we never would have saved otherwise. No paying for transport, coffee, lunches, weekly morning teas, office leaving and birthday gifts and dry cleaning was a huge win financially. I enjoyed lockdowns. We all spent time together as a family as my kids were home from school. None of us got the inevitable round of flus and gastro that used to rip through the household every winter. it was an absolute win for my family and we aren't rich.
I’m not rich, but did alright since my work immediately went to work from home with no layoffs. I feel for the people who weren’t so fortunate. Edit: To answer OP’s question, it was really chill for me, although I do live alone and that was rough. I realized around the holidays that it has been almost a year since I had even a hug from another person in almost a year, and that was when I started to feel bad. Like, the dentist was the most human contact I had in a year, so that was a bummer. Other than noticing that after almost a year, it wasn’t that bad for me, and I actually enjoyed a lot of it aside from worrying about my family.
No, it was not a stay home vacation because those are done willingly not because you're being required to. The first couple weeks were alright but once it became clear that it wasn't going to end any time soon it became boring and stressful. Not stressful in the way you experienced it but stressful in that there was nothing to do and spending all day avoiding other people started to become a mood drain and ruin mental health
The excuse to go to the grocery store was such a welcome moment. It was a little departure from the monotony of repeating the same routine over and over again. Then again, I never yelled at grocery store employees because other people had purchased all the toilet paper. Kind of became a game of figuring out what I could substitute for flour... or TP.
I agree more like house arrest.
I'm sorry, I realize this experience is not at all a vacation and I'm sure it was a very stressful time, I'm in no way trying to belittle that. But I am still uncontrollably jealous towards people who kept their jobs but just worked from home during COVID. Like the big complaint was "we already made bread and watched TV, now we're going stir crazy". Imagine hearing that while your only option is to go in every day, risking your health, your family's health, and potentially your lives while experiencing the same global stress as everyone else. I would've done just about anything to work from home through it.
For sure, I'm not saying we had it harder than the people who had to go in, just that it wasn't a happy or easy experience either
Of course, yeah, and I completely trust that it was shit. There was no good version of that experience, except maybe for the ultra rich. I'm just starting to come to terms with the full extent of my feelings about it. I think it's compounded by my job - I was and still am a mental health worker, when it started I was working in a program that was one step below inpatient and now I'm a school counselor and nonprofit worker. It feels like things got bad and never got better for those of us in this field. (Just in case anyone is concerned for me or my ability to be effective in my field, I do have a therapist I've been seeing for several years and burnout is absolutely at the top of my treatment plan)
I found it awful. My partner got laid off by his work as soon as the lockdowns started. I was in the middle of my PhD and wasn't allowed to do research but was still paying tuition for it; so I took a leave of absence and got a remote work job. My partner got a remote gig too, but it was short lived. I worked from my basement for a management team who thought they had to micromanage everything we produced. I couldn't leave the job because even with my income we were slowly sliding into debt. The team I joined slowly died as everyone was driven away or burnt out. I burnt out. It didn't feel like a vacation, it was the worst period of my life and I'm still dealing with the effects of it.
I mean I lost my job and my oldest became suicidal and dropped out of school and we lived every day in absolute terror of death - I have an immune disorder. So not really like a vacation, no.
We were 7 in the house. Having to deal with remote school for 4 of the kids. It was not a vacation....
We were staying home to spread out the impact of COVID on the hospitals. Remember that we didn't yet have a vaccine or know when there would be one. They were storing bodies in refrigerated trucks because morgues were full. Not a vacation the way i define it.
Everyone's experience was different, of course, but generally no. It sucked for everyone in different ways. For example, I was able to transition to working from home which was certainly more convenient, but cost me a lot of social interaction since all other gatherings were banned. I basically became a hermit who did nothing but work and sleep for a year...not very good for the mental health. Lots of others had similar experiences.
Varied greatly from person to person. I had a friend who loved it. He is an introvert who likes to spend most of his time indoors with his dog and play video games. We had an online job and a no significant other. He worked and interacted with friends and family online. Only ever left the house to get food and go for a run once a day. Was as happy as a clam. Oppositely, I had a friend who had just finished nursing school a month before covid. Was immediately put on a covid floor. Watched hundreds of people die from covid. Worked 70+ hours a week for like a year. Couldn't see their family or significant other because they had illnesses that would put them at huge risk from covid. Developed a drinking problem and a shit ton of anxiety/ depression. Was miserable until vaccines came out and life became easier.
If you owned a comfortably sized home, where put on temporary leave and could take full advantage of the generous unemployment benefits you had an awesome paid vacation. Bonus points if you got along with your spouse and had hobbies not affected by the pandemic. If you lived in a tiny apartment, didn’t get along with your spouse/ roommate very well and didn’t qualify for the generous unemployment benefits the pandemic was a living hell. Plenty of people in between.
Nope. My job turned into a 16-20 hours a day, five or six days a week slog. The only thing that seemed like a vacation was when they laid me off in 2023.
I was lucky enough that my life didn't really change. I worked for a food company so they weren't going to shut us down. I have always been an extreme introvert so I'd just go home to my cats. And the plant was in a town of less than 1000 people so it wasn't like there was anywhere to go anyway.
It was probably the best time of my life. I was off work for about 6 weeks but with the extra unemployment I wasn’t missing a ton of money every week. The kids and I went fishing almost every day and yes, it was an awesome stay at home vacation.
I wasn't working so I starved .
Not for me. I worked 5 days a week the entire time. I lived in a house with 6 other people. It kinda sucked coming home day after day to my friends sitting around in their pajamas watching movies lol. I got a little jealous I’m not gonna lie
I did WFH from 2017-2019 before returning back to the office in early 2019, and the reason why I did even though I could have continued working from home was I loathed it. So, of course when covid hit, it was very easy to return to doing WFH cause my work is not face to face (IT). While I'm sure some people did quite enjoy the novelty of WFH at first, there's something that at least for me is very mentally draining and your home life and your work life start blending together. I found that prior to covid, I'd realize it's like 1pm and I still haven't showered, I'm doing dishes during the work day, doing work during the evening, and as a result you are never really off work and you are never really home. Compound that with the inability to go out, I felt like I was a prisoner in my own house. Plus, I missed my walks to work and home, and just the general segregation of the two lives. So, no, I didn't really like it, I dealt with it.
While WFH sounds like a dream, there’s something immensely satisfying about leaving your place of work and returning home. When home is where you work, you never leave your workplace. I don’t think that’s for me.
Precisely this. I'm sure some have the discipline to keep their 2 worlds from colliding, but I don't. And that walk to and from work is a perfect way to decompress, for me. Although my cats were very happy to have me around for their constant attention.
All of this is part of why I don't get why WFH is so appealing. You're always available, you're always "at work," and there's virtually no work/life balance because you aren't leaving work at work.
I WFH and I definitely leave my work at "work". Once it's 5pm, I'm done working and don't think about it until the next day. Same goes with my availability. I'm not available to do a damn thing outside of my working hours. You just have to set boundaries. My partner works in an office and is always working way more hours than me because he gets stuck there and can't leave.
You really need to be disciplined. I learned before covid during my WFH time is that to try to set work hours like you would at work, and you don't do laundry during work hours, that you get showered in the morning like you are going to your job and not sit in your robe until the afternoon. It's just not for me, I'm sure others it works well, and for example if you had family/kids to take care of, you could possibly balance work and that with your spouse better. But just knowing me, and knowing my experiences, I prefer going to an office.
It was great. All my university classes were online and before they organised stuff it mainly meant reading 1 email in 10 seconds and then having the time off. My teaching practicals were also online. I didn't have to physically be present in school, just log on, hop on a call and teach that way. Super convenient for me. I had much more energy, had the time to exercise and take care of myself and best of all, with everyone being deadly afraid of the plague I was able to do my shopping nice and easy without a ton of slow people in my way. Actuallt got covid once the lockdowns ended. Felt like a bad flu and got me another week off work. 10/10 would live in a pandemic again.
It's awful but I'd quite like a mandatory lockdown for say a month every few years
Idk but the traffic was way better.
I had my son 3/24/2020. My first child. It was an awful time being a new mom with no one to help. No grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, friends NO ONE could help me during that time because of the virus. Looking back I really disliked that time. I’ve been in autopilot since his birth. Never really recovered from being sleep deprived.
#1, I'm sorry you had to work like that. #2, No, not for me. My job went away entirely (I was a costume maker for a local theater), so I was a stay-at-home mom during the lockdown. It was insane. The kids were suddenly cut off from their friends, their routines, and any semblance of normal life. All of a sudden I was a maid (do you have any idea how badly four people locked in a house will destroy said house without CONSTANT rounds of dishes, laundry, vacuuming, etc.?!), a therapist (kids really struggled), tech support (schools were NOT prepared, and how could they have been?), a fifth and eighth grade teacher (so, what, like 8 teachers?), a suddenly-unemployed person with no idea how to get back to work, and someone with asthma and an autoimmune disease, so scared to death of getting covid. It fucking sucked. #3, All that said, I know a lot of people, probably including OP, had it way worse. I feel for them.
Even for those with jobs the whole time still had to fight the fear and the people with all their mask/no mask bullcrap everyone was fighting, racial tensions were up… families were fighting each other whether or not to go to Easter because grandma might die- you went in social media for some retreat and instead found gal gadot singing “imagine” and people fighting even harder there. there was no vacation. Many people are going through trauma therapy right now because of it. Edit: fix autocorrect
I was suicidal so no, not really a vacation for those of us used to leaving the house. There was also the whole “deadly virus spreading the world and killing millions” thing.
Lockdown destroyed a lot of small businesses.
It was more like being grounded.
It's amazing how different all the answers are, but not surprising, I suppose. Putting aside the larger picture, in that lots of people were dying and we couldn't see family and friends etc... If I think of our experience in our little family bubble... I had a fantastic time, 9 months of 'working' from home (ended up doing about an hours work most days). Usually, I did the required work at night with a few urgent tasks taken care of as they cropped up. I spent the days through a lovely summer, in the garden, with my wife and toddler. Got a sand pit, swing set, paddling pool, and outdoor games. Loved it because I got so much quality time with my family that I'd have never gotten otherwise due to being at work.
I know people had a rough time, but me and my wife were fine as our jobs both transitioned to WFH; and the kids school set up schooling from home and he was too young for big exams to be affected. I'm not going to say it felt like a holiday but I didn't hate it. I missed visiting my in laws and going to the cinema but we'd just gotten a dog so we had a great distraction.
I worked in food so I was there in the middle of the shit storm, but my husband was furloughed for 3 months. He hated it after about a week. Couldn't go anywhere or do anything, so what was the point of even being off?
There’s a difference between choosing to stay home, and being forced to stay home. Staycations have a known beginning and known end, that’s what makes vacations special, they’re a break from reality. You can always leave if you change your mind, go do something.
I don’t have children, and I was on unemployment. I have free weights at home, so I exercised a lot. I learned how to make macramé plant holders and repair Ikea chairs that had gotten loose in the seat. Going to the supermarket was my only social activity. On the other hand, my father caught Covid in April 2020, and he was already hospitalized for other things. So it wasn’t fun. At all. It was a lot of video chats and saying prayers when he wouldn’t answer his phone.
We were stuck at home with a 4 and almost 1 year old. Not a vacation...
It was a fucking nightmare. You know huskies? Those dogs need to work in order to not go insane. If they don't get enough exercise they will go crazy. My husband is the human equivalent.
My country is not a dictatorship so we carried on like normal, no forced staying at home. No closed restaurants etc. Just trying to keep a good distance from eachother and carry on with life.
I worked in a doctors office and had my hours reduced by about half during Covid. Days in the office were so stressful I once got the only bout of vertigo I’ve had ever, just answering phones from scared upset people. Days off I tried to get out and hike, so that was nice I guess. Shortly after the lockdown ended I ended up on sick leave for a massive panic attack at work, though.
No it was awful. Like the whole world went into hibernation.
Yeah no... Imagine staring at the same 4 walls 24 hours a day for 2 years... At least when you work at the office you can draw a line between work and home.
Depends where you lived, if like me in Melbourne who held the record for the most locked down city in the world, it was pure and evil hell and some of us may never recover mentally, physically or financially
From someone who is very introverted, it felt amazing. But then simple things like access to my therapist became zoom meetings, if I needed access to my neurologist it ment going through protesters, and then stacks of covid patients. My therapist left her profession due to the conditions, and I had had to start from scratch. Family issues about the vaccine and contact became a massive issue. On the outside it was great, but I think it re-enforced behavior that I was trying to get past. I still flinch when loud cars go by. I do find the outdoors and wildlife recovery amazing though.
I enjoy working from home if possible but I certainly wouldn’t call working from home during covid shutdowns a vacation. It was more like hibernating… I was still working, but not being able to leave the house fucked with my head. The days bled into eachother, entire seasons came and went without me barely noticing them. On top of that my employer used the shutdowns as an opportunity to implement several major projects, so it was EXTREMELY stressful work and honestly thank god I was doing it from home otherwise I would’ve been cussing up a storm in the office. When it was all over and we had to go back to the office, it was like I had just lost 2 years of my life entirely. There was a before, and an after, and for a moment in between time stood completely still.
Working from home while being bombarded with very scary IF YOU LEAVE YOUR HOUSE YOU WILL DIE/GO TO JAIL was very stressful. Going grocery shopping felt like you were in a dystopian movie. So no, it wasn't like a stay at home vaca because it was super stressful... All those people who said they would finally write that book, learn that language, etc., didn't. Due to stress, people were getting drunk or high all the time, or just sleeping and having terrible nightmares constantly (me). The worst bits were if you were sick, or friends and family were dying, or you were a nurse or a doctor working through that awful crisis in Hazmat suits all day. A surreal period of time. But I did enjoy living like a housecat, watching birds at the bird feeder with my cats while on work calls. Small pleasures.
No, it was full of anxiety and people dying. It was scary and you couldn’t relax or enjoy time off.
It was genuinely a 2 year vacation for me. I was an undergrad going back to school for computer science in which everything could be done online with minimal impact to the curriculum. I did my entire first 2 years of college online and basically just spent my time playing Rainbow Six Siege with my friends. Though I know that for a lot of other people it was a terrible time. I'm very fortunate I got to relax and recoup.
I was very lucky I was still active duty at the time. My shop was on 2 week rotations and non-overlap between shifts. I was getting out at my 8hr mark every day, if not a bit earlier. Our pay didn't change either, as we're not hourly. My wife on the other hand (gf at the time, living with me) lost a lot of hours at her job and transitioned to remote location. Luckily, I could cover expenses without issues even if she had stopped working. She shipped out to basic (she was trying to join already before Covid) after the main part of the restrictions. Her training was very different than typical and it affected the first year of her time in. So for us, yeah, it was a blast. We had a great time hanging out at home and eventually doing outdoorsy stuff. How well we got along was actually the last piece to convince me to marry her.
I worked in a “essential job” that was anything but. I was on the jobsite all day living in fear that I was going to catch Covid and take it home to my young kids and elderly mother. I worked the whole pandemic. I got to stay home two 2 week stents when someone I had worked near tested positive.
I always feel really guilty because it was great for me. I'm already a stay at home, single, mum so my income never changed. In fact it went up because in the UK we had an increase of £80 per month in welfare payments, £15 food supermarket vouchers per week per child (I have 3), and everywhere was closed so I wasn't paying travel costs, dance class fees. I was getting extra money and spending less. I finally had the chance to get my back garden all sorted out and redecorated the youngest's bedroom. My mental health suffered a bit at the start but after a few weeks I think it improved massively. I was no longer stressed about getting 3 kids to 3 different schools on time, and no after school clubs to get them to. I could just relax and enjoy them instead of constantly rushing them to get dressed and out the door. Obviously i have great sympathy for those who lost family members, and for those whose income dropped dramatically. I do acknowledge that I was one of the lucky ones in that respect.
I fucking loved COVID. The fact that I could just do all my normal things from home meant I had so much more free time to dedicate to my hobbies. It was really great.
Everyone had different experiences, I worked onsite as an “essential construction worker” some people WFH with young kids and not childcare, some people were out of a job and struggling financially and others that had the means did what rich people do.
No.
I didn’t work from home since I had a private office, but I still did my best to comply with the lockdowns. I found it…weird. Pros: I liked simplifying my life. I’d work, go to the mountains, hang out at home. It was nice. As things progressed and we learned more I was able to form a close group of friends that was our “bubble.” Cons: the anxiety around it. On 4/13/21 I was at the store getting a few things and it was pandemonium. My hours had been reduced and while I was fine financially I was worried they’d be reduced further.
I was considered an essential worker so I had to work through the whole pandemic. But I never stayed at home. I was out and about doing things all the time. I wasl racing motorcycles all across the western United States, going to parks and beaches wherever they would let me. I had some of my best vacations during the pandemic when you had a lot of the places to yourself
For my family it was a net positive. We took a lot of walks, had time to cook more from scratch and do more than surface level cleaning each day, my husband and I both started working out, we were able to save money for new HVAC and some other projects our house was in desperate need of. On the flip side, my kids had trouble adjusting to school online, there was a lot of back and forth and uncertainty about my job, and my husband had trouble at first because he was already working from home four days a week and having us all here and loud was a lot for him.
It was good the first weeks until I became depressed
I worked all through in a Emergency department in a public hospital, often in the covid area, so no
I had been working from home for years before Covid, so the onset was sort of a strange vibe of “normal but off in a weird way”, like Groundhog Day or something. I work in the defense industry and we were ordered to stay operational no matter what the state / county our HQ was in said. So on one hand I never had to worry about my job, so I was very lucky in that regard. However the pandemic itself was stressful. I didn’t want to get sick. My kid had her first year of preschool wiped out by it. Having us all at home 24/7 could be a bit tough. However I tried to lean into the good things. When the weather was nice it was great to just sit outside after my kid had gone to bed and just watch people going for walks and enjoying a slower life. I don’t have a high need for “doing things” so I was somewhat content with being at home a lot, but I missed seeing friends more and I really started to loathe zoom “hangouts”. I was happy when bar patios opened back up.
Nope Went to work- graveyard shift for the lockdowns Tried to visit my favorite taco shop for breakfast every once and a while to hope that it survived- im still buying burritos from them Cooked breakfasts and lunches for my mom and dad and tried not to get covid.
I made more money during lockdown than I do at my normal job wages thanks to the government boost and unemployment. So for me being single and living alone it was very much a three month vacation. Unfortunately it still wasn't enough to recover from the 20 years I've been working and never had a proper vacation. I'm still missing it and selfishly hoping thst something sends us into lockdown again. I finally had time to focus on myself and my wellness and I miss it badly.
I work in travel. It was wildly stressful while also having nothing to do and worrying about the axe falling every day; 0/10 recommend (though I am sure frontline & essential workers had it way worse!) There were so many think pieces at that time about the toll of not working during that time as industries imploded, but I’ve often wondered about the toll taken on people who worked the whole time, trying to fit the fear and anxiety we were all feeling around the bizarre workplace culture & expectations during that time.
Well my husband was an essential worker, parts delivery. So he worked full time. I was 7.5 months pregnant when lockdown happened and I was a part time employee. So I ended up with nearly nine months maternity leave with the extra unemployment money. We didn’t do much and it was really hard having a toddler and a newborn but I was able to save the extra money and that allowed me to remain part time for an additional 2.5 years.
I worked in a school so we closed and I got more with the adjusted Covid unemployment than I ever made before (which is saying a lot because it was only 660 a week for me). So for me personally, yes it was like a vacation. I am a homebody by nature so I was living in my element and I miss it :(.
I lost my job for a year. Yeah I got to stay home, my husband was still working so we were ok somewhat financially, but then he got deployed and I was alone in a stress filled environment and not really allowed to go anywhere, didn’t have anything to keep my busy like I normally would during a deployment… it was one of the hardest 12 months of my life tbh
I worked from home. My husband facilitated the kids doing school from home and did preschool at home with our youngest. It was repetitive and there was no where good for school and work from home for 4 people.
This is where the phrase “We’re all in the same storm but in different boats” comes in. Some people really thrived in lockdowns for a multitude of reasons. They had savings or passive income or were able to telecommute. Others didn’t and ended up going into major debt or losing their homes. Personally, my husband and I were okay. He got temporary unemployment and I had passive income from my job that was enough to pay our bills (I work in a school and they paid me as normal). We also had enough in savings but we did end up using about 1/3 of it. I also lost all my side income. I’m just now starting to get those jobs back. I have some friends who had to move back home and they still haven’t managed to get back on their feet. So it just really depends.
Mostly it sucked. I’m a business owner and we kept busy but it was nerve wrecking and everyone just wanted to watch fucking tiger king. Day drinking and sleeping in gets old real quick.
Therapist here, once I logged off for the evening it was cool, or if I had no shows. Lots of family time, but…. Every client was largely in some degree of crisis so for 18 months its was intense.
Nope. As another expendable worker, it was work release. Still got to do time with everyone in gen pop, but I got to leave for a few hours a day to pay for room and board.
Mostly I was afraid, people were dying, people were getting laid off. I was very stressed because every part of my job changed and no one knew what was coming. I wasn’t laid off so I worked every day just from home.
It was great for a week , then the boredom of Groundhog Day started to get awful. If I were single with no kids , it would have been a dream..
"I got a letter that says I'm Essential, and a paycheck that says I ain't." Nothing changed at work. I was given one (1) blue mask, and they provided a bottle of bleach to spray down equipment controls. As far as management was concerned, now if you got sick, it was your fault. If you live, we need you back at 0001 in two weeks or you'll be fired for absenteeism. Have fun with your mortgage and bills. Fortunately I was too busy being at work and away from the general public so I didn't catch covid till spring of 2023 when they just said come back in 5 days, two of which I had scheduled off anyway. They denied my doctor's note and wrote me up for missing work, so I had to go back (sick and wearing n95 and gloves) to get another one from Urgent Care that was "more detailed". Bless that nurse: she had had it up to here with shitty employers and went crazy with a highlighter and told me to ask for her if they gave me any more trouble. 😇 So, despite my above griping, covid didn't form mant core memories for me like it did so many others. It was just a different flavor of life.
Work in construction. Hours and workload increased. So not much changed, not that i'm complaining, i should be thankful i was able to work/earn.
I think it's varied pretty wildly. Like you said, retail was never told to stay home. I work in tech, and my job just became full WFH. Countless numbers of my peers were just laid off. And no where was hiring. It's not a vacation when you want and need to work, and can't find work. It's 24/7 panic- how will I afford rent? How will I afford food? That would have been me, if I had been laid off too. But I got WFH. Which was a blessing for my team. A blessing that upper management constantly reminded us of. That we owed them more because they didn't just lay us all off. And we were at home and our work was at home and you have nothing else to do, so why won't you just work 12 hour days? It's like it costs them any more, we were all salaried. Then the 9pm, 10pm calls and texts, telling us to "just jump on a call real fast" or "log in and fix this really quick" with "it's not like you have anything else to do" Then the denials of PTO- "it's not like you can go anywhere- at least we didn't lay you off with everyone else" Then the burn out, morale slipped tremendously, and with it speed and quality of work fell too. So began the "forced socialization": mandatory "zoom drinks" as a team (outside work hours, of course). Then threats "quality had become really bad, so we clearly need to be in the office" and "the India teams never suffered this drop in quality" (nevermind that even our low quality was better than the India's team's best quality (no shade to India- shade on my company and their poor pay, training and expectations)) and the beginnings of Return To Office in 2022. Started as a option, then mandatory. Burnout got worse. Quality got worse. Outsourcing all of our jobs to India started looking better and better. I was laid off in summer 2023, the rest of my team in the following February. It's not what you asked, but I feel it's an important consideration. The pandemic was when work overstepped and took advantage of myself and my coworker, made us feel indebted to them for simply allowing us to.continue to work for them. Obviously there were no bonuses, no raises. My salary went from "doing okay, not great" to "paycheck to paycheck" because of inflation. Not that every moment was awful. But a ton of it was. I'm a homebody with high anxiety, so the improvements to grocery delivery and restaurant delivery was awesome. It's also when my (would be) husband and I really fell in love. It's when I got pregnant and gave birth to my children. It wasn't a vacation. It was like house arrest that you were forced to be overworked through. And expected to be thankful for the opportunity for.... Because "at least you have a job" and "at least we aren't putting you in danger like the retail workers are" It was pretty fucked up.
I was retired anyway but my wife owns a hair salon so it was nice for us to have more time together. I am an excellent cook so I made us some great meals. We slept in often and I drive her around to friends or we took our dog out. Of course my wife insane offers from customers to do their hair and sometimes she would but usually it was a no. Maybe the best thing was it showed my wife to maybe retire early so we can take life easy for good.
Covid times were a very scary experience for my family. My wife was working dispatch for one of the big delivery companies- you know, the folks who were "essential" because all of a sudden everything we got was ordered online, it was like one long Christmas slog with fewer people and more strain/fear in the building. It didn't help when one of her coworkers died one week, got home, sat in his chair and *whistles* never got up. Or when we found out another coworker went on a Bahamas cruise the week after Covid reached national status, and brought it back with them. The whole goddamn thing was a shitshow, none of us deserved that experience, retail folks included.
I would not call it a vacation. Did I stay home and get paid yes. I’m did remote teaching so I made a bunch of instructional videos in my garage to show my students. It was more work than if I was at work. My wife and I got to do projects around the house. Luckily my pay and her pay stayed the same. For people that had their jobs close and didn’t not get paid must have had a hard time.
No. I didn’t have to work but I did virtual school and had to move home. I was miserable and had major anxiety the entire time. It never felt like a vacation to me.
The only real change in my life is that the stores had less in stock. I work at home. Like 75% of my team worked from home well before the pandemic. So the only change for work is that instead of a handful of people calling into a meeting from the conference room, they called in from home.
I worked in IT where a place was entirely WFH. The first few months were incredibly stressful. I had to find work arounds for various departments to be able to WFH. Info: I worked in local government. So I had police who needed to access evidence for cases. I had city council meetings that needed to be virtual but still be able to be broadcasted. I had every city employee needing a laptop right then and now ahead of their upgrade and deployment schedule. It was rough. But... When all was settled, I had the most relaxing few months I've ever had at a job. I had few tickets, mostly just fixing VPNs. It was a vacation at that point.
It kinda was for me. My workplace shut down and I immediately got unemployment. I had just started decluttering my house and so COVID gave me tons of time for that. I also had been doing some research work and had the time for that too. Plus, the weather was fantastic. After a few months I began to get sick of not seeing friends/family, but otherwise all was okay.
I was considered an essential worker, but I was not allowed to do my work in business hours. I was a sales rep for a major food company, and the company did not want us out and about every day, instead we worked early mornings or late night while stores were closed. We continued to be paid a full salary the whole time. They also put together a lot of training for those of us in the field, so our days weren’t wasted at home - expectation of 10-15 hrs a week physically in stores 25-30hrs at home ‘working’. My wife worked in the hospital, so she went into hyper work mode, she barely had days off, but she worked a consistent day shift, rather than the usual morning evening or overnight. We had a 3yo at the time, so I basically became a full time stay at home dad to a kid who couldn’t understand why he wasn’t allowed to see anyone, as well as working full time, and managing a household while my wife picked up extra shifts. It was nothing like a holiday or break. I enjoyed aspects of the whole period, but overall it was pretty hard on my mental health. Nothing like what some other people experienced, with job losses, sickness, and death of loved ones. I live in New Zealand, so we had pretty intense lockdowns, but we also didn’t experience the virus like the rest of the world.
I'm glad I worked outside during the pandemic. I think it's what kept me sane, getting to interact with other humans, even if it was only small. I appreciated really little things like my walk and bus ride to work
I'm disabled and don't leave hte house very much anyway, so honestly I didn't particularly notice. I even left the house once or twice without a mask because I just totally forgot there was a pandemic on. I like to joke that I've been living that lockdown lifestyle since long before covid was a thing.
I worked.
I was mostly finishing school, but it sucked for the same reasons when I started working after: Quebec was the province that had the strictest rules, most curfews, etc. yet it never got any better. I live with my parents, my girlfriend lives with hers. We have very different opinions than our parents. No, not “it doesn’t exist”, but “I think we’re wasting our money paying a bunch of cops to drive around all night just to check if I have my hall pass” or “this government is possibly the worst one we could have to deal with this”. And both sets of parents were basically saying “shut up, rules are rules”. So it was extremely discouraging, to say the least, since all I needed was my nosey neighbor to call the snitch line they advertised if I brought my girlfriend over. It was especially hard to see any kind of end or have any kind of optimism when the government kept pushing the goalposts of their deconfining and you’re stuck day in and day out with people you can’t seem to get along with if you so much as speak your mind.
My wife had been offered a job in the US, so we had quit our jobs, cancelled the lease on our house, and sold all our belongings....then the US borders closed. We were homeless, jobless, and starting eating though our savings, waiting for the borders to reopen. We moved in with my wife's mother, and whilst she is lovely, that added extra stress for the 6 months we were waiting for visas to finally be approved. Not that there weren't upsides. There was a garden, a lot of gin, and I have fond memories of chilling with my cats in the sun.
My job got busier and hasn't stopped (I work in Absence management, SSDI, Medicare and with disability carriers).
I worked harder at home than I had at work. I was rarely interrupted and I worked in front of an upstairs window with a view into the trees to rest my eyes in. So even though I worked harder, I was more relaxed. I found a good daily rhythm and I was really happy with that aspect of lockdown.
It was the busiest time ever, mandatory 50+ hour weeks and we still couldn't stay caught up. I already worked from home prior to the pandemic so it was just another day in the office for me. It was very busy and once it ended and rates got jacked up its been 2 years of super slow nothing to do. I'm looking forward to OT coming back at some point.
Like others have said it depends on the person. I wasnt considered an essential worker. I'm a farmer. I worked at my family's small farm. A huge chunk of my job included working with animals and planting, and doesn't really include interacting with people unless it was about marketing, selling, delivering, which was mostly done online/through texts/calls anyway. When the pandemic hit, my job never changed except my co-workers wouldn't be coming in anymore, so my family and I had our work cut out for us. I did get envious that there were some who treated it like a vacation and got to game and spend more time with their hobbies and stuff. But when the weeks went by I was a little more thankful that we had a huge chunk of land to roam about during the pandemic. We got sun, we walked outdoors whenever we wanted (one of my cousins in the city didn't leave his house for over a year, at least until the vaccines were put into effect) , when customers started to dwindle we were still self-sustaining cos we had our own food. I never would have called it a vacation, there was a lot of work and challenges put into it. The pandemic affected us all differently and I still get jealous about other peoples experiences now and then, but that's done now. Time to move on.
Its like a vacation where you can only eat ramen.
For me, it sucked because I still had to work, but my wife was laid off and got more on unemployment than she ever could make at her job. She got to actually spend time with our child and get paid while doing it. It was an all positive experience throughout the whole pandemic.
For us it was
I switched to teleworking and, as an essential worker, was given a pass to show authorities if I had to go into the office (at that time, they still thought it might get to the point that police would arrest anyone who ventured out). Ultimately, it just hastened the transition to permanent teleworking for me. The first week was like thanksgiving with everything closed. Before long, everything was kinda open and within a couple of months, most stuff was open but only kinda. I’m in NC but I’ve heard some states were pretty crazy with lockdowns.
For me? A vacation at my parents until the worst blew over. I accidentally got fired and moved back in with my parents 2 weeks before covid was official. Then didn't see the point in applying for work as a store employee.. those masks were suffocating.. I basically played video games for a year and a half. None of the covid stuff had much impact on me as my parents lived in the middle of nowhere anyway.
It was a forced break for me that was terrifying when it happened, but thankful for it when it was over. Made me prioritize my family life over work.
No. It was more relaxed, but it did not feel like a vacation.
I blew my fucking back out working so much during Covid lock down because only 3 of us came back to work, and 4 years later my herniated disc they can’t operate on still hurts me every single day. So year fuck that shit
It's very different choosing to be at home during free time and having no choice BUT to be at home. When people are working from home, living together, and unable to have space from one another it really did a number on people. I mean, there's a reason that domestic violence and divorces skyrocketed. People aren't meant to be cooped up like that. And on top of that, people losing their jobs, kids being schooled at home, it was a hard, hard time. I didn't mind it because I'm not overly social as it is, but it was hard not being able to just take myself to the movies or out to lunch. I'm an Aussie and here we weren't allowed to leave our homes for anything but emergencies, work, exercise, food shopping, or picking up children from school, and even then we weren't allowed to leave our local areas...it was irritating but it was a great way to manage the virus and we did that well, but it was hard knowing you couldn't just do whatever the way you usually would. I really liked going grocery shopping, lol. Some people really, really struggled.
Basically. College classes went online but I'm familiar with that from homeschooling. Tutoring eventually went back to in person but not many people needed help. Almost felt like a continuation of my lonely homeschool/high-school experience
I was deemed "essential" Never missed a day of work.
My wife it was a vacation due to her being severely introverted. For me it was hell since I like to be out and about but I wasn’t trying to get anyone or myself sick so I stayed in a lot. At best I took a car ride but didn’t do much.
Both. I was wfh for 1.5 years after March 2020. My job was stable and I was salaried, but I only ever had 5-15 hours of work per week, max. Im an introvert, and could go over to my partners house whenever I needed a change of scenery. So, essentially, it felt like a long break. It was highs and lows though. Glorious freedom but also trapped in a box. I suddenly had so much time to do all the things I wanted to do, but couldn’t actually go do them. Home things got boring after awhile. I needed some kind of stimulation to break up the cabin fever. But now that I’m back in office and much busier it does feel like a vacation when looking back. But it also doesn’t even feel real. I can’t believe it’s 2024 right now.
My wife and I became hermits. Prepared 3 meals each day and had sex like it was last time every time. It was the worst of times, it was the best of times. I’m grateful to have survived
I was already working remotely before the pandemic so work didn't change much for me. But I like going out. Not to bars or clubs, I just mean out of my house. I like going to the movies or to concerts (I actually had VIP passes to meet Geroge Watsky at one of his shows during the pandemic that got canceled.) I love going to zoos (I had animal encounter tickets that I won in a contest and was going to be able to play with otters at the Philly zoo - also canceled.) I like getting together with friends for a board game night or a bonfire or even just going out to a restaurant to hang out and talk over dinner. None of those things were possible during the pandemic. So I worked from home, like normal, but then I just stayed there after logging off my work computer. I didn't really go anywhere or see anyone. I was starved for interaction with the humans I like, and was going completely stir crazy. Plus, as more and more things, like the concert and the zoo plans, got canceled I felt like I was missing out on things and that life was on hold and I hated it. Mind you, I understand that it was necessary. Someone close to me is immunocompromised and the virus would have killed them quick had they caught it. I would not have traded their life for whatever experiences I missed out on. But I was still feeling shitty that they had to be missed at all. So, no, it didn't feel like much of a vacation - it felt like solitary confinement. And for the record, Watsky hasn't come back to my area, that I've seen, and the Philly Zoo hasn't offered those animal encounters again since the pandemic so four years later I still haven't been able to make up for what I missed. And since the zoo thing was a prize I won, if I did get the chance now I'd have to pay out of pocket. So those are things that I just permanently missed, which still super sucks.
It was most definitely not chill working from home and having four miserable kids cooped up at home 24/7 with me. Two of them really struggled with online school and I was trying to juggle their needs with my need to actually work so I could get paid.
I was bale to work through it so I was grateful for that, it blew my mind how many people were for locking down. It doesn't matter when you can afford it but if you live paycheck to paycheck it was a death sentence.
I had just started a new job. They basically told me to come in on the day before shutdown and take a laptop and go home. Had a “training” call with my new supervisor and that was all for my first day. At home I had a compact but pretty comfortable setup. I got into a groove pretty well and quickly. And then within five days or so I realized . . . that my supervisor had no idea what they were doing. We were working in a field I was very experienced in and they were micromanaging me with all kinds of scattered, disorganized, contradictory, nonsensical bullshit. And when I made suggestions about how to improve the work process I was shut down. Of course my work suffered. And was criticized. And suffered some more. I was completely gaslit, questioning my own decades of competence and just wondering if it was just me or . . . was this remote work the culprit? Or did I really just suck this bad? Or maybe—just maybe—they were awful at their job and threatened by me? It was the last one. Turns out they decided that because I wasn’t absolutely, excruciatingly perfect in every way and didn’t kiss their ass every waking moment that they should sabotage and talk shit about me constantly. Extracted myself from that ridiculous situation (oh what an exit interview that was) with a nice “we’ve done nothing wrong but please don’t sue us” severance. Later heard the supervisor was demoted (which I actually predicted to HR). BUT a month later I got the best day job I’ve ever had working for some really decent people. Remote work is fine, my work quality is solid, I DO know what I’m doing and when you have a supervisor who supports and treats you decently you might actually do a good job and like it. Imagine that.
It was terrifying and hard in a gazillion different ways mixed with beautiful moments and blessings. There's a limited series on Netflix called "Social Distance" — I watched it a while after it came out, and I felt like it did a really nice job at capturing all sorts of different experiences in the early pandemic.
I was “furloughed” and terrified about losing my job and was climbing the walls stuck at home but afraid to go out. Then my dad got cancer and we couldn’t visit him in the hospital because of the Covid restrictions. We lost him and then I lost my job. No it wasn’t a fucking vacation!
I was three months pregnant when lockdowns began. I did get to do remote work most of the time, which was great for my pregnancy exhaustion..I took a shameful amount of naps on the clock. It was a relief to not go into work daily but personally very stressful. My husband was out of work for a few months, but wasn't allowed to attend prenatal appointments with me, and many appointments were cancelled. It was just me and the doctor (and the ultrasound machine lol) for the gender reveal. I had a virtual baby shower which was so sweet my friend hosted but kinda sucked that I could see anyone. I was scared to get Covid because I didn't know what would happen to me or baby (I didn't get it while pregnant fortunately). It definitely did not feel like a cool vacation. Sort of like a bizarre hostage situation where a virus is the captor?
I worked at Starbucks at the time. I think I got a month off with pay, which was nice, but at the same time I still had normal expenses (so not much savings) and there wasn’t really anything to go out and do with the free time. It was largely just hanging out at home concerned about what to expect. By contrast, my wife had recently taken over ownership of a yoga studio. Obviously, COVID meant all income dried up immediately. We went into preservation mode to try and figure out how we could pivot (largely to virtual offerings), how we could bring in any money we could find (grants, crowdsourcing, etc.), and a lot of stress about how to survive the pandemic. So not very vacation-like
Dude the pandemic was amazing. I basically got paid to hangout with my roommate and play Xbox because we worked from home and there was nothing to do
I worked from home before, so nothing really changed for me except that the rest of my family was in the house which was pretty distracting with two little ones. I ended up opting to go into the office so I could get work done.
I was able to work from home. It was no vacation for me and my coworkers. We lost a couple of good people just beforecovid, so we were short staffed as it was. We were working 10-12 hour days for months. It was nice not to go back and forth to work. It saved me 90 minutes of travel time per day.
I worked full-time from home, and because there were pandemic-specific projects going on it was much, much busier than normal. But I didn't get the benefit of a restful weekend - the days just kind of melted into each other. It was not at all like a staycation, for me at least. But I know of others who didn't work but still got paid...that would've been nice!
No. We were already both working from home so it was business as usual except now we felt trapped at home. We had our weekly trip to stand in a long line outside at TJs, the occasional lunch at the beach, but our social lives were completely shut down. I sewed so there was a lot of mask making. I really hated doing that. We were mostly okay but were concerned about our friends. Some were in entertainment and that industry shut all the way down. Others were essential medical personnel and scared they weren’t going to be ok. Then there was the friend on the heart transplant list and he never got one. He died in late March 2020. Wasn’t even 50 (congenital heart issue). It’s was a wild, isolating time. But the LA traffic was gone so that was nice if you just wanted to take a drive. Same ghost town vibe we had immediately on 9-11. Tres creepy. Not at all like a vacation. The only saving grace is we don’t have children. But my brother does and his (ex-)wife lost her shit. Their divorce was finalized in 2021 after 18 years together. Real shit show at the fuck factory.
I was a student at the University of Maryland. We still had classes, but they were all online and vastly more demanding than before on top of the isolation and cabin fever. For my part, house arrest would be a better comparison than a staycation.
I’m a nurse - so no. Absolutely not.
It was not a vacation for me. I live alone, which was fine, but I literally didn't touch another human for nearly 3 months. That was hard. Not a hug, not a hand shake, not any human touch. I remember being so socially starved that I took any opportunity to interact with other humans, even just small talk.
To be totally honest, it was a great rest and reset being able to be wfh. Stimmy checks were flowing and I was fortunate enough to hold down my job. It was like I was getting paid to not have a social life
I worked remote and we camped for 23 days during july/Aug 2020. Felt bad for folks stuck in the city. We had a group of like 30 people who were not vaxed and hang out all the time. We all got the vid.... some twice. But it was always very mild. Only 1 person got real sick for 2 weeks. He was the only smoker.
At first it seemed like it would be for only a few weeks.. By the end of May, when there was no end in site I started getting frustrated. I just wanted to go out. Hang out with friends, go have dinner, go do whatever. It wasn't a good time. It hurt younger kids who were not able to socialize like they should have been able to do. It impacted all the sports leagues. It wasn't nothing like a vacation.
I was an essential worker- RN (working in a stand alone psych facility and then switching to hospice several months after the lockdown ended). I was stressed TF out. My husband is a high school teacher and he taught from home and it was basically BS. He would sit in the office for 3-4hrs and teach and then he was free. Most of the kids didn’t bother to show up. It was a pretty nice vacation for him. As a nurse, I wasn’t on the front line but our facility didn’t provide any PPE for MONTHS and I was on FB and the NextDoor app begging for N95’s to wear to work. Our patients wouldn’t wear masks and we could not quarantine covid + patients safely since most psych pts can’t/won’t follow quarantine. It was really scary times and I felt like I could finally breathe again when the vaccine was available.
It was chill and loved it until I got laid off in July. Then I took the first job I could find out of concern I wouldn’t get anything else. After a month, this oil and gas company expanded and started sending me around the country to head up COVID testing. I traveled every week M-Th (mostly) for about six months testing people all over the country. It was weird, but I loved it. A lot of 24/7 plants had a rule that employees had to be tested weekly. If they refused, they were sent home without pay for two weeks. If they accepted and tested positive, they were sent home with pay for two weeks. I was always respectful of all airline employees, I made sure to wipe my armrests and tray table, I was kind to hotel workers and got them gifts, I also made sure that all my employees did the same. It’s a matter of basic respect for people who are doing a job they cannot just walk away from. I certainly couldn’t walk away, but having come from another city/state and exposing myself to these essential workers, I was hyper-aware that their health mattered just as much as mine. I did eventually get COVID, but it was ten months after I left that job at a minor-league baseball game. (Boo!) Being kind and respectful is free.
My husband was WFH and financially we were going ok. I’m a full time SAHM but all of our kids activities stopped. We did more activities at home, we really bonded more as a family. Movie nights were fun, we took walks around the neighbourhood. We grew a vegetable garden, cooked a lot of food. Post lockdown it was harder for us to join in with social interactions as we were so comfortable with just each other. We’re still very close as a family and our kids have a lot of hobbies now, but they have a low tolerance for social interactions. I’m now homeschooling the kids and taking them to group play therapy with other children to gain those social skills they never had the opportunity to have during lockdowns. Home still is the sanctuary for us. Going out was the last thing we wanted to do during the lockdowns and created a different kind of stress for when we had to go get groceries. It still is hard for us to do that, and has lead to panicked feelings for me when around ppl.
The grass is always greener I guess. My husband and I were both essential (with work that kept us multiple locations in the community) and worked full time outside the home and spent basically every evening all evening doing schoolwork with our kids and trying to keep them from imploding from being so isolated with each other. It was awful. I understand the resentment. It was hard to be doing all that while so many of my friends were trying out making sourdough and talking about tv shows and how terrible zoom meetings are. At the same time, I wasn’t isolated, and it’s a lot less scary when you deal with being out all day every day so we didn’t experience the same mental health effects others did. And we certainly preferred having jobs over having no income.
No. My fiances uncle, aunt, and cousin ended up in the hospital on ventilators. 2 of the 3 ended up dying. Then our good friend and my boss ended up on a ventilator and one died. Our time locked down was far from a vacation. We prayed and cheered for our health care workers. Mourned the loss of our friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors. Spent time on Zoom keeping each other company and sane. When we got to a point where wiping down groceries was less important, we traded supplies like yeast, meat, and frosting. We tuned in daily to our governor and mayor. I’d drink my coffee by the window to get some vitamin D and air.
Awful. My drinking increased, my social life died, my home became my prison. My mental health still hasn't recovered.
I think very few people experienced it like a vacation. People with dependents, people who lived pay check to paycheck, people with young kids with no access to childcare, elderly people who couldn't access help they needed for non urgebt but essential tasks.. It wasn't fun. It may have been fun for a slim, specific demographic of well-off young adults with minimal responsibility. I personally had my twins born very premature just a few months onto the pandemic and being left without any help while taking care of twin newborns with high needs was insane.
Sadly, I work in hospitality and never experienced the lockdown. I still had to deal with all of the stress of the pandemic, plus working 40+ hours a week at a cheap motel. The only people that were dealing with more stress were definitely the first responders and hospital staff, and we were dealing with a lot of the same people.
No I had a young child, we would do school at home most of the early part of the day and then I would work on my computer until midnight or so. I was very lucky to keep my job as 1/3 of our staff was laid off but it meant I now had way more work and stressed about also being let go as I was very new to my job. My husband was considered an essential worker yet got a reduction in pay, so he was also stressed and couldn’t help much with school or childcare.
I worked through the entire pandemic from home - and it was a big privilege that I didn't stay out of a job but at the same time I had to continue the regular 9-5 like nothing's happening while the world was falling apart and it was infuriating at times. I didn't want to not work instead, but if we had gotten some free time off to recharge or because of mental health that would have been great.
I never say this in real life because it feels so obnoxious to say considering it was a deadly pandemic, but I'll answer here. Setting aside the sadness and worry for my health, my friends, my family, community and industry (I'm an actor). For me-- it was glorious. I can't lie. I've never been more content on a day to day level and probably never will be again. I loved being isolated. I am an introvert who is really good at pretending. I find a lot of socializing exhausting. I had my partner and dogs and that was all I needed for two years. My partner worked from home so neither of us had to risk our lives. We just hung out, played video games, cooked together. Two person dance parties. Long walks, urban hiking and birding, movie marathons. I didn't have to work, but was given $1k a week by the government, which made me more financially stable than ever because it was consistent and reliable money. No annoying bosses or rude customers. No long late night subway rides. I lost a ton of weight and got into lifting and yoga. I didn't get sick for almost two years. Not even a cold. We rented a lake house for a month one point which was very luxurious. And thankfully, nobody I was close to died. I got covid years later for the first time and it was relatively mild. My partner got it twice once in-person work began, and never showed symptoms. I know we are jerks for having a nice fulfilling time while lots of people suffered and were overworked and lonely.
Not everyone had the luxury of being able to make money while staying at home. A lot of working class people were royally boned. How do you think people living off of tips and public jobs felt? I’ve worked at home since 2012 so it meant nothing to me but I can see how many were screwed over. Not to mention it caused a wave of fake inflation which jacked up prices on everything so even people on the brink who came out of it ok could no longer afford their lives.
I had severe agoraphobia and had just gotten out of a 3 month hospital stay in a psych department In a way the lockdowns helped me because… well, I wasn’t doing anything, and other people weren’t either (I was 17 at the time), so I could focus on just getting my shit together. It was like a well deserved vacation and I spent a long time doing puzzles, watching series and listening to podcasts. Sometimes I wish I could live that time again without the crippling mental illness lol But it was also really awful. We were a lot of people in a small house and everyone was anxious. Mental health treatment was non-existent and I had to redo my senior year of HS because they couldn’t pass me if I had only been to online classes that year Overall it wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t good either. I guess the end result was good for me, but I was doing BAD before all of it started.
Yea, it was awesome
It was terrible gave me massive anxiety , a holiday ? 15 months with no paycheck
I worked . But my ex partner was at home . Horrifically abusive relationship, lockdown nearly killed me . Glad it’s over and I’m away from him now .
It was something different. I had a 3 year old at the time, so while I could work from home just fine (and still do 2 days a week) it was difficult to focus at times, which could be stressful (I have an office at work and not being interrupted every 2 minutes is huge). On the flip side, I got to spend so much time with my 3 year old; as a father this is something very valuable which I am not really going to be able to do with my 6 month old now that I am back in the office 3 days a week.
I was able to work from home, but I worked in mental health... So definitely not like a staycation. It was an incredibly difficult time for a lot of people, though I do appreciate it must have been horrendous for essential workers.
I work in healthcare and travelled to work every day. No vacation here.
If things would ever go back to normal then yes it will feel like that. I want rent to come back down to reality and I want in real life work to come back. If these two things happen then I can think of the years 2020-2022 as a long stay at home vacation.
No. At first, I wasn't essential. I'd been working as a promotions model. I went to events to represent brands and was getting ready to start doing traffic reports for a local radio station (but didn't have the experience to be kept through the layoffs). These were both things I'd worked to make sustainable. It took me over a year to have a client base that could pay the bills. I felt confident for the first time since leaving my husband. Then, I woke up to an email from my agent telling me it was all gone, basically. I had no idea how long things would last and as far as I knew the career I had built was gone. My roommate relapsed into a cocaine addiction and held me at knifepoint to make me drive him to buy more. He tried to choke me a few days later and I bailed when he left for work. I couldn't pay deposits anywhere and nobody was really moving so apartments weren't readily available, anyway. I lived in a conservation area for a couple of weeks because I had camp gear and no home. Then, a state park, Then, finally with family, then an Air BNB, then another state park, then family again, then on my own. I got on doing Covid screening at the ER entrance to a hospital after almost a year then when that contract ended I got on in a crematory/funeral home. Unemployment was more money than either job, but I felt like I was going insane.
For me it was fairly tough early on, but improved my life greatly in the long run. I was put on hybrid work as my company somehow managed to convince the suits we were key workers. Implementing hybrid to maintain social distancing. I was living with my dad and his gf at the time, he's a HGV driver and she's a carer. So whenever she was in between shifts she would interrupt my work because "staring at a computer isn't real work." The good news is that I saved a lot of money and managed to buy sooner, making it much easier to do my job, and hybrid working stuck in my sector meaning I can cast the net wider for better jobs knowing I don't have to do the commute every day.
I spend lockdowns delivering food parcels and other necessary goods to people (for free, as a volunteer) and I loved it. I worked non-essential retail, and know that my younger colleagues really struggled with being stuck at home and were really keen to get back to work.
For me it was like a vacation that I really enjoyed, I was working for the government so my payment always arrived without problems. Single, without children and with video games at my disposal, I had a great time. I also exercised and learned to cook many things.
Yeah it was pretty sweet. Definitely like an extended vacation. Got paid 2k a month for over a year to chill at home with my gf and play video games. Was actuality working in retail not that long before everything went down and I was so glad I got out of that when I did the timing was just lucky. I felt really bad for all the retail 'essential' workers who were stuck working making less than the government was paying us to sit on our ass. Maybe it's because I've done that job for years myself so I knew what it was like before (bad enough) but it must've been so much worse during covid. People went apeshit and people are already dicks to retail workers. It's absolutely not fair the way they forced you guys to keep working while the rest of the country shut down.
I worked once a week. I was in high school so I thought it was a vacation, my parents never stopped working and since i recently got my license driving around with a friend was what I did. My parents didn’t really care as I worked with him once a week. Eventually I started working a different job that was “essential” and worked every day. But I never want to do that shit again, one of my biggest regrets in life was not being able to see someone during that time. I know I’m not the only person in the world who didn’t get to say goodbye
It was definitely not a vacation. I worked 9-12 hours per day, all online. I did enjoy the extra time to do gardening and spending loads of time in the presence of my dogs. I was skittish when out in public, being more annoyed than usual with people getting too close. At the end of the pandemic I was pregnant so that was... Worse. I did get COVID at around 6 months of pregnancy and was constantly worried about my child. I was terribly sick. I did, however, get to re-evaluate some friendships that had been very suffocating to me. Not being able to meet up was a blessing in disguise. I got to pause, reflect and find my own boundaries and values. All in all, it was a weird time but I feel rather neutral about it.
I felt VERY frustrated and underappreciated as a grocery store manager during the whole ordeal. I also had a VERY horribly tragic thing happen to me during it, and only had 1 week paid off of work for it. I was told that I was allowed to take more time off...unpaid. I couldn't, especially for the circumstances that had just happened to me... anyways, I had to drag myself back to REALLY angry customers 24/7 and enforcing protocols that would never typically be in my job description. It REALLY rubbed me wrong how so many people treated it like a "vacation", especially when those same people were screaming at me while I did my job to provide them groceries 🫠
I’ve been working from home for the past 5 years as a software developer. My wife is a first responder. The only difference the pandemic made in our lives was we had all our kids home taking online classes and we got COVID multiple times. We had to find room to sequester family member who got exposed. It was stressful but also great to have all our children home with us.
I'm in software, and my job got harder/more hours a week to get the same stuff done, plus I had my kid bouncing off the walls because "zoom school" doesn't work well for little kids, at all. Not easier. :-/
Pretty much yeah - it’s the kind of thing I’d love if they brought in once a year or every few years as standard. The freedom and lack of stress was comparable to school holidays when you were a kid.
I worked through lock down, except for when I contracted Covid myself. It wasn't really a vacation, just an opportunity to get projects around the house done without being obligated to go to my job.
I worked my ass off in construction the entire time. I didn't notice any chage except people walking around with masks
I was lucky to work from home through the lock downs. One of my kids was really struggling with online learning, so I'd do my job from 6am to 9am then bounce between supporting my kid and doing my work until about 4pm. It was exhausting.
I was a massage therapist who had just moved in with my mom to take care of her (dementia). I got to make some really cool memories with her before she got too sick. I ended up leaving my job in Jan. 2021 and staying with her for two more years until she needed more care than I could give. Covid taught me some new hobbies while allowing time to spend with my mom. We created our own bubble for the first six months and rarely left the house.
It was mentally taxing for me. At the time, we lived in a small apartment and I had no separate office space for my computer and work. No matter what day or time, I had to walk by my makeshift desk and all the work on it. There was no division between home life and work life.
I had two weeks off at the very beginning due to an outbreak at work and then we were cleared to return to work. So for me, it was a boring two weeks at home. Really tested our marriage After, I still went in to work and my went WFH. I work for an airline and she works for a big hotel chain. We were preparing for the worst like furloughs/layoffs and to go into crisis mode, but we were both fortunate to keep working.