It’s been more than 6 years since Covid pandemic, but has it changed your lifestyle?

How did the pandemic of 2020 change your outlook and approach towards life and lifestyle?

Is it strange to say the pandemic brought good things to my life? Gardening? Baking sourdough? Working from home?

If it wasn’t for the pandemic, causing me to have to be stuck at home all the time, I most likely wouldn’t pick up gardening. I didn’t get into gardening before 2020 because I was never home. I was in the office from 7 AM to 3 PM and the round trip commute was 2 hours, depending on the traffic. How could I had time to go out and tend to my plants back then?

I started working from home in March 2020. It wasn’t COVID that sealed my fate but an earthquake. A 5.7-magnitude earthquake rocked downtown Salt Lake City on March 20, 2020 and with that, everyone was sent home with monitors, mice, keyboards, and computer towers. Working from my bedroom, I didn’t have room for a computer tower, so I opted to sacrifice my personal laptop and just got one monitor. Suddenly, my commute shrank from 2 hours to 2 minutes.

My pandemic experience was probably very different from other people. There was no lockdown. Yes, there was TP shortage but I never felt it personally since we buy things in bulk. Everyone in the neighborhood could go out and walk their dogs in the park anytime of the day. The only time we had to wear a mask was if we were indoors like at work or in a grocery store. I was the only one in the family who never got tested, not even once, so I have no idea how it feels to have a swab stuck up your nose. I was also lucky to have never got it. One of my co-workers got it a few times and it did not sound pleasant.

So yeah, even though my experience was different from everyone else, the pandemic changed my life. It forced me to stay at home, which led to gardening, which led to a more calming and slow lifestyle. This made me appreciate working from home. Before the pandemic, I hated working from home because with my mom working in the same company, working from home meant I had to face her on a daily basis and that was one of the joys of being in the office – my mom was 2 floors down and she couldn’t waltz up to my floor anytime she wanted.

Now, however, I am growing fonder of working from home on a day-to-day basis. There is something about working from home that feels a little less anxious than working in the office. I sometimes feel the pandemic happened solely to slow down life because that’s what it did for me – forced me to slow down and enjoy the moments instead of rushing from one place to the next without really knowing what happened.

Sunday Poser