What effect has the pandemic had on our collective psyches?  Now that we are two and a half years into the Covid mess, and appear to be over the worst of it – unless it comes crashing back, like a rampant lion or hippo – where are we humans left?

Lots of measures show that we are mentally worse off – addiction, depression, anxiety, and other mental health measure are all headed in the wrong direction.  Something called neuroinflammation, which is not a good thing, is worse in us all, even if we didn’t personally experience Covid.  And standard measures of inflammation were also worse.  Stress can be good or bad, depending on how we respond to it, up to a point – but stress levels have gone up in general, and measures of cortisol, the so-called stress hormone, are generally up.  People tend to respond worse on memory tests when their cortisol levels are elevated — so our memories are suffering.

Anecdotally, I hear from people all around me that the world is grumpier, that people have become ruder, and that the little social niceties that used to make your day better – exchanging friendly banter with your barista – are either likely to be absent or less widespread.

Then there’s the Battle Over the Commute.  Broadly speaking, executives want their teams back in the office, but teams don’t see the point.  They feel that they are just as productive, or more so, virtually, and so why grapple with the commute every day? The executives are grumpy because they can’t manage their people, and the workers are grumpy when they come into the office and it’s only 30% occupied.

All of this suggests a level of turmoil in the work world that has been superimposed on the rapid change, digitization, heightened competition, and increased pace of the workplace before Covid.

What’s to be done?  Are we simply headed for a bleak, stressed-out, nasty future?  Or can humanity pull itself back from the brink and reset its mental playing field?  I realize that I’m mixing a few metaphors there, but that’s due to Covid stress, so don’t give me any attitude about it, OK?

Seriously, I think we are all responsible for how well the world works post-Covid, and that there are three things we can all do to ensure that the post-Covid world isn’t automatically a dystopian nightmare none of us wants to live in.

We need to re-connect, re-affirm, and renew.

Let’s re-connect with our fellow humans in ways both big and small.  Covid has isolated us.  Some of us still suffer from the scars of isolation or are still not fully integrated back into normal life – because normal life isn’t back yet.  So let’s agree to go out of our ways for the next year or so to be extra-relatable.  Let’s smile and exchange chit-chat with our baristas.  And everyone else.  Let’s re-connect with our fellow workers and friends in deeper ways.  It’s time to have post-pandemic, no-bullshit conversations with the people that matter in our lives to find out how we can help each other.

Let’s re-affirm our deep social ties and connections.  If Covid for you meant giving up on some of your clubs, causes, or churches, for safety’s sake, time to consciously renew those, or start some new ones.  The social fabric requires that we all do more than just work and just take care of our nuclear families.  We also need to take care of our communities, nation, and world.

Let’s renew our commitment to the planet.  Do you recall how early on in the pandemic many observers noted that a pandemic, like a crisis, “was a terrible thing to waste.”  Well, we pretty much did.  Here we are, a couple of years later, more stressed, back to pre-pandemic pollution levels, and cooking our planet.  We had a chance to re-think the trajectory we were on, and all we did was rely on Amazon and Uber Eats to keep the same level of consumption as before as best we could.  In 1961, President Kennedy launched us on a race to the moon.  We made it in a decade.  It was an extraordinary technological feat.  We need to do something similar for our earth.

Re-connect, re-affirm, and renew.  It’s time.