Movies. I was always an avid movie-goer and the pandemic weaned me off that. I started waiting until crowds died down at first, but the studios shortened the released dates for streaming to the point that I can just wait.
Since I was “essential personnel” to keep civilization from collapsing I never stopped going to work or going out, and since I work at a glorified grocery story/big box I didn’t do as much on-line shopping as a lot of other people, so in some ways the pandemic affected me less day-to-day than most.
About the only things I’ve done differently is gone back to baking most of my bread (but I’ve been on-again, off-again with that for the past 30+ years anyway) and I’ve upped my “just-in-case” pantry from 2 weeks to 2 months for some staples to avoid shortages.
I live in a blue state with very few shootings. My temple has more security than it used to, so i guess i need to get buzzed in now, instead of just opening the door. But that’s it re changes due to violence.
As for inflation, so far i just complain about it. It hasn’t affected my life in any important way.
Traffic is worse than it used to be. I’m part of the problem. The train runs less frequently, so I’m more likely to drive.
The big change is that i wear a mask most of the time I’m out of the house, and I’m working from home. My employer wants me to return to the office, so I’m contemplating retirement or a new job. I’m also traveling less. I miss restaurants. We eat a lot more takeout than we used to.
Re gun violence, i found this article very interesting.
Awesome find. Thank you!!!
I’m a salaried employee, so I’ve been coming in and leaving as I want. I used to be at my desk from 8-4:30 M-F. Gradually over the years for various reasons I have shortened that up. I can now do most things from home if needed. I usually get in by 8:30 and am gone by 1 or 2. I don’t come in at all on Fridays.
Because of high prices, I’ve been buying much more Great Value items than name brand. I have yet to notice any difference in quality but a huge difference in prices. Some items are half the price.
Diet Coke has been my go-to pop for years. I hated most other diet pops. Since 12-packs of all name brand pops are now regularly priced at $7+, I’ve been buying whatever is on sale. Diet Pepsi at 2/$10? Sign me up! I haven’t tried the Walmart diet cola yet. That will probably be next.
I never watch the national news anymore. I will watch our local news on occasion but not often.
We’ve cut our eating out way down. We used to go out or pick something up Fri-Sun. I’d rather save the money now. We usually eat out only once a week and that’s usually picking something up and eating in.
Yeah, I have. The downward trend of general civility didn’t start in 2016, but it really took a lurch around then, with more and more people proudly flying their asshole flag. It’s as if a beloved leader gave them implicit permission to just be themselves and not be constrained by longstanding social norms, or something.
There have always been asshole drivers, but now there are more of them. Rude jerks are nothing new but they’re everywhere now.
I’ve changed a few specific things in my behavior to feel safer and more comfortable. One, I drive much less – partly because I’m allowed to work from home, sure, but I rarely take an optional drive anymore because I think about how much road rage I’m likely to encounter, anywhere. Two, I never engage with strangers at all, other than to smile and say hello. For example, if at the grocery someone has blocked the shelf with their cart while they talk on their cellphone, I no longer ask them politely if I could get by – I just walk away and check back later.
I figure about 10% of people are armed, 10% are very angry, and 10% are batshit crazy. Those odds, multiplied together, are high enough to make me avoid engaging with strangers at all. I will never ask someone politely to move their cart; I will never beep my horn at another driver texting while sitting at a green light; I really worry about having a tiny fender-bender in a parking lot that has some crazy asshole leaping out of his truck with a tire iron.
It doesn’t help that I’m gay, and when with my husband, rather obviously so. I’ve encountered much kindness, but also much more blatant homophobia than I did in, say, the 1990s. I’ve had people yell slurs out of their truck in my suburban neighborhood, which I never encountered between the 1980s and 2016. We’ve been confronted on the street multiple times in rather menacing ways to the point that we’ve considered taking our daily walks separately just to fly lower under the radar.
(This, by the way, is why I love those BLM lawn signs, the “love is love” signs, the “all are welcome” signs, etc. Some people call it virtue signaling, and if it is, I truly appreciate the virtue that’s being signaled. I need to know about it.)
Thanks for that perspective. Maybe we should put up a permanent rainbow flag or something.
Apart from the ability to work some of the week at home. No, not really.
I’m completely over Covid. No mask, no avoidance of crowds, I just never think about it.
I did take up a couple of hobbies in the pandemic period that have been sustained, they’re fun.
The pandemic curtailed our family holidays temporarily but they are now back on track and they are a huge part of the enjoyment I get from life.
I’m cushioned enough financially that increases in living costs aren’t a major factor. (good wages, no mortgage and the whole family is pretty frugal)
Luxury goods never interested us before so any increase in those is irrelevant.
I don’t do social media so don’t engage in any of that craziness. (There is the very occasional hysteria on here but that’s quite fun and easily ignored if necessary)
Family, friends and colleagues are spread widely across the political spectrum and relationships with them are as good as they’ve ever been. Real people with honest intentions seem still able to talk.
I perhaps avoid media-staged divisive political discussion more than before. It seems like extreme combative collisions and entrenched positions are what passes for nuanced debate these days. Not interested. Those don’t reflect the balance of opinions I experience day to day nor the way normal interactions occur.
I’m generally pretty positive about how things are given a long enough timescale. The line wiggles around in the short term but it’ll get better overall I think and I’ve seen no reason to make any major changes.
To be fair I think the Venn diagram of these groups, particularly the latter two, overlap rather heavily. A small consolation, but hey any port in a storm 
.
Wow, you live in a nice area!
I retired a few months before the world ended, so I can’t say if my day to day life has changed or not because I didn’t have time to settle into my new life first.
We live in a little rural town in the reddest part of the state, the anger has been present since Obama was first elected and now things are totally insane.
I don’t talk politics or the plague with people I don’t know really well and I have a lot of pretty effective ways to change subjects, but those skills have been honed over many years.
Mostly what has changed for us is that we aren’t comfortable driving after dark, so we don’t go out at night much anymore. That’s an old people problem, and not related to the OP’s question.
I don’t discuss controversial subjects anymore, either online or in real-life, because there are too many fanatics out there.
My life is pretty much exactly the same as it was in 2019, except I watch/seek out a lot less news (even then I was easing it out of my diet.) I just have no need for the insanity. All my news comes from here and pretty much Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. I will tell you, my life is so much more chill without the noise.
'Zactly.
A slightly different perspective as I’m in the UK - my life hasn’t changed massively as I’m still living in the same place, still employed and still earning roughly the same as I was before. My mother passed away just before the pandemic really took hold, that cut down my travelling costs as I was no longer making the trip over to see her every weekend, and more regularly as her illness progressed and her life came to an end.
Our cost of living is high, we have seemingly random unavailable items in our local supermarket. One week I’ll go and they’ll have no tomatoes. Another week, no mushrooms. Last week they had pitifully small (and not good quality) onions, no lactose-free milk, and no cat litter. Grocery shopping has become less predictable, I can’t be sure I’ll get what’s on my list every time. Prices have gone up significantly (yes, I blame brexit for that most of the time) and our parting from the EU means we’ve lost the safety net of food standards so now we can import any old shite. I give much more consideration to where my groceries have come from, whether I really need something, and what I can get by without.
In terms of leisure, we were really happy to have live music back and have been enjoying much of what we’ve missed so badly in lockdown. We’re far less likely to have shootings in public places, stabbings are more likely with young people acting like total morons.
Holidays are back, which is good news as we had a bunch of places in the US that we’d like to visit, but gun crime etc over your side, well that definitely makes us think twice about where we’re likely to go, how we’re travelling and what we’re going to visit.
A year or so of lockdown and wfh destroyed my ability to get up early. For 35 years I easily got up at 5 or 5:30 and now, after a couple of years of getting up later and later, I have a hell of a time getting up at 7:30.
I still mask when I am in indoor public spaces.
Beyond that everything is more or less the same.
The simple answer is no, I haven’t changed my day-to-day life appreciably. (American)
Like a few other people, I am less diligent about following the news because it raises my blood pressure. And as @Elmer_J.Fudd put it, knowing someone’s political leanings seems to have become more important, though I still remain on good terms with a couple of family members who are very, very conservative.
I don’t worry about being out and about very much; I go to baseball games, go to parks, go for walks, eat at the occasional restaurant, get together now and then with friends, attend church most Sundays, went to the little guy’s school concert. I don’t have any particular concerns about traffic (I haven’t noticed this being worse, though everyone I know says it has gotten really bad, maybe I’m just oblivious), or the pedestrian coming my way, or the possibility of a mass shooting. Inflation is an issue but hasn’t made major inroads in my daily life. Yet.
I now freelance fulltime instead of three quarter time and work exclusively from home or the library, but that’s a natural progression in my case.
So, no, not much difference when you come down to it.
I’m more aware of germs and people. I would never eat birthday cake after a kid blew out the candles. It’s much better to cut the kid’s slice and put a candle on it. Let them blow on their own slice.
Sneezing and coughing disturbs me. I’ve stopped eating and walked out of rooms to get away.
I foolishly didn’t think much about this stuff. I’m not germophobic but certainly much more cautious. Living through a pandemic changes a lot of things.
No. About the only things I did differently during the first years of the epidemic were wearing a mask when required, getting vaccinated, and not going to the library because they were closed for a couple months. 
They don’t tell you about the artifacts. It comes and goes in both my eyes. I’m seeing it consistently in my left eye. Its like something is caught in my eyelash but nothing is there.
I’m learning to ignore it.