I’ve kind of thought that the consequences of the one world-shaking issue colors the view of most people, which is completely understandable, but it seems to me to say more about COVID than 2020 itself, if that makes sense. So I was wondering what others thought.
Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?
Well, that’s my point. Everyone says, “oh, 2020 sucks so much, so many bad things happened all year” when it seems to me that only ONE majorly bad thing happened this year, and everyone’s just lumping in anything else that comes to mind, like the Australian wildfires and Kobe Bryant’s death.
Actually yes. 2020 has been a bad year for me. The only real highlight was Biden winning (Trump losing) the election and COVID probably helped that along.
My Mom’s parkinson’s has finished her off mentally. She’ll never go home again. We got slammed by a windshear damaging the house that led to other issues and just after we had the roof done. Selling the house has been a complete nightmare. We don’t get to move to our new place until December 28th so our Holidays would have blown up even without COVID.
And more, much more. Yes 2020 was a shitty shitty year.
If it weren’t for COVID I believe it could have been sort of like 2016, which was not splendid either but did not have the aura of apocalyptic cataclism.
That said some specific people/places/communities have had an objectively extra sucktastic year even absent CoVid e.g. Southwestern Puerto Rico, Australia, the Western US fire province, the citizens of HongKong, etc. My Dad suffered a rapid deterioration in his general health and quality of life and will likely not be back in his own house either. So yeah, it’s a year on whose memory to piss.
I had a pretty bad relationship breakup in August. Other than that, the year would have been quite good if excluding Covid. Moved to a new house, on pace to save a lot of money, some elections went the way I hoped, the Chiefs won the Super Bowl, all in all it would have been good.
Stage IV cancer diagnosis in early March (and two months of feeling mysteriously sick before that) kind of ruined the year for me. And now I just found out I gotta put my cat down — oral cancer is eating her jawbone. For me, it’s Year of the Crab. Fuck this year. (But, as The Mountain Goats say, I’m gonna make it through this year — if it kills me.)
I live in CA. Looming drought + apocalyptic fire (affecting a few people I know) + weeks of smoky palls have been miserable. Work has been a constant source of low-level aggravation for stupid internal management reasons. Several people I know a little or a lot have died from non-COVID-related issues (fucking cancer), including a cousin about my age. The political landscape has been sour as hell.
COVID really magnifies everything x3, but yeah - 2020 would have been pretty mediocre all by its lonesome. There are two things in the plus column: 1.) Trump losing and 2.) the cancellation of Tab soda. And I haven’t even been able to fully enjoy #1 because of the closeness of it all and that malignant wart digging in his heels and holding his breath in protest.
Here’s hoping that by Spring of 2021 things will start to look a little less crazy.
2020 has been a good year for me, even with Covid, my wife having a hospital stay (kidney infection), and a tree falling on my roof.
To be honest, I don’t know. Covid has controlled and ruined everything in my life that it’s impossible to separate it from 2020.
I think it would have been a good year without COVID. My baby was born in March, and he’s an endless joy. My husband started his own psychology practice in January, when we had no idea what was coming. It should have been a year of new beginnings, and it still was, only COVID fucked it up in several ways. We have lost half the year’s income, our current childcare arrangement is not financially sustainable, and my husband’s relationship with his father has been permanently damaged. It’s hard to even imagine what the year would have looked like without COVID.
But we would have been fine.
Maybe. Would there have been a hiring freeze that forced me out of my job of 20 years without COVID? It’s hard to know.
We do the ‘xxxx sucks so much, can’t wait for it to be over’, literally, every year. Once we get into the last few months of the year and the third or fourth major celebrity has died, coupled with a few large scale natural disasters and some random scandals, people complain about how bad the current year is like this is something unique.
If you look back, I’m quite sure you can find memes from the last few years saying exactly the same thing. Granted, Covid is unprecedented, but without it, you’d still see people eagerly awaiting 2021 because 2020 “took” Alex Trebek and RBG and Kobe and Sean Connery and Neal Peart and Fred Willard and so on.
I agree that you can’t separate the COVID shitstorm, but a continent burned downed at the beginning of the year. Australia, for those who can’t remember. California refused to be left out and convinced Arizona and Colorado to burn to the ground. That wasn’t great.
My thyroid has gone on strike, my weight has skyrocketed and my health has been seriously impacted.
Hubs has come out as a Trumper, so we are not talking about trump as well as COVID, because that’s just a hoax. His disconnect with reality is stunning.
I guess I can’t count my 84 year old mother’s newly developed cognitive issues because I am positive that if she was about to actually interact with society she would be OK. I probably can’t bitch about dead friends, cause that was COVID as well.
Is my friend who lost her job and is now worried about being foreclosed on COVID or can we count her?
I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine how difficult that would be.
(It all sounds hard, I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m ignoring the other stuff. I hope things turn around for you soon.)
Thank you for noticing the worse part. If you had told me last year that the man I have been happily partnered to for over 30 years would go crazy, I would have laughed my ass off. He’s only 67.
I’ve lived all those years thinking he was colorblind because that’s how he presented. When the riots in Scottsdale started, all he had to say was “I hope they get over it soon.”
I still love him. He’s wrong, wrong, wrong and I am worried about his mental health, but I still love him.
I’ve spent half an hour pondering the OP’s question, and am still unsure how to answer.
At the purely personal level (me only), I’ve had a slew of medical problems this year which drastically limited travel and fun. As a new retiree, I (absent Covid) would have viewed this as a really bad year, and a shitty way to start my new life and bucket lists. But in retrospect, what better year to be laid up at home?
Due to chance, my family has econimically benefitted from the effects of Covid. My son made a substantial change in his career path in 2018. In retrospect, it was the perfect decision with Covid bearing down on us – his former career was devastated by the virus and most of his old buddies are unemployed – meanwhile his income more than doubled. My wife’s particular career niche has grown substantially due to secondary effects of the virus, ditto that of my sister.
So I guess a Covid-less 2020 wouldn’t have been a “bad” year, just a meh one for all of us. The only negative is I would be griping about the timing of my medical problems instead of mildly pleased they happened when everything was closed anyway. The Covid-less positive is some relatives and friends who died of the virus would still be alive. But I guess I wouldn’t have known to count those blessings.
Sorry I can’t come up with a definitive answer, I keep wandering off into alternate timelines and “what ifs” and only end up confused. I don’t even know how to define this year.
Yes.
My brother is unemployed and I’ve dumped thousands into dental work & home repairs for myself.
10 years savings gone, with no hope of recovery.
My mom broke her OTHER hip in January and is having a rough go of it. That’s been tough for both of us since I live 100 miles away and am really her primary help.
Fires. Sheese, Colorado got hit hard too.
And everything Trump. Trump alone would have made this year suck.
On Thursday one of my co-workers went off on a epic rant about child sex trafficking Socialist Democrats being shielded by the media’s refusal to cover their crimes and some of us idiots were willfully closing our eyes to it. And on and on.
On the Friday “happy hour” zoom call a discussion of The Masters golf devolved into an ugly race and politics discussion. I don’t know how much of this is down to COVID disruption and anxiety messing with people’s mental state, but if you had predicted that our diverse but collegial work group would descend into this madness, I wouldn’t have believed you.
My brother is not on speaking terms with most of his siblings and our parents because he’s turned into a Holocaust denying anti-immigrant nut job. He’s an immigrant himself and his long term girlfriend is a former UNDOCUMENTED immigrant.
My dad’s Parkinson’s has gotten a lot worse as has his mental state, though both might have been exacerbated by COVID isolation and inactivity, I suppose.
But yeah 2020 would have been a bad year.