If it weren’t for COVID, would you personally have found 2020 so far a remarkably bad year?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Non-Covid things that happened in 2020:

  • Australian bush fires
  • Fires in the western U.S., especially California, including the Day of the Orange Sky
  • Shootings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Jacob Blake, et al., leading to widespread civil unrest (and, no, I’m not saying the unrest was wrong)
  • Abuses of power by Donald Trump, much of it directed at BLM protests, including snatching people off the street by unidentified federal agents in unmarked vans and the use of gas to disperse legal protestors in Washington, D.C. so that Trump could look tough in a photo-op
  • RBG’s death and the subsequent hypocrisy by Republicans about replacing her so close to an election
  • Trump’s impeachment, in which the Senate held a so-called “trial” during which no evidence was allowed to be introduced (thanks, Mitch!)
  • The worst, most stressful presidential election in memory. The first “debate” was particularly bad, because the President of the United States refused to act like a civilized adult (but what else is new?).
  • The Beirut explosion
  • Unexpected celebrity deaths, including those of Kobe Bryant and Chadwick Boseman
  • Escalating tensions and a series of retaliations between the U.S. and Iran leading to Iran shooting down a Ukranian airliner, killing all 176 people on board
  • Swarms of locusts devastating parts of Africa
  • China’s authoritarian crackdown on Hong Kong

I could add more.

I know terrible things happen every year, and people tend to think only about what’s happened lately, but 2020 does seem to me to be a bad year.

22

I think for a lot of people, the badness of the pandemic has exacerbated the badness of personal problems.

But for me, I’d say the pandemic actually helped me cope better with my personal problem–a breast cancer diagnosis I got back in May. Being able to work from home for the past 7 months has really been a blessing because it has allowed me to handle my business without dealing with the annoyances of office life. Like being able to talk to medical professionals on the phone without feeling self-conscious about my cube neighbors overhearing me. Or being able to go in for my daily radiation treatments without my coworkers asking me why my work schedule is weird. The medication I’m on is starting to make me feel irritable. So it’s been great being able to work in a setting that I have full control over. I can listen to relaxing music with my cat in my lap while dressed in pajamas if I want.

So I would say for me, this hasn’t been a particularly bad year. It would not say it was a great one, but years from now I know I will look back on this time with some nostalgia.

23

Other than COVID, 2020 has about the same number of macro-scale problems as any other year. Frankly, the fact COVID almost certainly caused Trump to not be re-elected has saved the USA from far worse to come. Assuming he doesn’t succeed in his ongoing coup attempt.

For each of us as individuals some years have bad surprises and some have good. It’s human nature to see patterns where they are not. Those of us who’ve had unrelated bad luck will blame 2020 for it and those of us with unrelated good luck won’t blame 2020 for it.

Ref dear @monstro just above, her most awful-est news is less awful for happening in 2020 than in 2019. Even disasters are not unalloyed bad.


As to myself, COVID has been a minor irritant and an excellent practice retirement. Had there been no COVID I’ve had made more money, but worked more too. All the other stuff in my life, both good and bad, continues to evolve slowly, unperturbed by COVID.

Being a coastal Floridiot I pay attention to hurricanes. We knew last winter that 2020 was likely to be a busy year for hurricanes because it was shaping up as a La Niña year.

Sure enough, it’s been a record breaking year for storms from beginning to end. And we’re still not done yet. And yet FL did not get a landfall until last week with Eta, and it was minor. Meanwhile Lake Charles LA got hammered with two major hurricanes and New Orleans took hits from 3 storms. So is 2020 a bad year for hurricanes or a good year for hurricanes? If the answer depends on your zipcode then that pretty well says the question is bunk. Or at least answering it individually is bunk.

24
  • Endless hurricanes & tropical storms affecting several parts of the world over and over and over
  • Extreme drought in the US northeast
  • Murder hornets
  • Protests in many non-US locations…
25

I lost my dad (non-Covid related), so yes.

26

After two years of bowel cancer I’m officially in recovery.
My property tycoon wife pushed through a deal that makes us comfortable for life.
I live in a country that had the lowest Covid 19 infections and death rate in the world so on the whole 2020 wasn’t a bad year.

27

My lost year. I shattered my left femur February 29, and haven’t walked since. Add this fucked up election and Covid, and it’ll be one I’ll always remember, probably in nightmares.

28

Everyone else has already covered the other large-scale bad things this year, which seriously bummed me out (particularly the fires and RBG’s passing) but didn’t directly affect me in any measurable way. And I didn’t have any major personal issues that weren’t COVID- related, so yeah, I guess, if not for that, it would’ve been a pretty great year.

Even with COVID, I really shouldn’t complain. I missed out on some things I wanted to do, and I’ve had a rough time of it emotionally. But nobody I know has died or even been hospitalized, my job isn’t going anywhere (I even got promoted), and I can still go scuba diving. The election has really cheered me up too. Things could be a lot worse.

29

IMHO, Trump’s poor leadership never showed more glaringly than throughout the Covid pandemic and may have played a large role in his being defeated at the polls. So there is at least that plus for 2020.

30

Other than COVID, no idea, because COVID has impacted everything that we’d otherwise have done. People died, but they’d’ve died anyway eventually (I mean Alex Trebec, etc., those who’ve died of non-COVID).

Pretty much, the only reason this year has been personally bad this year is COVID.

Yeah, we’re lucky.

31

Yeah, I’m going to say 2020 sucked with or without Covid.

32

For me the answer is unequivocally yes, 2020 would have sucked without covid. Covid was just salt ground into some deeply personal mental wounds inflicted this year

33

COVID has for me made 2020 a much better year than 2019. It’s been extremely comforting to know we are all experiencing the same event at the same time and in largely the same way, and the way I’ve been dealing with it is common across millions of others. I feel less like an outsider looking in, or an insider looking out. We’re all inside looking to each other.

I also found the slow down of lockdown cathartic and a source of much-needed stress relief.

So without that, I’d feel 2020 was much like 2019, a long screed of misery. The BLM protests in particular would stand out as especially horrible, but they also came with an eye-opening educational awareness of what really goes on, which I think as important enough to mitigate some of its worst effects. Drawing attention to the horrific nature of the Police in some countries has been devastating, yet it’s now out in the wide open and impossible to ignore. And hopefully that makes it fixable.

Overall, it’s been shit, but hopeful. I see light at the end of the tunnel.

34

The best thing about 2020 will actually happen 20 days after the year ends. My mother and brother are still fighting over the election, and neither of them are allowed to vote in the US so it’s just creating stress for nothing.

Outside of the US, though, I don’t really know if it was a bad year. There were disasters and so forth, many of them potentially climate-based, but future years will be even worse.

35

Obviously I can’t say for sure what would have happened without COVID, but basically all my plans got scuppered by it this year; the only good point was that I got sent home with full pay during the last few months of my degree course; as we only missed a few lectures and I then got to give it my full focus rather than trying to work around study, it’s possible I got higher marks.

On the negative- the promised job fair got cancelled, and though the sector I just qualified for actually has done quite well this year, the general job chaos has meant the job market has got way more competitive, meaning work is much much harder to find. Although I am one of the somewhat lucky ones in that I’d started a job in the sector over the last year of my degree, it’s part-time, underpaid and overstressed, so I was planning to quit, either for a new job- ain’t gonna happen, or a masters’ degree- which I decided to put off for a year because of the chaos in universities caused by COVID.

My summer plans were all cancelled, both the travelling and the second job, and we still have sodding Brexit to look forward to in 2021, which is looking like it’s going to cause a whole new exciting range of problems for most of society. It could conceivably mean more opportunities in the sector, but I’m not holding my breath.

So yeah, I think this should have been a good year, and it mostly hasn’t been.

36

In all honestly, 2019 was my personal bad year: my favorite aunt died, pretty horribly, in May. My oldest sister died, entirely unexpectedly, in October. My brother went to rehab and it was a whole thing. I found out my other sister was the victim of DV. My best friend at work left, and which was both a personal and a professional loss, because it meant I had less help to deal with the shitty situation that drove him away. We had some financial problems come to a head. In some ways, that overlooks the key fact that my marriage was good and my son healthy and thriving, so it wasn’t all bad, by any means, but it was a very, very rough year.

Again, personally, 2020 has been much better (so far). My job is secure–I even got a raise. Our household has adopted easily to COVID restrictions. My siblings have reached improved equilibrium. We are saving more money than ever before. It took a pandemic for me to really slow down on my personal and professional commitments, and it’s been pretty amazing: I’m getting enough sleep for the first time in 10 years, at least. I had started seeing a therapist in like Febuarary and she said “I don’t know really how to diagnose you”–I want to call her back and say “It was STRESS. Pure stress!”.

But I am not foolish enough to see my better fortune as anything but a happy break that I am grateful for. I still have a lot of existential dread about the future. I think the reason people really like the “2020 sucks!” thing is that the slogan inherently carries some hope that it won’t always be true.

37

A good friend that we’d known for 30+ years died in February.
My grandmother died in March
Another friend of 35+ year died in May.
My SIL’s mother died in June
Another friend died in October.

None of these were COVID deaths, although COVID made them all much harder, since we couldn’t visit during the illnesses before death, or attend funerals/ visitations/celebrations after.

So yes, even without COVID, 2020 sucks.

38

2020 is a remarkably bad year BECAUSE of Covid.

Up until I lost my job in May, it was actually a pretty good year for me. I was let go from my job of 4 years in 2018 and after a painful 9 month job search, I landed what ended up being a great job with a cutting edge tech company (that was struggling with issues of it’s own). For the 11 months I worked there, it was fantastic. Great bosses. Great coworkers. Great work/life balance. Already mostly working from home, except when I felt like going for a drive to check in on my clients or head into Manhattan to have lunch with some coworkers.

I found a new job relatively quickly, but I don’t like it very much. But I guess I should be happy I have one.

But generally speaking, everything that sucks about 2020 for me sucks because of Covid. I honestly don’t care about natural disasters or celebrity deaths or whatever. But thanks to Covid:

  • I’m in a new job I hate
  • I have almost no social life (many of my friends have moved anyway)
  • Every public activity feels high risk
  • There are very few activities I can even do anymore
  • I’m paying “8 minute ferry from Manhattan” prices on a condo when there’s nothing to do in Manhattan anymore.
39

2020 sucks shit, and would’ve sucked shit without Covid.

My mother went through chemo & radiation treatment last year. This year she’s been dealing with congestive heart failure – a side effect of the chemo, apparently – that has necessitated several hospital stays. Each hospital stay has been followed with a flury of doctor visits, medication changes, and the like. This has been exacerbated by the fact that both her and my father have fallen off the wagon after 20 years (mom) and 35 years (dad) sober. Neither one will even admit they’re drinking.

My wife lost her job in March. It wasn’t exactly covid related but its enough of a grey area that I think it is. She does not, did not claim unemployment, and has used the time to go back to school and earn her BA. So we’re down to just my income now, which, while sufficient to meet monthly expenses, makes it hard to do anything extra, fun, or frivolous.

The fires in September would’ve closed the school I teach at had Covid not already done so. One of the wildfires came within a mile of campus, and actually did burn some old disused storage buildings and some fencing. I’m not sure what the ramifications would’ve been had there still been students on campus but I’m sure they wouldn’t have been pretty.

My FIL was diagnosed with throat cancer in September which the fucking VA still has not started treating because Reasons (I have a serious hatred for the VA right now). Squamous Cell Carcinoma, stage II. He’s supposed to start radiation treatment in a couple of weeks though. Hopefully.

My grandfather was just diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The same thing that killed Alex Trebek. He’s 93, and his treatment options are still being discussed. Docs just did the biopsy this week, but it looks like its in his bile duct at least, so my understanding is its at least stage II. Regardless, he won’t be around much longer. He helped pay for my education, and encouraged me to go to school in the first place. I can’t even process what him being gone will mean or how it will impact me.

My (department) boss just announced her resignation. I have a (probably irrational) fear of the “changing of the guard” in management and hate, with a fiery passion, when I get a new boss. I’ve had some really bad experiences with new supervisors and while I’m now protected by a pretty powerful union, I still don’t like it. The director of the school also quit some months back and that position has not been filled yet, so that’s two new bosses I will eventually have. Ungood.

My depression is back. My last bad bout was about this time of the year in 2013. I was suicidal. I’m not that bad this year but I can feel it slowly getting worse. This one is likely Covid related, but I’m not sure.

There have been a few bright spots: Biden winning the election, we moved to a newer, bigger, and nicer house in July, and I reconnected with a former student who I had thought I would never hear from again and, much to my relief, is actually doing OK.

But overall it’s been a really shitty year.

40

2020 would have been a pretty bad year for me, overall, without COVID. To begin with, I was furloughed at the beginning, for the second time. My wife needed an operation. Despite the fact that I had two books coming out (although one has since been delayed), the royalties I have historically gotten have been abysmal, and don’t make up for the income loss from my job.

Ironically, COVID was my salvation. My business was ruled as essential one, and I was brought back on board. we had a huge surge in business churning out things for the pandemic.