The COVID Blues
“I feel pulled in so many directions”
“I feel lost at sea, desperately grasping onto anything I can find”
“I’ve lost my keystone habits, and my life has lost structure.”
“I feel disconnected from my identity — who am I?”
“I’m going through a quarter-life crisis”
“I’m burnt out”
“COVID sucks”
Sentiments like these have been almost ubiquitous in my social circles. I thought they were just in my own head, but it turns out everyone is feeling the same way. That was a surprising revelation — I call this universal mood “the COVID blues”.
But something has been bothering me about the COVID blues; this essay is an exploration of that feeling.
Fundamentally, I think the COVID blues stem from a lack of happy environments. Our internal happiness loops can only self-reinforce for so long before our environment leaks in and adjusts our mood. Our mood is fragile, and we’re socially designed to calibrate our moods to match those around us (this mood changing behavior is a big part of empathy).
If you don’t believe me, imagine the saddest movie you’ve ever watched, or the saddest song you’ve ever heard. Better yet, just watch this gif of a sad baby.
Pay attention to how your feelings change depending on which gif you’re viewing; can you feel the emotions in your chest?
Unfortunately for both of us, sadness lasts longer than any other emotion. An occasional happy baby is not enough to overcome an environment filled with sad news. The COVID blues are the natural human response to an environment filled with overwhelmingly bad news. Ironically, this is good news for those of us, like me, who feel helpless, lost, or overwhelmed. It means we’re not broken, we’re not “lost”, we’re not stuck this way — we’re just matching our mood to our environment, and our environment is currently pretty terrible.
So what do we do?
- Change your current mood to feel happy and empowered
- Redesign your environment to prevent an abundance of sadness
- Add 1 keystone habit designed to reboot your mood
v2 Draft — April 2026
This essay sat unpublished for six years. Revisiting it, the core insight is bigger than COVID — it’s about Cultural Black Holes and Cultural White Holes.
Instead of “The COVID Blues,” this could become an essay about cultural malaise in general. The framing: “The first time I noticed this was during COVID. A phenomenon that I at the time called the COVID blues.” Then quote excerpts from the original draft. But the real essay is about the physics of attention.
Cultural black holes have gravity wells. They suck you in and they hurt. You can feel it in your body. Examples:
- The COVID cultural black hole
- The AI doom cultural black hole
- The environmentalist cultural black hole
- The US politics cultural black hole (left and right each have their own)
Cultural white holes are where creativity comes from, where love comes from. Feeds filled with art and wonder and human ingenuity. Children, families, hope, God, faith, animals, nature, people restoring nature.
Both are equally news. Both are happening. It’s just where you’re putting your attention.
Interactive essay idea: Could be published as an interactive piece that takes you through different layers of media experience. Simulate people’s feeds — the community archive has enough data to reconstruct who follows whom, and Bluesky feeds can be simulated too. Show the reader what it feels like to be inside a black hole vs. a white hole. Then tell them how to get to the white hole experience. An art project as much as an essay.
Next Steps
- Develop the Cultural Black Holes concept page — define the metaphor, list examples, explain the gravity well
- Develop the Cultural White Holes concept page — the opposite force
- Explore interactive essay format — can we simulate feeds using community archive data?
- Research Bluesky feed simulation possibilities
- Write v2 outline: cultural malaise essay with COVID blues as origin story