Look, it’s not rocket science. We’ve let our guard down since 2020. It feels like the world is finally back to normal, and we are bound to forget some of the stuff we learned when the entire world stopped and forced us to smell the roses.

It’s 2024. While we still call things “the new normal,” we seem to have turned our back on a lot of the progress we’ve made when the pandemic changed everything, especially in the realm of mental health. It seems like an eternity ago when the world realized being cooped up for months at a time meant taking a look at how not just your body but your mind was doing was really important. Here are just 8 ways how we’ve lost sight of that.

8. We’ve ignored the need to take care of our mental health, period.

With the lockdowns came an increase in anxiety, depression, and feelings of isolation. The acute awareness that the world has changed overnight has made us realize that we need to take care of our minds just as much as we do our bodies. After all, being Covid-free was great, but having to deal with crippling depression while still in the pink of health was no fun at all.

Now that we’re socializing again, it seems like all that time actively looking after our mental health seems to have faded to the wayside. That can’t be good.

7. Work-life balance really took a hit.

Working from home has come to mean “the workday never ends” for a lot of people. Always on call, always on the clock, and because our entire house is now an extension of our work desk, boundaries have never been more disrespected than they are today. We recognized the need to keep things separate back at the height of the pandemic, but we’ve forgotten all that now, much to our detriment.

6. We’re only beginning to rebuild our social lives.

Socializing was difficult during the pandemic, and even with it all but over now, it’s not like we all just went back to the same old ways of hanging out with people. Simply put, we’re only at the stage where we’re barely rebuilding some of the connections that we ended up neglecting, and we can’t really keep up with all those connections—much less bring them back to how they used to be.

All those missed connections, broken friendships, and so much more that we’ve only gotten round to now? Well, all of that now affects us and lives rent-free in our heads.

5. The capitalist world has figured out how to exploit all of this (again)

Let’s face it: some of the most humane things the corporate world has done (as well as some of the least) we’ve seen happened during the pandemic. But as the corporate world adjusted, so did its ability to take the stuff it had to give us and find a way to turn it against the average person. Whether it’s forcing people to go back to an office setting despite productivity being actually better during WFH, or finding new and exciting ways to pay people less through the new and exciting ways of doing work, unfortunately, the worst among us just find ways to make things just that much worse for the rest of the world.

4. We’ve just gotten complacent, period.

The way we act nowadays, it’s almost like we didn’t just come from a world-changing pandemic. We live our lives in 2024 as if 2020 couldn’t possibly happen all over again, even if it very well could. Part of that complacency has come with our mental health.

Nowadays, people are so used to how things are that they gloss over some of the issues that cropped up during the pandemic, sweeping all of it under the rug again because the world keeps spinning. And with Covid-19 no longer locking the planet down, we’re forced to keep moving. Why stop to care about your mental health when we have more pressing concerns? It’ll all sort itself out, just like we thought it all did before the pandemic.

3. We think we can get the help we want when we need it (without realizing we already need it).

Part of being willing to put things off is the fact that we don’t know for sure if we could actually afford to do just that. We think that hey, things have changed enough, and we can and will take a mental health day when we need it—except we keep pushing those days aside more and more because we feel guilty about having to take those mental health days. It’s just another way the soulless corporate machinery trivializes things that we’ve already established to be really important.

2. We never realized that we had a mental health pandemic to begin with.

The fact is, everyone had to pay attention to their mental health one way or another during the pandemic, and we were forced to because we had nothing else to do at the time. Some of us discovered we were actually introverts. It was hell for extroverts. Others had to deal with multiple issues, both physical and mental.

The reality is that everything that happened resulted in a mental health pandemic that we only barely grasped. And ever since things went back to “normal,” we’ve been so busy trying to get back to our old routines that we forgot that we never did develop a vaccine for all that anxiety, depression, and isolation we had to contend with — and just kicked down the road like some proverbial can.

1. We started wearing pants again.

Oh, to return to a society where wearing pants on the daily was merely optional. Unfortunately, we’re wearing pants again, and with the increase of days we are wearing pants, so have we begun straying from the light.

And while you might think we’re being facetious here, the reality is, us going back to pants is just emblematic of all the lessons we’ve forgotten about mental health during the pandemic — it’s those simple bits of consolation we had during the pandemic that we turn our back on now that reminds us that we’ve lost sight of the lessons we learned — because society has decided that wearing pants on a daily basis now has to be a thing again.

How have you been caring for your mental health recently? Tell us about it in the comments.