Why It’s Okay If You Didn’t Accomplish Anything Last Year
How #PandemicProjects and motivational speakers are wrecking your mental health.
It’s been over a year since we went into a nationwide lockdown. In that time, everything has been turned upside-down. Millions of people lost jobs or took pay cuts, many more started working from home, and a whole bunch of workers was suddenly classified as “essential.”
One thing that has emerged from the carnage of a year in lockdown is the premise that we should have done something with our lives during that year. Heck, that started almost immediately once lockdown had started.
I’m sure that many people have seen the “motivational” tweet from April 2, 2020, about what we “should” accomplish during quarantine. According to the person who wrote it, if we didn’t come out of this with either:
- A new skill
- Starting a business or side hustle, or
- More knowledge
Then, the issue is that we didn’t lack the time, but the motivation.
Honestly, that’s garbage. It was garbage then, it’s garbage now.
A year after that tweet, the economy is struggling to recover for most people, millions remain unemployed, and over half a million Americans are dead. COVID disrupted everything we know about life. We have collectively watched a slow-motion train wreck over the past year as people we know and love lost jobs, got sick, and maybe died.
We have undergone a global shared trauma as the world ground to a halt and everything we knew changed. COVID spared no one. We were all affected in some way.
Those of us who have been living with mental illness are familiar with the experiences of COVID — depression, anxiety, and a general sense of unease and unhappiness. During COVID, many more people are experiencing these feelings, to the tune of over 40% of Americans reporting symptoms of depression and anxiety, up from about 11% typically. I suspect that the actual number is higher but people have such stigma about mental illness that they’re not reporting their symptoms.
As someone for whom depression and anxiety were formative experiences in my teens, I have an understanding of how paralyzing they can be. You lose any sense of motivation, any desire to do anything but the bare minimum, and you hate it. When I’m depressed, chores pile up and I order a lot of takeout. My life and relationships suffer as a result.
When that happens, I’m typically aware of my failings — the sink full of dishes, the overfull trash can, the piles of laundry — and they make me feel like crap. I am incredibly aware that I am failing in my responsibilities as an adult, but I feel powerless to do anything about it. On the contrary, feeling bad about falling down on my responsibilities drives me further down the path of depression.
For me, this is a common feeling, and I have mechanisms for how to cope with it, as do many of the 11% of people pre-pandemic who experienced them. Now, imagine that 30% of the population is experiencing those feelings for the first time. They are depressed, the dishes and laundry are piling up, and they have gained weight from all the takeout. There is a global pandemic, and they can’t see their friends or family to vent in the ways that they normally do. Everyone is miserable, and everything feels hopeless.
Now, taking all of that into account, imagine some schmuck with a Twitter account is telling them that if they didn’t accomplish anything during the lockdown, they’re a garbage person. I know that I would take offense to that on a good day. On a bad day, I’d take it as a sign that I actually was a garbage person, unworthy of compassion or value as a human being.
For a whole subset of the population — again, 11% of people in a given year experience symptoms of depression and anxiety, and about 20% of the population experiences some kind of mental illness in a given year — this is a normal experience. I know how to cope with feeling like a garbage person, and I know how to deal with people who assume as such because I can’t do more than the bare minimum.
But again, there is now an additional 30% of the population who is experiencing this for the first time. I’m used to assumptions about my character because of depression, and I can brush them off. But what about all of these people experiencing it for the first time? How many of them are internalizing that feeling?
It doesn’t help that we in America have a bit of a complex about being self-starters and turning your hobbies into income. Hustle culture is both pervasive and toxic to many, as there are quite a few of us that just want to work our jobs, go home, and watch Netflix.
For those of us with mental illness, it can be frustrating to hear that we need to hustle, to work long hours to bootstrap our grand business ideas. There are times when it’s hard for me to get out of bed in the morning; why should I work 14-hour days when I’d rather be dead?
Now, 30% of Americans are experiencing this for the first time. Suddenly, they are being judged for not gaining a skill, or starting a business, or finding a new area of knowledge during a global pandemic where over 3 million people are dead, including roughly 600,000 Americans at this point.
We’ve all been impacted by the pandemic in some way — whether through job loss, loss of income, working from home, being an essential worker, or having someone we know get sick or die. We can’t see our family or friends, the people who are important to us, except over Zoom. No hugs, no handshakes, no bonding over a shared meal. It has all been taken from us.
And, now that vaccines are available and we are starting to get back to whatever the new normal will be, we are all struggling to figure out where we stand. One thing we don’t need in all of this is the added stress of feeling like we “didn’t accomplish anything” during lockdown.
I know that I, for one, am doing my best to just make it through until we can get to some semblance of normal. I’ve been working from home for over a year, which is a messy proposition for many, and I’ve been so busy that I haven’t had much time for other things. That’s okay.
You are not a lesser person just because you didn’t teach yourself something new or launch the next great app or whatever. Not everyone thrives under pressure, and it’s not a personal failing if you don’t. Sometimes all you can do is take care of yourself and just get through it. And you know what? That’s okay.