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Talk about what you think the world will be like after the pandemic is over.

I don’t think that there’s a chance in hell that things will go back to the way they used to be before the pandemic. I think that it’s a little naive to think so, especially right after the pandemic is over. I think that we’ll still be wearing masks, although I’m not sure how tightly enforced that rule will be once all of us are vaccinated. I think that the culture surrounding masks will remain though - if we see someone not wearing a mask in a business, we might go “damn, look at that idiot not wearing a mask”. On the other hand, we’ll probably see others wearing their masks, and think “oh, how responsible and empathetic of them”. But I don’t think that we’ll ever go back to seeing the same meaning assigned to masks ever again. I also think that everybody will still be weird about physical contact - we went so long without it, or without any form of it, that its recurrence might throw us off a little. When I look back at videos and pictures from things pre-pandemic, I’m just thinking to myself, “wow, we really used to live like that, and it wasn’t life-threatening”, you know what I mean? Like, there’s a video in my snapchat memories of my friend in the hallway chaos that was passing time in high school, and she’s just getting swallowed by the amount of people that were flooding the hallways. There are pictures of all of us close together, without masks on, inside businesses. Even parties - I’m just in a room full of kids that I barely know, have no idea where they’ve been or who else they’ve been with, and before the pandemic, that wouldn’t have mattered, but now it does, and it’s weird to think that there was a period of time where it really did matter at all. I’m pretty sure that we’re all going to try our hardest to make the world like it was before, but I think that’s impossible, given the impact of the pandemic. There will always be vestiges of it in our world, little reminders of this time in our society.