There is a quiet, nagging consensus humming beneath the surface of modern life: something broke in 2020, and it never quite got put back together.
We aren’t talking about supply chains, mask mandates, or remote work policies. On paper, the world returned to normal years ago. The restaurants are packed on Friday nights. Stadiums are loud. Commuters are back to complaining about traffic. Yet, as many people have pointed out, the texture of life feels fundamentally altered—thinner, angrier, and strangely exhausted. It’s as if society went through a reboot, and while all the icons reappeared on the desktop, the operating system underneath is corrupted.
Why does life still feel so off?
The answer may have less to do with what happened to us in 2020, and everything to do with how we reacted to it. For the past six years, more than half of society has been locked in a perpetual, self-destructive revolt against the hand it was dealt.
The Revolt Against the Guardrails
When the shockwaves of 2020 hit, they exposed genuine cracks in modern life. People were scared, isolated, and frustrated. Make no mistake: the problems were real.
But instead of soberly fixing what was broken, huge swaths of the public decided to flip the table entirely. Like a frustrated gambler convinced the dealer is rigging the deck, society began rebelling against the foundational pillars that had quietly held the modern world together for decades.
On one side, a justifiable exhaustion with lockdowns and mandates mutated into a wholesale rejection of the postwar order. Suddenly, everything was on the chopping block: vaccines, free-market economics, legal immigration, transatlantic alliances, and fiscal restraint. All of these institutions and norms—imperfect as they were—were rebelled against under the delusion that tearing them down would usher in a populist golden age. We threw out the guardrails assuming the ditch would be a smoother ride. It isn’t.
On the other side, a different kind of rebellion took hold: a revolt against the messy realities of human nature itself. Confronted with both real and imagined injustices, a cultural movement demanded "Equity"—not just equal opportunity, but engineered, top-down parity of outcomes—as the ultimate cure-all. It treated fundamental human friction as a bug that could be bureaucratically reprogrammed, assuming that the ideological alternative would be fairer and more harmonious. It wasn’t.
Whipsawed Between Real Problems and Imaginary Solutions
This is the true source of our post-2020 malaise: humanity got whipsawed between real problems and imaginary solutions.
Think of how a teenager rebels. A teenager’s angst isn't necessarily fake; growing up is genuinely hard, the world is unfair, and authority figures make mistakes. The feelings are real. Yet slamming doors, ditching school, and burning bridges never actually solves the teenager’s problems. Rebellion feels intoxicating in the moment—it offers a rush of righteous agency—but it leaves you worse off the next morning.
Since 2020, our politics and culture have been trapped in a state of collective adolescence. Millions of people were convinced by grifters, ideologues, and algorithms that the answer to a complicated world was a bogus crusade.
- Mad about inflation and economic anxiety? Smash free trade and abandon fiscal sanity.
- Mad about social friction and historical unfairness? Tear down merit and police language.
- Mad about institutional overreach? Burn down the institutions altogether.
None of these rebellions helped. None of them solved a single underlying issue. Instead, they turned neighbors into enemies and transformed everyday life into an exhausting ideological battlefield.
The Hangover
The reason the "feeling of life" hasn't returned to its pre-2020 warmth is that you cannot spend years in a state of engineered outrage without paying a psychological toll.
People were bamboozled into fighting phantom wars for counterfeit solutions. In the process, millions essentially gave themselves a form of cultural PTSD—living in a constant state of fight-or-flight, convinced that the sky was falling and that tearing down one more norm would finally bring peace.
Now, the bill has come due. When you rebel against free markets, fiscal discipline, alliances, and basic social trust all at once, you don't get utopia. You get the worst of all worlds: dysfunctional governance, economic volatility, fractured communities, and leadership that reflects our worst impulses rather than our highest standards.
The restaurants are full again, and the concerts are loud. But until we outgrow the urge to burn down the house every time the roof leaks—until we trade imaginary crusades for the boring, adult work of fixing real problems—life is going to keep feeling just a little bit broken.
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