Three Years In, How the Pandemic Has Changed Our Lives (and How It Hasn’t)

Forty-one percent of boomers say they’d prefer to continue teleworking after the pandemic. There are some downsides to sales meetings at the kitchen table. The average after-hours work increased by 28 percent. These and other work changes were part of a remaking of the American labor force, as roughly half of all workers began looking for other jobs in what came to be called the “great resignation.”

However... mass layoffs, particularly in tech, continue, and many Amazon Prime customers complain that “next day” or two-day shipping means three-, four- or five-day shipping. Big competitors such as Walmart, Target and Home Depot (and let’s not even discuss home furnishings retailers) saw huge delivery snarls the past couple of years, pegged to everything from unprecedented congestion in ports and COVID lockdowns affecting Chinese exporters to American labor shortages. American supply chain fragility has affected everything from how long it takes to get new appliances to what foods are on grocery shelves to which medications are in critically short supply (among them: amoxicillin, Adderall and Tamiflu).

Family and community

The relationships that really mattered went even deeper...

Though for many of those age 50-plus, isolation and loneliness soared — and our children struggled.

Family ties have improved. Among families with multiple generations under one roof, nearly 80 percent report having better relationships with family and kids, including with adult children, since the pandemic. In part, it was simply a matter of spending quality and quantity time together with those who matter most. A 2021 Pew Research Center study counted 59.7 million U.S. residents living in multigenerational homes; that’s four times the number reported in 1971.

Relationships stabilized, divorce decreased. For older adults, relationships did surprisingly well. Two-thirds of respondents in one survey reported that relationship quality stayed the same during the pandemic, and more than 1 in 5 reported their relationship quality got better. A 2022 survey by Monmouth University found that 90 percent of adults 55-plus are extremely or very satisfied with their relationships, and three-quarters said their happiness levels stayed the same. Predictions of a divorce uptick were unfounded; the national rate actually dropped by 12 percent in 2020.

Downsize — say what? If you think all that housebound time made older people want to move or go smaller, think again. Recent data from an AARP survey shows that adults 50 and older overwhelmingly want to remain in their homes for the long term; only about one-third of older people said they plan to relocate to another community. Aging in place will require some fixes, research shows. A third of AARP poll participants said they would need to modify their residence so they or loved ones could continue to live there if they had physical limitations. And desire and reality are not in sync: In 2022, boomers made up the largest share of U.S. home sellers, at 42 percent.

However... on the flip side, family bonding during COVID didn’t mean as much to the nearly 26 million Americans 50 or older living alone (up from 15 million in 2000), including a growing number — about 1 in 6 Americans 55 and up — who do not have children. “For older people living on their own, loneliness and isolation became a very real pandemic side effect,” says Diane Ty from the Milken Institute.

Then there are our kids and grandkids, Gen C — as in Generation COVID, children born around 2016 and after — who researchers say seem slower to develop. Babies born during the pandemic vocalize and interact verbally much less than their pre-COVID counterparts did, according to two studies. Some say it could be attributed to caregiver stress and lack of exposure to the outside world, while others blame it on increased screen time or mask-wearing, since babies learn to speak by watching mouths move. In 2021, the U.S. surgeon general declared a mental health crisis among young people.

Masks have largely disappeared, and people are flocking to cafés and restaurants.

Roy Rochlin / Getty Images

Travel and leisure

Life’s pleasures — food, flights and entertainment — returned...

Though staffing remains a huge issue.

Sports, never gone, roared back. “The pandemic bubble” — in which players quarantined together, tested constantly and played to near-empty arenas — “saved sports and kept fans in their seats,” albeit at home, says Abraham Madkour, publisher and executive editor of Sports Business Journal. With stadiums full again, we’re seeing changes that will likely linger: paperless ticketing; refreshments ordered through apps and screens, and a better overall home-viewing experience.

Movies and weddings are on the upswing. After countless nuptials got bumped in 2020 and 2021, the number of planned U.S. weddings in 2022 jumped to 2.5 million, up from 2.1 million in 2019, before the pandemic. Hollywood is doing well, too, with some big caveats. Theaters sold about $7.46 billion worth of tickets in the United States in 2022, led by mega-sequels to Top Gun and some beautiful blue creatures in Avatar.

Speaking of screen time, it’s off the charts. The average time a U.S. adult spent looking at a screen each day increased 60 to 80 percent during the pandemic. That’s everything from phones and video calls to the television shows and movies we binge — one view is that we have the world at our fingertips, so why go anywhere or do anything?

Travel has resumed. “We are eating out again, visiting faraway friends, taking family trips — activities that were unthinkable even during parts of last year, especially for older folks,” says Pauline Frommer, editorial director of Frommer’s guides. After years of isolation, multigenerational travel is up 50 percent. Even cruise lines — the original petri dish of the coronavirus — are booking up again. Older travelers are going the extra mile: Nearly 40 percent of people 65 or older say they prioritize traveling out of state, and more than half those travelers prioritize trips to visit family or friends.

At the same time, smaller cities are thriving. “The pandemic provided a necessary reset button for many destinations,” says Bert Sperling, founder of the website Best Places, who says the influx of new populations in towns across America means “things are a lot more cosmopolitan in places like Billings and Missoula and Boise” than in 2019. “You can get a great cappuccino where you couldn’t get one before.”

However... moviegoing is still down 34 percent from the pre-pandemic year of 2019. The problem hasn’t been only a fear of crowds but a movie shortage, as many films — including most smaller, independent films — went straight to streaming and productions in general were slowed by COVID. Although hotels and restaurants are busy again, widespread staff shortages mean “you might not see daily housekeeping or receive the attentive service you did before 2020,” Frommer says. Ditto on reliable flights or counting on your luggage to arrive safely; witness the Southwest Airlines debacle this past holiday season. “Travel insurance is suddenly booming for cruises and vacation rentals,” she says.

Retirement plans

We are focusing hard on money...

But cracks appear in the nest egg.

Financing our post-work years is focus number one. Across four generations surveyed in a recent poll, 76 percent said their life priorities changed due to the pandemic, and 56 percent said they were prioritizing retirement savings. Regardless of respondents’ political affiliation, Social Security is a unifier. Retirees this year are getting an 8.7 percent Social Security cost-of-living adjustment, the biggest in decades, which is fortunate: 40 percent of boomers said they expected Social Security to be their primary source of retirement income. Savings found some renewed vigor too. More than 4 in 10 near-retirees in one 2021 survey said that they had started saving more since the pandemic began.

However... Retirement has been postponed. Millions retired early during the pandemic, but with a tight labor market and rising prices on almost everything, “unretiring” is in vogue. So is extending one’s retirement horizon. COVID prompted about a third of Americans to change the age they anticipate retiring, with nearly 40 percent of respondents in one survey adding three to five years, and 35 percent adding nearly a decade of expected work years. Even as the average American nest egg fell by 11 percent in 2022 to $86,869, down from $98,800 a year earlier, according to another survey, the amount Americans think they need for retirement increased by 20 percent over that same period, to at least $1.25 million.

Rethinking how we think

We are feeling good...

Though the divide with others is real.

Fear of death has dropped and happiness has risen. Perhaps the most hopeful news three years after the start of the pandemic is that older people managed to stay the happiest during those years. Surveys consistently show that, compared with younger populations, people 60-plus score more positively on a wide variety of daily emotions. About 2 in 3 of the oldest adults, 80 and older, say they are living their “best possible life” or close to it, compared with just 1 in 5 younger adults, according to National Geographic and AARP research.

“The pandemic showed how important the perspective of age can be,” says Carstensen, from the Stanford Center on Longevity. Even the fear of death is decreasing with age in the time of COVID, the study shows. Though more than 20 percent of people 49 and younger say they fear death “extremely or very much,” those numbers fall to 10 percent among respondents ages 70 to 79 and to 4 percent in those 80-plus.

Stress has actually decreased. In a well-publicized study last fall, scores of young adults reported being moodier and more prone to stress during the pandemic. But for older people, that wasn’t true. Older people reported getting less neurotic. “I think because older adults have so much more stability in their personality, social support networks and day-to-day activities, they were disrupted much less than younger people,” says Angelina Sutin, the Florida State University researcher who oversaw the study.

However... even after all this upheaval, we remain a country firmly divided. When the nonpartisan Pew Research Center surveyed people in 17 countries, Americans were the most likely to say their society was split along partisan, racial and ethnic lines. The U.S. also reports more religious division than almost any other country surveyed. If all this information isn’t troubling enough, all the misinformation should be: Rumors about unproven miracle cures, claims about dangerous technology lurking in masks and about the efficacy of vaccines — “false information takes us back a step for every step forward,” internist Guerrasio says, “and older people cannot afford that.”

Editor's note: Answers have been edited for clarity and brevity.​