Tyler Robinson was twenty-two when he pulled the trigger. His adolescence had unfolded in lockdown, his friendships mediated through screens, his worldview shaped by algorithmic feeds that rewarded outrage over understanding. On September 10, 2025, at Utah Valley University in Orem, he ended the life of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk with a single shot.

Within minutes of Kirk’s death, the information ecosystem exploded. Twitter threads fantasised about the shooter’s politics. Cable news panels speculated about his motivations. Foreign state media amplified contradictory narratives designed to fracture American society further. The blame machine whirred to life, transforming tragedy into content, grief into weaponized performance.

I keep coming back to that moment. Because it seems to capture something horrifying, and hard to face, and crucialabout where we are now, five years after the pandemic began rewiring Western civilization.

Robinson wasn’t a member of some underground cell or disciplined political movement. He was a product of our new normal: isolated, angry, lost, algorithmically radicalized, trained to understand human conflict as performance for an invisible audience. If you raise kids to fear contact and worship the feed, don’t be shocked when the feed writes the script for their most desperate acts.

The story of the post-COVID West isn’t about recovery or resilience. We are a society running on a glitch. We work differently, socialize differently, trust differently, and vote differently. The pandemic killed ways of life that sustained democratic societies for generations, and in their place we seem to have either created or inherited something darker, lonelier, and more volatile.

An entire generation came of age during lockdown, spending their formative staring at rectangles instead of faces, their social education conducted through comment sections rather than cafeterias. Robinson’s generation learned conflict resolution through blocks and bans, emotional regulation through algorithmic dopamine hits, and community through parasocial relationships with influencers and streamers. They missed the ordinary cruelties and graces that teach young people how to be human together.

Teens who lived through COVID describe feeling “socially rusty” years after restrictions lifted. Basic social skills — reading facial expressions, navigating group dynamics, tolerating disagreement without flight or fight responses — atrophied during their screen years. Many report anxiety in face-to-face situations that would have been routine for previous generations: ordering food at restaurants, making small talk with strangers, sitting through meetings without the escape hatch of muting or logging off.

This social brittleness isn’t confined to teenagers. Adults across the West emerged from lockdown with shortened fuses and thinned social networks. The habits that had sustained community life — casual encounters at coffee shops, weekly gatherings at churches and clubs, the weak ties that sociologists tell us are crucial for social cohesion — withered during the isolation years. Even after restrictions ended, too many people kept living more isolated lives. Americans now spend roughly fifty-one minutes less per day on out-of-home activities compared to 2019. It’s a behavioral residue that weakens the civic glue holding democracies, societies, even towns and suburbs and streets together.

The psychological toll is immense. Rates of anxiety and depression have soared, particularly among young adults. By 2023, roughly one in five Americans reported feeling lonely “a lot of the day,” equivalent to about fifty-two million people struggling with frequent isolation. The World Health Organization has declared loneliness a global epidemic, noting that prolonged social isolation carries mortality risks equivalent to smoking fifteen cigarettes daily.

But the damage isn’t individualized; it’s collective. Communities that gathered regularly — for worship, recreation, mutual aid — saw participation plummet. Church attendance fell during the pandemic and stayed down for many congregations. Movie theaters struggled with lower usage. Public transit ridership remains depressed in many cities. Our social tissue simply didn’t regenerate.

With physical communities weakened, digital communities “flourished”, but they operated according to different rules. Online spaces reward the most provocative voices, amplify the most extreme positions, and create echo chambers that harden rather than complicate political identities. We lost the muscle memory of democratic engagement while gaining fluency in performative outrage.

And a society that stopped practicing togetherness started voting like strangers. The post-COVID political landscape became defined by a relentless anti-incumbent reflex, with voters systematically punishing whoever happened to be in charge when the bills came due. This wasn’t logical and it wasn’t ideological; it was more visceral than anything else. From Germany to Canada, from France to Australia, established governments fell as citizens expressed their frustration with persistent inflation, degraded services, and institutions that seemed simultaneously overbearing and incompetent.

Voters weren’t necessarily embracing alternative policy platforms; they were simply rejecting the status quo with increasing ferocity. In 2022, the developed world witnessed the largest wipeout of incumbent governments since World War II. The message was clear: if you were in power when things got worse, you had to go.

Why did this anti-establishment rage take hold so deeply?

The price level — not the abstract and (for more folks than we’d like to think) hard to grok inflation rate, but the actual cost of living — jumped during the COVID years and never came back down. People don’t experience inflation rates, they live on a higher price floor. Every trip to the grocery store has become a small humiliation, a reminder that our money buys less than it used to.

Meanwhile, the quality of services that people depended on deteriorated. Flight cancellations became routine. Hospital wait times stretched. School systems remained chaotic years after reopening. Government agencies, from the DMV to the unemployment office, operated with reduced capacity and increased dysfunction. Citizens found themselves paying more for worse service across both private and public sectors.

Maybe the most corrosive: the rules governing daily life seemed arbitrary and constantly changing. Mask mandates appeared and disappeared based on shifting scientific guidance and political calculations. Travel restrictions swung from draconian to nonexistent with little explanation. Business closures followed logic that ordinary people couldn’t decode. And it built up, into a crisis of institutional legitimacy that persisted long after emergency measures ended.

Trust in government, media, and scientific institutions have plummeted. By 2023, only 35% of Americans expressed trust in the federal government to do the right thing, near historic lows. Similar trends emerged across Europe regarding national governments and the European Union. The expert class that had promised to manage the pandemic competently had delivered years of chaos, mixed messaging, and uneven results. Their credibility never recovered.

And into that churn, that fuckery, walked the only politician who promised vengeance rather than repair: Donald Trump. His return to power in 2024 was the COVID hangover in executive form. Trump 2.0 reaped everything that the pandemic years had planted: resentment over institutional failure, skepticism toward expert guidance, and a desire to punish someone, anyone, **everyone* for how our lives have fallen apart.

Trump’s second-term agenda reads like a catalog of pandemic grievances translated into policy. The universal tariffs that took effect in April 2025 — a 10% baseline on all imports, with higher “reciprocal” rates for specific countries — were the natural result of the economic nationalism that had grown stronger during supply chain disruptions. If global integration made America vulnerable to shortages and price shocks, the solution was aggressive protectionism, regardless of the cost to consumers.

The immigration crackdowns that started on day one channeled the cultural backlash against cosmopolitan elites who had imposed lockdown rules while relying on “essential workers” to stock their groceries and deliver their meals. If the laptop class could work from home while service workers risked infection, then service work should go to American citizens, whatever the impact on labor markets and economic growth.

Trump’s public battles with statistical agencies and the Federal Reserve play out the populist suspicion of technocratic authority that crystallized during the pandemic. If the Bureau of Labor Statistics couldn’t accurately count jobs, and if the Fed couldn’t prevent inflation, then these institutions deserved political pain rather than professional deference. The firewall between technical expertise and partisan politics, already weakened by COVID controversies, crumbled entirely.

The economic consequences were entirely predictable. Tariffs drove up prices for import-dependent businesses while providing limited protection for domestic industries. Immigration enforcement reduced labor supply in sectors already struggling with worker shortages, driving up costs for elder care, food service, and construction. Political interference with monetary policy undermined confidence in financial markets while complicating the Fed’s efforts to manage inflation.

But Trump didn’t invent the hangover; he monetized it. The policies were secondary to the emotional appeal of a leader who acknowledged that things had gotten worse and promised to make someone pay. To make anyone pay. In a society where institutional trust had collapsed and social bonds had frayed, the politics of revenge felt more authentic than the politics of repair.

What people felt in their daily lives was a grinding combination of financial pressure and social isolation. Groceries and gasoline still cost more than before the pandemic, but paychecks hadn’t kept pace with the higher price floor. Job markets were simultaneously tight and precarious, with labor shortages in some sectors and layoff anxiety in others. The economic recovery that politicians celebrated in statistics felt hollow to families struggling with persistent inflation and stagnant wages.

Culturally, the shift was even more profound. Politics had become the primary form of entertainment for millions of people who had lost other sources of meaning and community. Policy debates transformed into spectacle, with every tragedy immediately converted into content for the outrage machine. The murder of Charlie Kirk follows this pattern perfectly: within hours, his death had been weaponized by partisans across the political spectrum, with foreign adversaries amplifying the most divisive narratives to maximize domestic chaos.

This feedback loop — isolation leading to anger, anger leading to protest votes, protest votes leading to harsher policies, harsher policies leading to higher baseline costs and greater precarity, and greater precarity leading to more isolation and anger — is the defining dynamic of post-pandemic politics. Each turn of the cycle makes democratic discourse more difficult and violent solutions more appealing to those who felt locked out of normal channels of political participation.

The lone-actor violence that punctuates this period is a sign of the pathologies of the broader system. The assassin of the 2020s doesn’t need a manifesto or movement; he needs only a motive cocktail and a feed. Robinson’s Discord messages revealed someone who had absorbed years of political rage through algorithmic amplification, transforming personal grievances into public violence. His generation has been trained to understand conflict as performance, and murder is the ultimate performance for an audience of millions.

Each incident of political violence re-polarizes the Western world faster than facts can load. The information ecosystem that evolved during the pandemic, optimized for engagement and to hell with the truth, tribal identity and to hell with shared understanding — turned every tragedy into a weapon. Foreign state media, recognizing the vulnerability, has routinely amplified false narratives designed to deepen Western divisions. We are, all of us, a collection of “societies” where violence begats more violence, beats more violence.

This is where plaguenomics has left us: broke, isolated, and furious. The economic dimension is straightforward — the price floor moved up and never came down, making every checkout a punch in the gut for families whose incomes hadn’t kept pace. The social dimension is more complex — fewer clubs, fewer pubs, more doomscrolling. The political dimension ties them together in a politics of payback that (historically speaking) always emerges when paychecks don’t stretch and institutions don’t persuade.

We are simultaneously hyper-connected and profoundly alone. We live in the most networked society in human history, and we report unprecedented levels of loneliness. We have access to more information than any previous generation, but our trust in facts has collapsed. We have technologies that should enable unprecedented cooperation, but we act the collective fool.

A Republican defeat in 2028 won’t solve anything. Neither will a European political renaissance. It barely matters whether or not the AfD achieves their electoral goals. Why? Because technical fixes won’t solve cultural problems. Unwinding blanket tariffs would help prices settle into some kind of normal range, if normal exists, but they won’t restore the social trust we need to have any kind of faithful democratic governance. Building housing at scale would address affordability, but it won’t rebuild the civic institutions that connect strangers. Funding youth mental health programs would treat symptoms, but it won’t address the algorithmic systems that created them.

And ultimately, the incentives to solve any of these problems in a way that matters, in a way that is anything more than cosmetic, run in the opposite direction. Outrage pays, algorithms reward escalation, and loneliness is profitable. The platforms that dominate who we are and how we understand each other are driven by division, not consensus. The political system rewards performers who can generate viral moments, and leaders who can build coalitions are toast. The economic system increasingly concentrates wealth and power in ways that undermine the middle-class stability that democratic societies require.

And meanwhile the demographic and technological trends that accelerated during the pandemic keep reshaping Western societies in ways that make actually building back better more difficult. Remote work reduces the casual interactions that build social capital. Online education diminishes the shared experiences that create generational cohesion. Digital entertainment replaces community activities that brought us together.

And that’s without addressing the growing appeal of authoritarianism among young people who have lost faith in democratic institutions. Recent polling shows surprising support for strongman leadership among voters under thirty, a generation that has witnessed primarily institutional failure during their formative political years.

The murder of Charlie Kirk will fade from headlines — our attention simply can no longer sustain one topic for more than a few weeks at a time — replaced by new outrages and fresh performances. But the conditions that produced Tyler Robinson — social isolation, economic precarity, algorithmic radicalization, institutional distrust — will persist (and persist, and persist) until we choose to address them systematically.

In short: we need a cultural project the rebuild the habits and institutions that made it possible for us to live with each other.

The West didn’t collapse overnight; COVID frayed us thread by thread, then all at once. We need to choose connection over convenience, community over consumption, and the patience of institution-building over immediate gratification. Until // unless we make those choices, we’ll keep living in the shadow of the pandemic, isolated and angry, wondering why our politics has become so violent and our society so fragile.

God forgive me, and may the comments section laugh at me, but I am optimistic about our willingness to undertake this work. The same technologies and incentives that created our current predicament can be used to shape our responses to it. If we can engineer problems that keep us apart, we can engineer solutions.

If we can’t find our way back, the alternative is more Tyler Robinsons, more violence, more algorithmic acceleration and more human rage. Our trajectory isn’t sustainable. Plaguenomics gave us a civilization optimized for keeping us apart. Whether we build something better depends on whether we can remember what it means to be together.