8 Things Unexpectedly Affected By The COVID-19 Lockdown

The Environment

Sure, we figured things would be a bit different in the air when people stopped clogging up EDSA on a daily basis, but we did not expect this drastic drop in pollution worldwide: with greenhouse gases being 23% directly from transportation, this lockdown has proven what Greta Thunberg has been complaining about for so long: it can be done. It’s just too bad it required a worldwide pandemic to get people to ease up on the fossil fuels.

Work-From-Home

There has been a lot of resistance to letting people work-from-home from people who still don’t realize we are now connected by the internet, and it took this lockdown for a lot of them to second-guess every “conventional wisdom” they held dear about keeping tabs on their employees. As some companies needed to function in the middle of lockdown, the employers reluctantly allowed their people to do their work from home, and the experiment turned out… pretty well, actually.

After this lockdown, there has to be a long, hard dialogue about giving people the ability to work from home if the work can be accomplished, especially as we combine it with the environmental impact we’ve seen of having less people out on the road every single day. If someone can do just as good a job onsite as from the comfort of their home, then why not spare them the extra two or so hours of daily transportation woes, often accounting for billions of losses in unproductivity every single year?

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Gaming

Most gamers probably saw this coming, but Nintendo clearly didn’t, as they are now facing a worldwide shortage as people want to do some good ol’ console gaming at home. It might seem odd why people haven’t taken to the PS4 or XBOX One in similar fashion, but aside from the PS5 coming out most likely at the end of 2020 or early 2021, you can’t exactly play the PS4 while you’re sitting in the toilet. Because even when it comes to gaming, people want to be efficient, dammit.

Dalgona Coffee and Sourdough Bread

Nobody expected any food trends to come up in the middle of this lockdown except maybe new and exciting ways to cook instant noodles, but lo and behold, Dalgona Coffee and Sourdough Bread are inexplicably popular right now. Then again, if it’s easy to do, new, and anyone locked indoors can probably get around to doing it, then maybe this makes sense.

Professional Wrestling

Where other sports just plain shut down their seasons indefinitely, pro wrestling, or at least the main show everyone in the world knows, the WWE, has decided to keep trucking along in empty arenas with the barest number of people legally allowable to keep the show going. It’s wildly irresponsible, but it’s also mind-blowing.

It’s quite a sight to behold as a spectacle that was always best viewed live and with incredibly participatory audiences (yes, even more than late-night talk shows) suddenly takes away half of its appeal. No chants, no cheers, no boos, yet the wrestlers, trained for their entire careers to pander to a crowd, pander away still into the oblivion, making for a combination nobody expected possible: half-naked musclebound men, ruthless aggression, and existential dread.

The Miz’s commitment to cheap heat even with no audience is deeply admirable. pic.twitter.com/fBKBcWLHaT

— Mith Gifs Wrestling (@MithGifs) March 17, 2020

Shakespeare couldn’t have written this better.

There’s also the awkward grunts and sounds these wrestlers make suddenly being the focal part of every match instead of the crowd reaction, which makes people think it’s not wrestling you’re watching if they’re not looking at the screen. Wrestling has simply become a wildly different animal in the middle of this pandemic.

Podcasts

Even if you haven’t got much contact with the outside world beyond the internet, being on a Podcast makes you feel loud and heard, even more so than social media usually already does. The sheer number of people who are now podcasting while in lockdown is staggering. Truly, it is the greatest temptation that we must overcome at present, next only to…

Tiktok

While podcasts take a bit of effort to put together, making a Tiktok account doesn’t. It’s so effective and so ridiculously popular that it got Harry Roque rehired as presidential spokesperson. Maybe. With random challenges, meme dances, and so much more, this amazing Spyware from China is gaining as much popularity with even older people now. And the fact that it’s arguably as much a security nightmare as equally popular COVID-ready meeting app Zoom really makes the new Invisible Challenge terribly awkward now, doesn’t it?

Fortune Tellers

Earlier this year, Feng Shui Master Hanz Cua predicted that “2020 will be a prosperous, lucky year.” Whoops.

Not pictured: accuracy.

Unless we discover how to terraform Mars by December, it’s pretty safe to say that he and most other fortune tellers got this prediction wildly wrong, and with a bunch of people now awkwardly sharing their hilariously inaccurate guess of how great 2020 will be, a good chunk of these soothsayers might now have to look into their crystal balls for a new career. Bet they didn’t see that coming.

Got anything to add to the list? Tell us below!