Is It Possible to Live a Meaningful Life In a Post-Pandemic Era?

The COVID-19 pandemic put the world to a halt. People stayed home, isolated from family, friends, and support systems to slow the spread of this virus to prevent deaths and overwork of our healthcare system and front-line workers. Schools, air travel, and simple interactions with one another were brought to a halt through various regulations that needed to be followed. Some may view the pandemic as the worst thing to happen to them, and others may say that it positively changed their life. Bozdag (2021) found that individuals were experiencing various psychological effects, for example, depression, anxiety, mood disorders, fear, and post-traumatic stress disorder, and in contrast, some reported that "when individuals were asked to stay at home, they felt like they were perceived as acting responsibly and feeling safe." Therefore, posing the question, "is it possible to live a meaningful life in a post pandemic era", can be answered using the concept of existential positive psychology. Existential positive psychology "brings forth these two separate domains of psychology together" (Wong, 2010). Existential positive psychology focuses on the positives and negatives of life in the hope of promoting the understanding that we need one with the other and that life, in its entirety, cannot be completely negative or positive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]