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I realized for a while now, that word “quarantine” for us became just a casual word. It’s all over the social media, TV, newspaper, products etc. It gained so much more purpose over these 2 years. It became selling point in many products (ex. masks), it is used in many campaigns and now even in movies. It’s now harder to not see any “quarantine related thing” than ever before.  It is becoming more apparent that the old version of our world isn’t coming back. Most people just measure time before and after COVID. When before march 2020 was the last time, we used the word- quarantine? Probably in movies or textbooks. Personally, I didn’t even know how to spell quarantine correctly until COVID hit. The word earned so much more meaning, from the word that described something surreal and distant to something really close to people all over the world.

 For the last couple of days, I’ve noticed many young people sharing and liking anti-vaccine content on social media. I’m not only talking about teens in Poland but also from the English-speaking countries. There was a burst of many conversations about a rightness of the vaccine. Statements like: we don’t need herd immunity, vaccines have microchips in them etc.  In my opinion, many teens base their knowledge about Covid-19 vaccines on fake news and misinformation. They learn and read from unchecked sources, and they create their opinion even without asking why? They seem to take everything for what it is, not interested in how or why it came to be. It’s like nowadays, fake is mistaken as real and real as fake. And the fake news culture should take a blame for that. I believe, it’s destroying a critical and reasonable thinking. And at some point, things will start to be dangerous for everybody.

Every now and then when I’m out in public, I see little kids with electronic devices with access to the Internet. But last week when I was in the shopping mall, I passed by the group of kids who were comparing likes on their profiles in a very heated way. I passed by them and I couldn’t stop myself from laughing, but also in some way being disappointed in a modern society.  This moment really got me thinking about this ongoing “modern” issue, which puts children in a digital world far too soon. I can’t comprehend that nowadays difference in likes can lead to an argument between friends. Those kids were around 9 or 10 years old. I wonder if they even know how damaging Internet could be for them. In my opinion, society is putting too much technology in children’s hands. Even though we all know how badly that could harm them.