Before COVID-19 is there any historical precedent for people "enjoying" a pandemic?
I occasionally see memes and comments about people looking back on 2020 with nostalgia because they didn't have to leave the house, they got to wear masks and not show their faces, etc. I can understand the cognitive dissonance since so many people are miserable and nostalgia always distorts things. It's also extremely calloused and the fact that people openly admit it and make jokes makes me wonder what it indicates.
My question is, is this entirely an internet-era thing or has there always been a subset of the population that existed and they're just more visible now? Did people ever claim that, for example, 1918 was a good year because of the flu?
u/KyleFromBorrasca — 6 days ago