Hello and welcome to a solo edition of Ask Me Anything of IWay with Jamila Jamil, a podcast against shame.

I hope you're well. I am all right. I'm travelling at the moment, so that's why I don't have a guest,

but I'm going to do my best to answer your personal and wonderful questions today,

kicking off with a very lighthearted, how do you think culture has shifted post-COVID?

I think the way in which it's improved is that we have developed more awareness because the

world stopped moving so fast and we had time to actually think about things properly and start to learn more about ourselves and the world. And I think a lot of us changed our valley systems because we realized that we were just in this, I think a lot of us realized anyway that we've been in this rat race. And what if everything just ends tomorrow? What if we all just die from this terrible new virus?

Have we lived our lives properly or have we spent our entire lives at work waiting until we're dead

or retired to rest? And so loads of people left their big jobs and moved out to the countryside

and started growing their own vegetables and living more holistically.

Other people became more grateful and aware of their health, so I think that was good.

However, I also feel as though COVID brought about hyper individualism because we were in lockdown,

we were isolated from each other, we were on our own. We were spending far too much time online.

Social media algorithms are designed to be divisive and to pull us apart and to stoke outrage.

Outrage is what travels the fastest. It used to be sex that would sell, but now it's outrage

that really sells. And I think it created a monster within our society, a real beast.

I think that we became the most tribal I have ever seen us in my lifetime.

I'm sure there have been more tribal periods throughout history,

but in the 30-something years that I've been alive,

I have never seen people behave this way.

It became very us versus them, whether it was

the vaccine or whether it was the masks or any of these things. And then, you know, I guess the

conversations around race and everything that followed, everything became us versus them.

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