If there's one thing we know about social media, it's that misinformation is everywhere,

especially when it comes to personal finance.

Financially inclined from Marketplace is a podcast you can trust to help you get serious about your money

so you can build a life you've always dreamed of.

I'm the host, Janelli Espinal, and each week I ask experts important money questions,

like how to negotiate job offers, how to choose a college that you can afford, and how to talk

about money with friends and family. Listen to financially inclined wherever you get your podcasts.

Everybody listening right now has survived COVID. Some of us had a rough go of it. Some have suffered the strange miseries of long COVID, but all of us are here today. We have that in common. The other thing we have in common, including the small fraction of us who never got sick at all, is that the pandemic changed us. From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd. The ways that COVID

shaped the country were impossible to ignore in the earliest days of lockdowns and masks and

parking lot test sites. But my guest lays out the case in a recent New York Times opinion article

that some of the most significant effects happened well beyond

the health care system. The greatest lingering effect of the pandemic may be on how we view our

fellow citizens. David Wallace Wells is a science writer and essayist. His New York Times article was

titled, How COVID Remade America. David, welcome to think. Thank so much for having me. The biggest change you note,

honestly, is counterintuitive. For a while, we all followed the same recommendations together,

but the end result of all this was that we became hyper individualists. What do you mean by that?

Well, when I look back on the early days of the pandemic, I'm honestly kind of inspired by the amount of breathtaking solidarity that we showed out of concern for one another and obviously to some degree out of fear.

We basically all of us across the country and indeed all across the world suspended huge portions of our lives for a period of weeks

or months, depending on how you want to count, in order to protect one another and to limit

the amount of spread of this virus.

And that lasted months maybe into the summer of 2020.

And when we started to return to something like our normal lives as the pandemic

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