As a childless person who cooks fine, the hardest part of this pandemic has been the mental toll of the sudden loss of everything that gives my life meaning- nights out with friends, concerts, festivals, etc.

I don't have the fortune of getting a sense of meaning from being a parent.

Go ahead and tell me how the things I get meaning from pale in comparison to being a parent and how I just need to suck it up. Does that make this pandemic any less depressing for childfree people? No, it doesn't.

Your burden is real. The loss of connection you suffer, especially if you live alone, is legitimately devastating. Very few amongst us can go indefinitely without an on-going external investment of care. While I believe that it's just to provide parents with the slack they need to continue as healthy contributors, I also firmly believe that we owe you and all those that suffer differently, an incomparable, but adjacent duty to provide care and support in the ways that address your needs.

As far as I can tell, the right course of action would be for each of us, parent or otherwise, to outwardly acknowledge the ways that the pandemic has harmed us and the ways others could support us, while also advocating for and contributing to the well-being of our peers.

So long as we're focused on receiving a fungible equity that compares directly to our peers, I think that we will be grabbing at ever less valuable scraps of a torn social fabric while ultimately denying ourselves and our peers the benefits that would provide the satisfaction of a high-trust emotionally robust collaborative environment.

Sometimes it’s meaning but most of the time it’s like having a Second except job running a gas station except your night shift employees quit so you gotta work full time at both. If you want to know what it’s like start a side hustle and put another 8hrs in during the week and 14 on the weekends, you’ll probably get the same amount of meaning out of it - no seriously. When you are ready to have kids quit one of your jobs and you won’t skip a beat

There's also arguably more psychological impact on young single people who live by themselves and are used to and rely on the companionship of friends.

I worked with a couple of youngish folks that have just recently moved for work internationally. They've been in the new city from a few weeks to a couple of months when the lockdowns hit. They seem pretty isolated socially and now even as things are opening up a bit, the avenues for socializing and meeting new people in a new city is greatly reduced.

> At least in the US, the pandemic has changed everyone's life created stress for everyone. These policies seem to indicate that non-parents don't have an additional burden worth recognizing.

This is spot on. The article uses multiple quotes from business leaders that, paraphrased, say "everyone has challenges" yet not one mention of any policies to help non-parents who may also be struggling with mental health issues or otherwise.

Is this a joke? My 12 year old son would be able to cook for himself if it was required. Of course the kitchen would be a total mess. With instructions like the video below everybody can learn how to cook within a few days.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw_Ze9zIafM

As someone who loves to cook, I don't fully agree.

60% of cooking is logistics: knowing what to eat, setting time aside for grocery shopping and meal preparation, and keeping food waste to a minimum. In my opinion, this is a lot harder than the actual cooking.

If you've never done it before, it's surprisingly hard. Cooking in a well-organised, well-stocked kitchen is very different from starting with an empty pantry, blunt knives and no idea of what to do.

I have a hard time agreeing with this. Cooking things like hot dogs, dogs and beans, pasta and meat sauce, etc... that's relatively simple for anyone. And it can be done for the time being until they figure out how to cook better things; things that will make them happy. The ability to ease your way into cooking for one's self should make it relatively trivial.

Honestly, compared to figuring out how to work from home without losing 50% of your productivity (for someone that wasn't already setup for it), the food part seems easy.

By the time I was 14, my brother would have been 10, my mom just bought us the right ingredients and frozen foods and we managed to make ourselves 80% of our meals.

This is over 15 years ago, and there was no pandemic going on. It was worthwhile even then and helped me be better prepared for moving out of my parents house.

FWIW, my brother and sister who were both younger than me when we started preparing food are significantly better and healthier cooks than me today. So starting to cook earlier, as long as it is safe, has only helped.

I just remember what cooking was like when I moved out of my parents' house. It was daunting at first.

Just to be clear, I was just adding to the conversation. I agree with you that the transition won't tank your productivity and make you a nervous wreck.

I agree with this.

As a person who is single and just moved far away from my parents to work, having to cook at home isn't hard. Acquisition and management of ingredients is hard. Cooking for one is annoying, it's hard to even buy ingredients that won't go bad faster than I can eat them.

Additionally, my whole life was tuned around having food and transportation from work. Given no time to prepare, I now have no car, and I'm unable to carry lots of food back from each trip to the store. Each trip to the store also carries a certain necessary amount of COVID caution.

I'm aware that many of these problems are problems for people with families as well, but I've definitely felt some exacerbation due to living alone, not having a car, and not having anyone else to help me cook or to cook for.

Consider that the issues may be psychological. I'm sure I could learn how to cook, I already know how to make a few things. But finding the strength to plan meals, to choose what to eat and then to prepare it when you're not really interested in the food and nothing really tastes that good is a lot harder.

I don't own a scale but I wouldn't be surprised if I lost weight since I started working from home. And not in a good way...I've always eaten insufficiently but at least in the office there was food readily available so I ate about two meals per day. Now I'm eating about once per day and I'm perpetually hungry.

My point is that everyone has different struggles. What seems trivial to one person can be a lifelong struggle for someone else. For many, the disruption caused by this pandemic upsets a very delicate house of cards that kept them sane and functioning. Some of those people might even be parents. :)