Pandemic-Era Trends That Completely Died – A Look Back 6 Years Later

Remember When We Were All Doing This?

It's been six years since the COVID-19 pandemic upended daily life in 2020. BuzzFeed recently compiled a roundup sourced from Reddit highlighting 21 things that were wildly popular during the pandemic but have since completely vanished. The list has been making the rounds on r/AskReddit and r/nostalgia, triggering a wave of collective reflection.

Looking back, it's remarkable how seriously we took some of these things at the time.

The Pandemic Trends That Didn't Survive

The Home Hobby Craze

Sourdough bread baking: Remember when flour was sold out everywhere? Instagram feeds were nothing but sourdough starter photos. Quick question — is your sourdough starter still alive? Didn't think so.
Banana bread recipes: The companion trend to sourdough. It was once the most-searched recipe on the internet. Now it barely registers.
Dalgona coffee: Hundreds of thousands of people willingly whipped instant coffee for minutes on end to make a frothy drink. It was a moment.

Media and Entertainment

Tiger King mania: Netflix's "Tiger King" was THE cultural event of early lockdown. Joe Exotic was briefly the most talked-about person in America. Now the show feels like a fever dream.
Zoom happy hours: Every evening brought another virtual toast with colleagues, friends, or family. These days, most people feel physical dread when they hear a Zoom notification.
Home workout challenges: TikTok fitness challenges and at-home workout programs peaked during gym closures, then vanished the moment gyms reopened.

Everyday Life Shifts

Sanitizing everything: There was a phase where people wiped down every delivery package and grocery item with disinfectant. Entire YouTube tutorials existed for this.
Clapping for healthcare workers: The nightly tradition of opening windows and applauding was genuinely moving — and lasted about three weeks.
Drive-through everything: Drive-through graduations, drive-through birthday parties, drive-through weddings. The format was stretched to its absolute limits.

Reddit's Collective Reflection

The r/AskReddit thread has become a space for people to compare their pandemic selves with who they are now:

"I treated my sourdough starter like a child and abandoned it within three months"
"I thought I'd miss Zoom happy hours. I absolutely do not."
"The fact that I watched Tiger King with genuine interest feels like it happened in another lifetime"
"The only pandemic habit that stuck was washing my hands properly"

What Disappeared vs. What Stayed

Not everything from the pandemic era vanished. Remote work settled into hybrid arrangements that persist today. Delivery culture expanded permanently. Streaming services became the dominant entertainment medium.

But the fleeting trends — the ones that felt so urgent and universal at the time — disappeared cleanly. In retrospect, many of these were collective coping mechanisms: shared activities that gave people a sense of connection and control during profoundly uncertain times.

Funny in Hindsight, but It Mattered

Six years on, pandemic-era trends look almost comical. But there's something worth acknowledging beneath the humor. Making sourdough, hosting Zoom happy hours, and collectively watching Tiger King were how millions of people got through an extraordinarily difficult period.

The trends died, but the shared experience of living through that time remains one of the defining generational moments for anyone who was there. Sometimes the silliest things are what hold us together when it matters most.