Across the nation, these two words can be seen in every single storefront: Now Hiring. There isn’t a business today that isn’t struggling to keep its doors open due to understaffing. As someone who works at one of these businesses, I can tell you that this is a real issue.

In the last few years, American adults have each been handed $3,200 in stimulus money due to the effects of COVID-19. This had to have been helpful for a large number of people, but along with that, unemployment benefits have skyrocketed, leading people to feel as though they’re better off not working.

An ex-coworker of mine once said to me, “I’m about to make more (money) on unemployment than I’m making here (at work).” While I cannot speak to exactly how true that was for him, I can speak to the mindset people have developed over this pandemic.

I have seen person after person go through my workplace who has absolutely zero work ethic, and I have no doubt that this carries over into their personal lives as well. While this doesn’t apply to everyone, there is an ever-growing number of lazy people in our society.

While I would love to accredit this apathy to the money doled out by the government, I simply cannot. Our generation has simply become a mosh pit for laziness, entitlement and impatience.

Not only has this pandemic taught us how to do everything (and I mean everything) from our beds, it has also taught us how to survive on other people. And that goes further than just government “gifts.”

I’ve had friends of mine ask me to spot them on a coffee then call into work the next day flat out lying, saying they were exposed to COVID-19. I haven’t experienced this as much in the past 6 months, so maybe people in my age group are maturing. However, I’m still very wary of trusting that our generation will be able to recover from the way this pandemic has trained us that it’s okay to act.

Even further than this, I’ve seen people lie about actually having the virus as well. An ex-coworker said they had COVID-19 and then posted about a road trip they were taking on social media. It’s hard not to cringe.

Not only is it embarrassing that they posted publicly about something when they had knowingly lied about the reason they weren’t at work for a couple weeks, but it’s embarrassing that they thought it was okay to lie about something that millions have died from.

There’s not even a good comparison to this because we’ve never had to deal with anything even remotely like this before. But that almost makes it worse.

Lying about a death in the family is awful. Lying about an illness in the family is also awful. Lying about your own illness is common, not always a huge deal, but still disrespectful. But lying about your own illness when it’s something that could kill those around you and their families? That’s just sickening.

People are taking advantage of this pandemic as a way to be lazy, and it’s giving them all of the tools to do so. Not only has this generation been entirely desensitized to the very real effects of COVID-19, and that’s not cool.

But it’s gone way too far.

So think twice before you quit your job. Think twice before you call in. Think twice before you skip class. Think twice before you make an entire workplace, classroom, or family scared for their health and possibly lives.

Think. Twice.