Right now, we can travel, go to concerts and sporting events - it's starting to feel much more normal.
That's despite COVID-19 still lingering and new variants outpacing vaccines.
But the uncertainty we're all living through might have a silver lining.
It's been nearly two and a half years of controlled chaos - a long and winding road we've travelled - but where to now?
No matter what life stage you're at, it seems everyone agrees we've learnt one thing.
"The most common response to all types of potentially traumatic events is resilience," said Lucy Hone, who has a master's degree in resilience.
That's like in Christchurch, which lived through thousands of earthquakes - where the ongoing uncertainty felt scary, sad and unsettling, and everyone was forced to come up with techniques to cope. Those techniques came in handy during the pandemic as we again had to live every day dealing with events beyond our control.
"There's absolute evidence that some things have changed due to the earthquakes that have better equipped us to deal with the pandemic," Hone told Newshub Investigates.
Resilience helps steer us through our time on this planet and whatever adversity, challenge, trauma or change we will have to face in our lives.
"Try and focus all of your attention on what you can change and influence within those really strict parameters that have been forced upon you," Hone said.
We've all heard of post-traumatic stress but what you may not have heard of is post-traumatic growth.
"[There's] a growing body of scientific literature that shows, actually, it's more common for humans to grow from trauma than to get post-traumatic stress," said Hone.
But how do you grow, or get over it, when it's not over?
"This virus is going to be circulating around the globe for many decades to come," said Graham Le Gros, an immunologist and one of New Zealand's top COVID-19 experts.
One of the golden tickets, according to Prof Le Gros, is better vaccines - there are about 190 currently being worked on around the world.
"We've got to get it right otherwise in 50 years' time… our kids and kids' kids will be dealing with this again and it will cost the world trillions," he said.
The man who steered New Zealand's COVID-19 response, Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield, agreed better vaccines were the key.
"None of us want to be having boosters every three or six months, so - vaccines with longer protection and ones that afford protection across a range of variants," he said.
But Dr Bloomfield won't be at the helm when those vaccines arrive. Like everyone, he's ready for some downtime.
"I'm looking forward to the break and just being able to step away from the intensity, and the pace of work," Dr Bloomfield said.
Now the health response has moved beyond lockdowns, some sense of normality has returned at every life stage.
But for all of us, "the impacts are going to be rather larger than we anticipated", according to sociologist Paul Spoonley.
Spoonley's biggest concerns coming out of the pandemic are school dropouts and the anti-social impact.
"I think graffiti is one of those indicators - in the last six months, the level of graffiti has gone up exponentially," he said.
The pandemic has widened the gap between rich and poor and it's changed both how and where we work.
We're having fewer babies and the pandemic has also impacted our mortality in a surprising way.
"There are three countries; Taiwan, the Netherlands and New Zealand that have seen an increase in life expectancy and in our case, it's about eight months," Spoonley said.
So, we're living longer but the chaos of COVID-19 might just mean we're living stronger too.
"Resilience is built within us," Hone said. "We have it within us to get through all sorts of terrible stuff but, really, it's massively built between us."
There's one thing we've all needed over the COVID-19 years and we will still need to cling on to it for some time - hope.
"We talk in resilience psychology about 'realistic optimism,' - you've got to keep that hope for the future because hope seriously is the fuel that drives us forward."
Watch Newshub Investigates: Generation COVID in full on ThreeNow.
