After two years of lockdowns and restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, some of us might be ready to put the 2020s behind us and focus on the future.
But can looking back at the past actually help us deal with the present?
Medieval historian and Senior Research Fellow Miles Pattenden, from the Australian Catholic University, suggested that looking back through history and what humanity has survived helps us rationalise present-day challenges.
"Sadly, plague has been a common recurrence throughout history," Mr Pattenden told ABC Radio Canberra.
"[COVID] has been pretty bad for a lot of us who have been locked up at home for long periods in Australia and elsewhere.
Mr Pattenden said history did not diminish the current COVID-19 pandemic but rather brought perspective to it.
He said that other pandemics did not have the benefits of medicine and science to treat them quickly, and pointed to "the really big one, the Black Death".
"We don't know exactly how many people died in the Black Death, but most historians would estimate it to be somewhere between a quarter and a third of the whole population of Europe and Asia," he said.
"[It] swept across Asia and then Europe, starting in about 1347. And it came through in several waves.
Mr Pattenden said humans often forgot about these kinds of historical disasters.
"If you spend too long thinking about all the things that can go wrong or that have gone wrong in the past, you never learn to enjoy your life," he said.
"I think that's probably a coping mechanism for much of humanity."
So what purpose then, if anything, can looking back at things like plague, pestilence, war and natural disaster achieve?
How can history help us cope in the present?
Mr Pattenden said knowing a little bit about these life-changing historical events could give us hope.
"It helps make me a more optimistic person because you see all the all the kinds of problems that people have encountered and confronted before, and somehow they've got through it all," Mr Pattenden said.
Mr Pattenden puts the year 536 AD as "the worst year to be alive" due to three volcanic eruptions which led to the sun being blocked out for more than a decade, but said that having knowledge of these kinds of medieval events could "put COVID into some perspective".
"The other thing that I take from episodes like this is that the old saying that the darkest moment is just before the dawn it isn't usually true," he added.
Professor at the College of Health and Medicine at the Australian National University, Kate Reynolds, said that lessons from history were only one part of what was needed to stay optimistic amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
"I think it's very hard to compare hazards and disasters like that ... I mean, we've had a different set of circumstances, some countries have different supports in place, we've had different technology. It's had uneven impacts in the community, so I think they're hard judgements to make," she said.
"It's been immensely challenging, there's been huge uncertainty, there's been huge disruption. COVID's had uneven impacts, affecting people in very different kinds of ways – and it's been ongoing."
Rather, Professor Reynolds said maintaining strong social connections was the key to wellbeing.
"I guess that reinforces how important it is to nurture and strengthen those social relationships and our connections with other."
Professor Reynolds also added that a "silver lining" of the pandemic was that many people took the time to re-evaluate their lives.
"There's lots of talk of things like people reassessing their values, reassessing when and how they work, perhaps even becoming kinder and connecting more with those around them," she said.
