This chapter addresses gaslighting and the post COVID experience. As COVID restrictions were withdrawn and the reporting of daily numbers of those dying and contracting the virus waned in the public arena, there seemed to be an overwhelming sense that the experience of COVID itself would also magically evaporate: the deaths, the anger, the despair, the mourning and the ill health. Drawing on Rene Girard’s work on the function of desire and cultural violence, and Gregory Bateson’s double-bind theory, this chapter will provide some critical philosophical understandings on how gaslighting (the undermining of people’s sense of reality) emerges in the context of long COVID and how this gaslighting is symptomatic of different forms of the psychodynamics of cultural violence in daily life and social relationships. The aim of this essay, then, is to explore the cultural violence of gaslighting and how it impacts on the experience of ‘COVID’, long, short and thereafter—since when does it ever end?