The beautiful clarity of self-discovery in lockdown

In February 2020, I was convinced I was having a breakdown. It wasn’t just me, so many of my friends and other 20-somethings were similarly overwhelmed that sociologists gave it a cute new name, the Quarter-Life Crisis.

If you haven’t heard of it, the QLC is the younger, poorer cousin of the midlife crisis. It involves much of the same paralytic fear about who you are (i.e. you don’t know, and even if you do you’ve wasted your life not being it). But for us it’s also compounded by growing up in the era of millennial burnout, youth mental health crisis and digital rubbernecking of social media.

So however chipper our Instagram exteriors looked, many of us were thinly veiled nervous wrecks. We were all planning to do what disorientated young people always do. Move overseas. Many of us had already gone, leaving stragglers enviously scrolling through self-discovery pics in foreign bars, clubs and co-working spaces with jaunty neon signs.

I was supposed to be off on my OE in August and was working multiple exhausting, but exciting, hospo jobs to save for it.

Then Covid hit. And very soon it was clear that I would not be finding myself in Europe, Sydney, or in fact anywhere except the bed, the couch, and (when I felt like a treat) a hot shower.

But then it became even clearer that this was the least of our concerns. Far from being six weeks of baking banana bread, lockdown was a whole new kind of pandemonium.

Previously in the gig economy, many of us had a patchwork of badly paying individual jobs which, when strung together, added up to a living.

Overnight that flexible job network evaporated.

Those of us like me who topped up a regular part-time job with entertainment gigs and freelancing suddenly found ourselves unemployed.

Yes, the contractor subsidy saved our arses. But I still had to swallow my pride, move in with my partner and eventually borrow money off my parents like a red-faced teenager.

I felt even worse for my friends who didn’t have parental safety nets or had no family in New Zealand, or were nannying for extra cash or working in bars where tips were a big part of their income. Their jobs evaporated as wealthier couples reined in household spending and venues stayed shut. And much of my lockdowns were spent sending out care packages to struggling friends.

You can imagine what weeks of staring at the ceiling did for that pre-existing fug of confusion, panic and disorientation. When I’d worked out how my friends and

I would eat each week, I moped around like a lemon, guiltily mourning my lost coming-ofage rites.

But something weird happened. One day in September, the restless, chaotic, itchy nothingness of it all broke and it felt like waking up from a fever dream.

Out of nowhere, my quarterlife crisis had lifted.

Yes, lockdown bodyslammed us all into a wall. But it also squeezed out of us answers we’d been chasing for years. And I had the blisteringly, beautiful clarity of knowing who I was, who I cared about, and what I was prepared to fight for.

So it turns out I didn’t need to run away anywhere. Who’d have thought it, but you can actually find yourself in the square metres between the couch, bed and shower.

Former government chief scientist Sir Peter Gluckman says there’s plenty of hope for the future, though things won’t be back to normal anytime soon, or ever.

‘‘At some point we’ll establish a new equilibrium but there’s a lot of things that need to happen, and they’re a long way from happening. We’re a long way from 7 billion people being immunised and the virus probably has more things to throw at us.’’

The pandemic has changed both the psyche and economics of the world, and the effects will be long-lasting.

‘‘Many people’s lives have been irreversibly changed, be it because of family tragedy around the world or because they’ve lost their jobs or their plans ... the echoes of this are much longer than ‘oh we can travel to Australia again’.’’

Looking ahead a year, Gluckman hopes New Zealanders will be immunised against the virus, but says the biggest – and unknown – issue is whether the current vaccine is appropriate for how the virus might evolve.

Another worry is the high vaccine coverage needed to open New Zealand borders. Misinformation and reluctance to be immunised are among the issues that could stand in the way.

‘‘It’s at least another year for a country like NZ to get sufficient vaccine coverage to be comfortable about open borders ... I assume by then we will have resolved freedom of movement to Australia, the Pacific and probably more broadly if the world

has sorted out things like vaccination passports.’’

He credits the formation of the Epidemic Response Committee as the Government’s most important tool in terms of rapidly resolving issues stemming from the pandemic, but warns there’s plenty more work still to be done before we can breathe a sigh of relief.

‘‘Even then things won’t be normal, just a new-normal.’’

Instead of looking just one year ahead, Gluckman says we need to be thinking what this new, New Zealand will look like in 2040 at the bicentennial of the Treaty.

‘‘Surely having faced this existential threat, it’s time to think about our existential future.’’

Professor Paul Spoonley says one of the things New Zealand will see less of in the near future is babies, as anxiety about Covid19 and its effects plague those who might have become parents.

‘‘The Brookings Institute estimates there will be 300-500k fewer births in the US because of Covid-19. We don’t have data for NZ but international data is showing a significant dip in birthrates in 2021.’’

It’s not a new phenomenon,

the sociologist says.

‘‘If you look back at the Spanish Flu epidemic, and at wartimes you’ll always see that dip and when you come out of it you see a boom.’’

As well as fewer babies populating the country, our net gain from migration will probably halve, causing big headaches for businesses.

‘‘A lot of our labour market is now reliant on either temporary or permanent migrants, so you’re going to see quite significant labour shortages. That’ll be from the horticulture sector all the way through to big, shovel-ready infrastructure projects; IT and elder care.’’

In the elder care industry alone, about a third of the workforce are on migrant visas, leaving employers struggling to find workers.

‘‘That’s not a bad thing. We’ve become too reliant on migrants to fill gaps in our workforce, and we’ve been too lazy in training and preparing our own resident communities, but it is a very big shift.’’

As for the year ahead, Spoonley expects it will be largely a continuation of the latter part of 2020.

International eduction is

unlikely to resume, Kiwis will continue to come home and fewer will leave, and previous rites-ofpassage such as the traditional overseas experience just won’t happen.

He also predicts a migration into regions like Tauranga and Nelson as city-dwellers sell up and downsize.

While much of our future hopes are pinned on eventual vaccination, Spoonley warns completely vaccinating a population is going to be challenging because of those who either can’t access it or don’t want it.

‘‘The general election last year convinced me there is a small but growing community influenced by QAnon and other internet sources. The Billy Te Kahika phenomena of the ‘plandemic’ and the vaccine sceptics is still quite a considerable part of our political spectrum.

‘‘We’re going to have to fight those who are opposed to vaccines.’’

One year after a masked May Moncur stood in Auckland airport and warned her husband of what was heading this way, she says life has changed dramatically for everyone.

There are fewer planes in our skies, MIQ facilities are full, and Zoom meetings have become the norm. Looking forward a year, maybe there will be a travel bubble with Australia or the Pacific, maybe vaccines will make us start to feel safe.

Looking back, how does she even begin to describe the past 12 months?

‘‘It’s been a very strange year.’’

‘‘Elsewhere in the world a whole generation of frontline health workers will realise they’ve faced unimaginable psychological trauma.’’ Dr Paul Young Intensive care specialist