Generation Cancelled
Lockdown has left young people frustrated, facing a blank summer and bleak career prospects, says
When Becci Stokeld, a third-year student at Southampton’s Solent University, imagined the summer of 2020, its horizons seemed infinite: “This is your final year,” she says. “You’re looking forward to graduation; to celebration and letting your hair down. Instead, you can’t do anything.”
She sums up the frustrations of a generation, whose lives have been summarily upended by the cancellation of everything they thought this year would hold.
Graduations, parties, festivals, far-flung trips, fragile relationships, sought-after internships and hardwon first jobs – all swept away by Covid-19, casting young adults adrift without the social, marital and financial safety nets that their elders have had chance to knit.
Stockeld had family celebrations and fond farewells with friends planned for her graduation in July: “When we went into lockdown, we didn’t know that would be the last time we’d see each other,” she says. “You don’t have a sense of closure.”
More pressingly, she is struggling to find an opening in her field of creative design. “My plan was to secure a job by March [ just gone], so I would have the security of income by the time I graduated. Instead, I am now using the last scraps of my student overdraft to keep my flat. I worry for all graduates this year. A lot of us feel completely unheard and ignored.”
She currently lives with her boyfriend, but without a job lined up, she may have to leave the life they had started to build for themselves on the Isle of Wight and go home to live with her parents in
Middlesbrough. “It’s my only option,” she says. It is a cruel irony that young people, overwhelmingly unlikely to suffer severe symptoms with the virus itself, are paying a high price for its impact on others. The longterm effects this might have will only emerge over years to come.
Linda Blair, a clinical psychologist, says: “What they’re going to see when they look back is a hole.
The celebrations, the markers like graduation, first day at university, relationships – the majority have been cancelled, not just truncated. There’ll be a punctuation they remember, but not in a way that nourishes us, and there’s a sadness. It’s like a bereavement. They’ll have holes in their history.”
Indeed, alongside economic anxieties, and the loss of selfconfidence unemployment can cause, comes the more nebulous impact of being socially severed from your peers at a crucial developmental stage.
“University is such a big thing,” says Orla Stanford, 20, a first-year theology student at Bristol, who finds herself back home with her family in London, having only just flown the nest.
“It’s really odd to be back six months later,” she says. “There’s a sense of ‘did it even happen?’ There is a sense of missing out: you’re meant to be being reckless [at this age], and instead you’re at home watching Netflix.”
The late teens and early 20s are customarily when you’re most free to try a variety of personas and experiences before the real responsibilities of adult life arrive.
Little wonder that millions nostalgically binge-watched the BBC adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel this month: a tale of first love and leaving home.
Researchers from Sheffield and Ulster universities are currently examining the psychological impact of the current dislocation on those aged 13 to 24, and some of their initial findings make uncomfortable reading.
Dr Liat Levita, who is leading the team of psychologists, says some are coping better than others, but “over 50 per cent of young people are almost showing post-traumatic stress-like symptoms to Covid-19. That is incredibly concerning… If young people continue to experience trauma-related feelings and thoughts over the long term, that is going to be a barrier to them successfully adapting and dealing with the challenge.”
She suggests it’s too soon to know exactly how the events of this year will affect this cohort’s burgeoning sense of identity, but says: “If we try to compare it to other young people who have gone through immense trauma, then yes, it does have an impact in terms of being able to form your full sense of identity and be able to provide a positive future for yourself as an emerging adult.”
Dirk Flower, a London-based child and family psychologist, has already seen evidence of this in his work with young people during lockdown. “They’re at the point of trying to establish their careers and work out who they are,” he says. “I’m getting a lot of ‘it’s all pointless, why am I here?’ They will be the hardest hit [also] because with the amount of money being spent by the Government, someone is going to have to pay the taxes – and it will be that generation.”
Blair warns further: “We’re limiting their natural ways to expend energy, which can turn to anxiety otherwise.”
For some, it already has. “Even though I’ve spent the past two years building my self-confidence up and working on my anxiety, I feel like I’m back where I started,” says Yasmina Magdy, 26, a mature final-year fashion retail and enterprise student at Newcastle College University Centre. Before the pandemic, she had three work experience placements and a job interview lined up. All have now been postponed or cancelled. “It’s been awful,” she says of the stress. Almost a third of graduate jobs have been cancelled or deferred due to the pandemic, a survey carried out by graduate recruitment site Prospects found this month. Some 28 per cent of final-year students have had their job offers rescinded or put on hold. It is, declared Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, a “terrible time” to be a young person.
Anna Keomegi, 25, is among those to have lost out. Offered her “dream job” as a fashion design assistant after graduating from Nottingham Trent University last summer, she thought she was on her way. Since lockdown, however, the company has frozen all recruitment. “I’ve ended up emptyhanded and questioning everything that I thought was going to happen to my career,” she says.
Given Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s admission last week that it was “very likely” the UK was already in a “significant recession”, the economic effects this could have on young people will play out over years, maybe decades. A 2016 study by researchers at Ghent University in Belgium suggested that highly educated young people graduating during a recession incur “a moderate, but long-lasting loss in earnings” and become locked into lower-quality jobs.
One 21-year-old finalist at the University of the West of England in Bristol, who wishes to remain anonymous, says she “will have to get whatever job I can to survive, even if that’s in a supermarket, or cleaning” after the e-commerce position she’d been offered was cancelled. “I’m in a student house now and am looking for a rental place. But without a job, many landlords won’t take you.”
Given the sums young people have spent on their higher education, and the debts they have accrued, the blow is doubly hard. Stanford says a petition is circulating among Bristol undergraduates asking the institution to refund them some of their money, given that staff strikes had already deprived them of many teaching hours, even before lockdown began.
But amid the gloom and uncertainty, a resourcefulness and determination to make the best of the situation is emerging, too. Her previous plans in tatters, Keomegi is working on her own fashion illustration brand, which she’s grown since lockdown began.
Jasmine MacPhee, founder of the online platform Find Your Intern, says cancelled internships have led others to think likewise: “OK, this is rubbish but I need to turn this around.” And many are making efforts to do so, while trying to stay as positive as possible.
“We’re young, we’re healthy, we [will still] have time to do those things we’re missing out on,” says Orla’s elder brother, Kit Stanford, a fourth-year medical student at the University of Leeds, whose summer elective in Malaysia with his girlfriend, due to be followed by a trip to Far East, has now been demoted to desk-based research, at home with his mum and dad.
The brain still develops until our mid-20s, Dr Levita points out: “There’s a lot of flexibility and adaptability to how you deal with the world, so [young people] might have the resources to deal with this better than older adults, if we give them the right support.”
We can draw on the lessons of the past here, she suggests. “Humanity has been through so many unfortunate events in its history – we just celebrated VE Day – and we emerged triumphant as a whole.”