Friday Flurry #18: We're different now. COVID's changed how we feel - and it might last a while.
There's a reason you can't get RSVPs to your party. We're all a bit weird.
Welcome to Friday Flurry, my weekly round-up. These posts are a mixed bag of what I’m doing, reading and thinking about.
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Hello!
In this week’s Friday Flurry, I get curious about the longer social and economic tail of the COVID pandemic (I know, I know, are we still talking about that?!).
With New Zealand lifting all remaining COVID-19 requirements two weeks ago, (just before an election, such a coincidence…) we should be out of the woods. COVID is old news.
But is it? The threat to public health may be significantly diminished, but the effects of three years of a once-in-a-generation social and economic shock might be with us for much longer.
The pandemic flipped our lives upside down, causing us to adapt and change in ways we never imagined. It transformed our homes into offices, classrooms, and gyms. It introduced us to new technologies, changing the way we communicate and do business. It coined a new Generation name (Zoomers). And it's also messed up our mental health, screwed with our kids, and possibly changed our personalities.
Anecdotally, I’ve noticed big changes in myself and my peer group. More of us suddenly identify as introverts and prefer to stay home. There’s less engagement on the group chat. Mental health issues have bubbled to the fore and there’s been lots of quarter-life and mid-life crises.
It got me thinking: this can’t be a coincidence. While we like to think our personal issues are driven internally, we’re more vulnerable to global and social conditions than we think. In a world where we have less agency than ever, it makes sense to frame our crossroads as a personal journey. But while the plural of anecdote is not evidence, it seems too much of a coincidence we feel like this all at the same time.
I’ve been researching the different ways the pandemic has changed how we live, work, and feel, and here’s some interesting things I’ve found:
We work from home - and our boundaries are all blurry
Despite a new headline every week about people being forced to return to the office (including, famously, Zoom employees), working from home has become the new norm for millions worldwide.
The professional middle class has more flexibility than ever to choose our work hours and location - (while our most critical and vulnerable workers remain at the mercy of low wages, low work security and minimal agency, despite a brief flurry of care during COVID.)
On the one hand, we’ve said goodbye to the long commute, and office space requirements are way down. But many people are left grappling with blurry boundaries between work and personal life.
This is, of course, worse for women, who are still doing twice as much domestic labour and childcare than their male counterparts. Popping out to put a load of washing on between Zoom meetings or grab the kids from school before doing another hour at the laptop before bed takes it’s toll over time, especially when we can no longer leave work at the door.
Our education system is battling - affecting our kids
The pandemic exposed and exacerbated existing educational inequalities and access disparities. Not all students have equal access to the necessary resources and technology required for online learning. Low-income households, rural areas with limited internet connectivity, and marginalised communities faced significant challenges in accessing quality education during the pandemic, and the impact on long-term life outcomes remains to be seen.
It hasn’t gone away, either, with historically low attendance rates that have failed to rebound after COVID, and ongoing disruption with weather events and teacher strikes. What this means for our kids is a large-scale experiment, that we won’t know the results of for another decade. What does seem obvious is that if you were already at a disadvantage, that’s been amplified to a new level.
We’ve left our jobs to start businesses - often not by choice
Redundancies are on the rise with economic recession hitting globally. Mid-pandemic, our economies were buffered from the true impact of supply shortages and financial uncertainty thanks to large-scale state support. While hospitality, tourism and retail battled immediately, many in tech and other professional jobs found themselves stable, if not prospering.
In a post-COVID, high-inflation, low-growth environment, the band-aid has been ripped off. Economic confidence is shot, and the instability of traditional employment has been temporarily exposed. After years of calling the shots with remote work, people are reluctant to get back on the begging circuit, preferring instead to enter the gig economy, or start their own thing.
(The banks, of course, are doing just fine. 🤔)
Conspiracy theories and disinformation are rampant
COVID was the perfect breeding ground for unprecedented levels of disinformation and conspiracy theories. The conditions were ripe. The conspiracy theories, and the technology to disseminate them, were already there. But the level of anxiety, fear and uncertainty generated by the pandemic, along with widespread state communication failures across the world, became the catalyst for widespread suspicion.
The long-term, compounding impact of even temporary participation in an anti-state conspiracy or disinformation campaign is uncertain. What will your aunty who got sucked into the 5G/ anti-vaccine theory do, now her theories has been debunked?
Research suggests that while misinformation is almost always accepted as fact — a staggering 99.6% of the time — attempts to correct it succeed in only 83% of cases, even when the evidence is overwhelmingly clear. It’s why we still have people who believe vaccines cause autism. Once the seed is planted, it’s hard to undo.
Conspiracy theories can act as a gateway, allowing nefarious interests, including alt-right Qanon style propaganda to skilfully redirect the energy behind one cause to another. Vaccine skeptics are now turning their attention the the ‘trans agenda’, using the same logic (SAVE THE CHILDREN!) to spread further hate speech and danger throughout society.
COVID didn’t cause these trends, but it accelerated them, as more people spent time on social media platforms with egregious track records for inciting hatred, violence and social unrest. The impact on social unity and elections in even strong democracies has a long tail.
Our mental health is shot
The pandemic had a significant impact on mental health. Latest research form the University of Sydney confirms the lasting impact of these challenges. Stress, anxiety, and depression rates are higher than ever, and rather than a coordinated response to promote recovery, we’re facing an under-resourced mental health sector, and compounding problems to trigger ill health.
“What worries me is that rather than having an intense recovery phase in Australia we’ve had further crises, including marked increases in costs of living and natural disasters, all of which we know exacerbate mental health problems.” -
Professor Teesson, senior author and Director of the Matilda Centre
Again, these are issues that don’t disappear when the uncertainty surrounding the virus, social isolation, and the economic fallout begin to fade.
“If we don’t act to implement holistic strategies now, particularly for young people, we risk having a whole generation at a long-term disadvantage,” said co-lead author and University of Sydney PhD student Scarlett Smout.
We see our friends less often
When the pandemic first kicked off, we made a real effort to maintain social connection in an isolated, virtual world. At our place, we had a Friday quiz night which, at it’s height, saw over 100 people joining in for fun and frivolity. Grandparents were on FaceTime, people had online birthday parties - even weddings! - and articles began circulating about how people were more connected than ever.
In the later phases, the wheels fell off. As people adapted to the new way of living, some evidence suggests large-scale shifts in personality traits across the population. More introversion, more neuroticism, and less inclination toward collaboration and connection.
Of course, this happened quickly, so there’s no reason it won’t change back quickly too. But if it took us three years to get here, and it takes three years to get out, the impact on personal, professional and romantic relationship and the robustness of social networks could linger for a lifetime, especially for young people, who grappled the impact of the pandemic at a pivotal moment in their social development.
Emerging data support this, noting that personality shifts have disproportionately affected young people, who have less established social networks, fewer resources to invest in their relationships, and more dependence on institutions like schools to connect to their peers.
“Between the first stages of pandemic lockdown in 2020 to the second and third years of the pandemic in 2021 and 2022, the researchers found that extroversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness all declined across the population, but especially for younger adults, who also showed an increase in neuroticism.” - Brent Roberts, University of llinois.
Anecdotally, I’ve noticed this shift in my world. More of my friends identify as introverts than ever before, preferring to stay home, and avoiding large social gatherings where they might encounter people they don’t know.
Where to from here?
The long and short of it is: the pandemic might be over, but we’re different now.
All these changes - blurry boundaries between our home and jobs, (which we’re panicking about losing thanks to mass redundancies), staying home more, feeling more depressed, and being more vulnerable to conspiracy theories and misinformation - are interlinked and compounding. Society has shifted, and the bonds that hold us together have weakened.
We’ll be tempted to internalise these changes, or explain them as individual shifts, either because we genuinely don’t see the trend (because we’re introverts now!) or because we need to make sense of our reality, and “I’m affected by a global social change” is not half as empowering as “I’ve made different choices because I’m a different person.”
Fair enough, too. I get that. But it raises interesting questions about where we go from here. How long does it last? Do we get back on track? Or is there a new frontier of social and economic life just around the corner?
I don’t have a crystal ball, but I’m interested.
What about you? What have you noticed as being different in your world, or your network? Are there more personal crises? Is there more mental health awareness, more reflection on career and life path, more generalised discontent?
…Or is everything pre-COVID, bounced back, and it’s just my lot that are battling?
I’d love to hear about it.
Til next week,
A.
Well, that sums up this week’s Friday Flurry! I really appreciate your support, as I shift my focus more toward my writing work. I love writing and sharing with you, and this is a fully reader-supported effort, so please take a moment to bask in my gratitude for your subscriber status. You rock.