By Sophie Fairey
The Telegraph says that the nation is the happiest since pre-covid levels, with 58% of the population reporting feeling happy at the start of this year. After Covid-19 swept through the globe, it is safe to say that things were far from normal for a long time. Not a single person was left unaffected, but now, half a decade later, according to those numbers, it seems that we are finally healing.
In 2019, the last time the country’s happiness peaked, Ariana Grande was taking the charts by storm with hits like ‘thank u, next’ and ‘7 Rings’, and Billie Eilish was gaining huge popularity with ‘Bad Guy’. And now, Ariana is back in the charts with ‘Popular’ from the 2024 musical adaptation of Wicked, and Billie Eilish is still going strong with ‘BIRDS OF A FEATHER’.
Even fashion trends came and went. 2019 saw ‘mom jeans’ taking over; now there are signs of baggy jeans dwindling back into straight leg. From pop music to the redemption arc of skinny jeans, it feels like a full circle moment. If the Wicked soundtrack is in the charts, we can’t be doing too badly. Perhaps we are getting better at finding the joy in life now that lockdown feels more like a fever dream than a reality.
Nevertheless, it was, unfortunately, an all too real reality. Covid inflicted damage on many people, lockdown tampered with young children’s social development, teens’ mental health, and the whole world as we knew it for everyone. It was like a moment in a science-fiction movie, a pandemic rampaging through the planet as we locked ourselves inside, deprived of social interaction and feverishly disinfecting every reachable surface. There was a unique quietness, deeply unsettling but strangely peaceful.
2020 has become a kind of checkpoint that we have started to measure time with. At the very start of the year, one of my first thoughts was ‘I can’t believe it’s been almost five years since lockdown.’ It was like a shift in time. Everyone downloaded Tik-Tok and started making whipped coffee, then stood outside their front doors in the evenings to applaud the NHS even though many had little comprehension of the real dangers and stress that doctors, nurses and all kinds of professions were placed under.
There was a stark disconnect from those suffering, overworking, losing loved ones without being able to hold a proper funeral, and people throughout the country like me who with GCSEs cancelled, spent my days baking banana loaves, reading the Harry Potter series and going on sunny walks. Part of me was devastated to be leaving school without an official goodbye, prom, or post-exams holiday with my friends. Part of me enjoyed being in lockdown during the summer, completely separate from the rest of the world. But this did not end up being a good thing.
At the time I was perfectly happy to spend my time with myself and my family mostly in the house or in the back garden mostly. There was a lack of stimulation but I didn’t find myself getting all that bored. Instead, I got used to having no commitments or pressures of the outside world without realising it.
The skies were blue and cloudless. No hustle and bustle, no planes decorating the empty sky, no summer parties echoing from down the street. I appreciated that this was a completely unprecedented event, where I had no work, deadlines, responsibilities, only a summer stretching ahead of me to fill with reading and relaxing, maybe trying to learn to paint, cook, play the ukulele, or honing other wholesome skills that I otherwise might not have bothered to try. Facetiming friends and relatives became a weekly norm, wearing masks in supermarkets, social distancing on walks, searching for new obscure hobbies to fill the time- all experiences from the recent past that are tinged with an eerie nostalgia I’m sure many of us would rather forget.
We put our lives on hold for a year and were then expected to just carry on as normal once restrictions were gradually lifted. And when they were, many people just didn’t know how to go about daily life as if it was never interrupted. After months of enjoying the quiet of my own home, I began to feel lost in social situations and anxious to go out with friends.
It has taken all these years of learning to deal with this new layer of uncertainty, looking back and grieving the teenage years I could have had. By the time I was almost 18, I had never been to parties or experienced going on holiday with friends. I felt like I was playing catch-up, never feeling my age, stuck at freshly 16. I ended up cancelling plans for nights out and wishing I’d had more experiences instead of going from being stuck at home in the summer to being taught A-levels from a teams call in the spring.
Even if it might not have seemed much like it, lockdown affected everyone in different ways. I would argue that absolutely no one came out the other end for the better. We had to get used to everyday life again and come to terms with whatever lockdown left us with. And it seems we did just that. It’s been a while since we’ve had to social distance and remember to bring a face mask to every social setting, and we’ve settled back into normality.
Perhaps it is just because I have gone from 16 to 21 and feel more excited about the future now, but I can definitely feel more optimism in the air than there has been since the Covid era. But why is that? I am not convinced that there is much rhyme or reason as to why now, specifically, we are so much happier. There are still, just as much as ever before, if not more so, horrific and devastating events happening all over the world. Is it a darker sign that we have become desensitised to it all? Or is it just that 5 years is the perfect amount of time to recover from an unprecedented national lockdown and learn how to balance living our lives contentedly alongside what we see on the news everyday?
Maybe the Wicked movie has something to do with it. I can’t think of one single time listening to ‘Popular’ didn’t significantly improve my mood. Whatever it is, the mentality that things cannot possibly get worse than they have been actually seems to be working. The only thing that’s apparent is that things are finally feeling back to ‘normal’ again, so I’ll take that as a sign that time really is the greatest healer.
Image: Zwaddi via Unsplash