Quaran-TEEN: A High School Senior’s Reflection on Staying at Home
A Gen-Z perspective on battling the “quarantine productivity race”
Last week, a teacher at my school asked a few seniors if we would be interested in filming a thought-provoking meditation on a topic of choice for virtual assembly. He promptly implored us to “steer clear of anything coronavirus related.”
This exchange didn’t cross my mind again for another week, until I left the house clad in gloves and a mask to buy magazines. One of the most blissful moments in daily life for me is sitting down with a hot cup of coffee and an unopened stack of magazines. But, as I delved into this year’s February and March copies of Vogue, my eyes started to glaze over. I was bored — because absolutely nothing between the glossy covers of these publications was about the pandemic. None of it felt relevant to me — why should I care about this season’s Jacquemus kitten heels if, realistically, I wouldn’t be wearing anything but sweatpants for a long, long time. To make matters more confusing, looking at party-wear during these “strange and unprecedented times” (see what I did there…) felt overly indulgent and frivolous.
I wanted to read something more personal.
I wasn’t craving three-month-old articles about fashion week, which normally I would pore over. Instead I wanted to read expository personal essays. I realised that the feeling of universal togetherness caused by this pandemic has completely changed my reading habits. I have found solace in reading exposés about strangers — from bios in Medium, to The Cut’s deeply relatable “Ask Polly” or Humans of New York’s Instagram posts. What is it, exactly, that is so soothing about reading the quarantine diaries of over-40-single-mother-types or millennial-fashionable-New-York-City-people? As a 17-year-old high school senior from Switzerland, I have little in common with these people — except, for the fact that all of us are isolated, living at home, and struggling with how to spend our time.
I appreciated the beauty of the world’s togetherness for a brief moment, but then thought, “What, then, is the point of a realisation of global unity if we are all alone anyways?” We obviously cannot get together, skip rope and rally for important causes. Frankly, all that mattered to me was staying at home, not getting the virus, and doing something productive to advance myself as a person whilst social distancing. The catch is, we are all expected to come out of this “unprecedented time” (there it is again…) with a new skill — be it playing the trombone, creating a tech startup from your garage, or sewing your own clothes.
The media is having a field day with this phenomenon, with headlines bouncing from extremes such as “It’s ok not to be productive during a pandemic” to USA Today’s “100 things to do while stuck inside” — which suggests gargantuan tasks such as reading all of Ulysses and “willing Tom Hanks into recovery from coronavirus by watching every Tom Hanks movie chronologically.” My personal refuge from this deluge of isolation-related self-help articles has been reading the deeply personal and unabashedly awkward — an example being Manrepeller’s hilariously relatable “The Banalities of a Day in the Life During Quarantine” and “Debate: Do Jeans Actually Suck?” (a reflection on wearing “real” clothing when you’re going nowhere).
The aforementioned media focus on productivity is a marker of the human tendency for extremism. We struggle with the endless tug of war between work and play, and self-restriction and hedonism. Modern thought equates indulgence with a lack of discipline — and to those of you who, like me, experience anxiety upon hearing about your friends’ intense home workouts and juice cleanses: you are not alone. Unfortunately for us, for the first time in a long time, the only thing we are not short of is time — a platitude that, to the “hedonophobe” such as myself (one who fears any small indulgence might pave a slippery-slope to being a raging hedonist of the Wolf of Wall Street variety), signifies that we should be more productive than ever.
Even though I am only a teenager, there is a voice in my head telling me to start the dystopian novel or screenplay I always wanted to write — and it is combated by an urge to read someone else’s personal writing (sometimes in the form of Instagram post which is, unfortunately, anything but genuinely personal) in order who find others who relate to my muddled stream of consciousness during this time. The next anxious thought that usually follows suit is that Shakespeare wrote King Lear in the midst of the plague, or that a young Isaac Newton invented calculus whilst social distancing. This train of thought only serves the purpose of reinforcing my own cycle of guilt. After all, the only reason why I sat down to write this — my own personal essay — is because I felt a certain pressure to be productive, and did so by taking a stab at the type of writing I find so appealing right now.
How are we supposed to push ourselves towards stressful “productive” situations when every single time we open our devices we are overcome with unsurmountable stress? It already feels like Gen-Z is carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders — we just crossed the hurdles of applying to college, getting the best possible SAT score, and working towards final exams and graduation only for them to be reduced to subpar alternatives on Zoom. This pandemic is stressful for young adults because most of us have never experienced a global and protracted crisis before. The world has never halted for us before — after all, we were born just before or after 9/11, and the 2008 Wall Street Crash is a vague childhood memory for most of us.
An analogy I have for my personal conundrum is a new Netflix show called The Society — a modern day parable of Lord of the Flies, in which teenagers are left alone in a town to forge their own society. Obviously, chaos ensues. We teenagers are resilient, but we often trick ourselves into thinking we can withstand immeasurable pressure. Many of us hope to use this stressful time to better our mental health, but sometimes trying to do so is stressful in itself. After all, social media constantly bombards us with different relaxation techniques, often accompanied by a related product (such as Monki’s streetwear/mental health campaign) in appropriate Capitalist fashion.
How, then, can we use this time to grow and soothe our over-saturated Gen-Z minds? Perhaps the answer comes in being comfortable enough doing nothing productive at all.
It is nearly impossible to avoid the “elephant in the media-room” (the pandemic), but the resurgence of personal, “stream-of-consciousness”-style writing during this time has shown me that others face the same dilemma. I want to attempt to hit the “reset button” by simply doing the things I like shamelessly — such as reading Normal People, baking varieties of banana bread, and painting with watercolours — without uttering the word ‘productivity.”
I am also urging myself to be aware of the distinction between relatable essays and “relatable” Instagram posts — just because one person is advertising their yoga challenge, doesn’t mean everyone is doing a yoga challenge. Yes, it may be hedonistic to simply indulge, but by perceiving our simple pleasures as luxurious, we may be able to attain the coveted level of mental peace. If our goal is optimal mental health, then doing what we love could be as productive as engaging in thought-provoking meditation.
