44 Fear and Apathy

Francis

In early March of 2020, I was a twelfth grader at Cardinal Leger Catholic School in Brampton, Ontario.  

In the days before the first shutdown, my mother had been home recovering from surgery and had become acutely aware of the novel Corona Virus spreading throughout Asia. Approximately a week before March 12th lockdown day, my mom sat me down and tasked me with amassing a six-month supply of food for our family of four. This was when I started to see this novel disease as a life disrupting event. We had agreed to spread out purchases to avoid inciting public panic. Over two days I went to four different stores, buying supplies for a six-month isolation for a family of four: canned goods, medical supplies and even board games. I carried a real sense of fear before the lockdown, as a high schooler with a mild history obsession I had read about the kind of anarchy that can occur during a real plague. School was soon announced to be paused for a two-week period. That fear persisted for the first week of the shut down as I waited to see whether the supply chains to the grocery stores would persist through the disease. This was the only time in my life I conceal–carried a weapon for self-defense. The real existential dread subsided a week or so into the first lockdown when I saw new shipments of food filling the shelves. The fear gave way to apathy as the lockdown was extended for months on end, even when people I knew started to fall ill, I never felt that same dread that loomed from the threat of social violence. 

The declaration of a state of emergency on March 17th meant we were in full lockdown. Public spaces were taped off and in the first weeks it was even questionable to be seen walking outside. Every time something new was brought into the house it was subjected to a disinfecting from my mom and a soapy bucket of water. For the first month or so my mom refused to allow food prepared outside the house, at this point no one was sure whether the disease could be spread through food. The novelty of the disease really fed into the fear; nothing felt 100% safe from it. 

The first Covid lockdown occurred during my senior year of high school and as a result my cohort missed out on any meaningful form of graduation or prom. Having those milestones in my life bypassed involuntarily has made me sometimes indifferent to marking achievements at all. Even now as I graduate university, I feel myself perceiving the ceremony as a chore rather than a celebration. However, the larger loss for my cohort at McMaster was the shutdown of on campus residence for the 2020-2021 academic year. The social networks that are formed during that first year are relied upon to connect the student body and schools without a strong residence culture usually lack a strong institutional identity. I struggled to make friends and only through aggressive extra-curricular participation in the years following was it remedied. 

I think due to Covid it became much more acceptable for young people to engage in hermitizing behaviours. Many more people now act in this way because the world learned to accommodate it. Online classes and remote work used to be seen in a negative light, with the socialization associated with in person activities as an expected norm. Now these isolating activities are seen as a premium situation and the lifestyle associated with them is idolized. This apathy towards genuine human connection is not new but greatly exaggerated in the post Covid world.  

I think Covid added fuel to the raging fire of youth mental health. In 2020 teenagers already reported the highest ever levels of anxiety and depression. The lockdowns stripped those in high school of a meaningful structure and the support that comes from regular socialization. Without in-person schooling many of the kids younger than me missed out on key developmental years that were meant to be spent out in the world. The low stakes, day to day social interactions are essential for the sense of community that humans crave and taking that away was catastrophic to the collective mental health of the generation.  

Scholars in 100 years should know that your experience of the Covid lockdown was directly correlated with your socio-economic class. Covid meant the closing of public spaces, this will always affect people with wealth far less than those without. I had a friend who shared a bedroom with a younger sibling and with everyone staying at home there was no where they could go to be alone. In contrast I have friends who have fond memories of the time, they had no responsibilities and spent months at their families second and third properties. The more private resources your family had access to the less damaging your experience was during lockdown. There is no meaningful understanding of the Covid experience without considering class.  

My Covid experience was dominated by the cyclical shift between fear of the pandemic and apathy towards the life that the measures had created. The government announcements seemed to unendingly expand the timeline of the restrictive social measures. As a teenager your friends feel like your whole world, it did in fact feel like mine was ending. I had carefully orchestrated my life to unfold beautifully my senior year. My team had qualified for a national tournament, I had a summer long camp counselor position, and a bed waiting for me in residence at McMaster. When the restrictions took that all away I felt directionless and scared that I would never find it again. I worried that this disease would lead to the dismantling of the institutions which I came to love so much in the first part of my life. Maybe it would become endemic, and the fabric of our communities would become thinned forever. Ultimately, this did not happen and slowly but surely over the past 5 years we have rebuilt many of the institutions that were destroyed by the long pause we had put on our lives. This would usually be where you would include a message about the perseverance of the human spirit, but for me and for many it was truly not that bad. I still received a quality education; I had a safe clean roof over my head and was paid out eight thousand dollars in government stimulus (thanks Trudeau). In retrospect, this ordeal for many of us was much more the inconveniencing of the human spirit rather than its triumph.