Lockdowns Have Left More Than a Third of Young People Feeling Their Life is Spiralling Out of Control, Study Finds
More than a third of young people feel their life is spiralling out of control following the pandemic, according to findings released to the Guardian ahead of a nationwide campaign that highlights the impact of years of restrictions on the younger generation. Here’s an excerpt from the newspaper’s report – though it being the Guardian, it’s always “Covid” or “the pandemic” that is to blame rather than lockdowns or restrictions.
The Prince’s Trust Class of Covid research also found that more than 60% of 16-25-year-olds said they were scared about their generation’s future, having lived through a pandemic only to face a cost-of-living crisis. One in three think their job prospects will never recover from the pandemic…
There is also evidence of widespread “retarded development” among young people as a result of missing developmental milestones during the pandemic, according to findings from the Savanta State of the Youth Nation report.
The report found that almost a quarter of 16-19-year-olds missed out on having their first kiss because of Covid. For those aged 20 to 25, the figure was was 17%.
A significant number also missed out on starting their first romantic relationship, with one in five of those aged 16 to 19 and 15% of those aged 20 to 25 not having a relationship when compared with the experiences of people of the same age before the pandemic.
The research by Savanta, a youth research specialist that runs the country’s largest youth research panel, has asked more than 1,000 young people the same set of questions for the past seven years…
Almost 60% of young people who lived alone during the pandemic told researchers they now lacked the confidence to make up their own minds, compared with 40% before the pandemic.
For those who lived with their parents during the pandemic, the dip in confidence was significantly less marked, with 47% saying they could make up their own minds, compared with 52% before the pandemic.
The report also found that young people who experienced disruptions in starting work or who had to work online were confused about what to expect from the world of work. Before the pandemic, 68% of young people felt work was what they expected. Post-pandemic, the figure has fallen to 49%.
The research also shows young people are less confident about performing tasks at work. The proportion of those who feel able to focus on one task for a sustained period fell from 55% pre-pandemic to 39% post-pandemic.
Having the confidence to have conversations with management is another area where young people struggle, with 21% feeling able to talk to senior people at work compared with 37% before the pandemic.
The newspaper has also run a feature headed “‘We gave up so much’: how Covid changed young people’s lives” with a number of awful stories of lost youth, including this one from 20 year-old Eoin O’Loughlin, who moved from Dublin to Dundee during the pandemic to study at the Scottish School for Contemporary Dance.
I think my generation gave up a lot during the pandemic for older people because it hit at such a key, developmental time for us. We were happy to do it at the time but problems have come since because the government hasn’t acknowledged what we sacrificed. Some recognition and some recompense would help, in terms of support for the issues – around careers, education, mental health, physical health – that my generation suffered and still suffers as a direct result of pandemic policies introduced to protect the older generation.
The sad thing is that we gave so much up because we had a sense of community. But because there’s been no recognition of what we gave up or any attempt to recompense us, I think that sense of community has been burnt out of us. I’m not sure that my generation would be as happy or willing to sacrifice ourselves for other people a second time. I think we all feel our goodwill was taken advantage of.
The pandemic was dreadful for me. It stunted me at the exact moment I was ready to burst out creatively and socially, and start exploring and making my mark on the world. The pandemic meant that I had to adapt from being a child to an adult with no transition period – I missed my secondary school exams and graduation, along with my 18th and 19th birthdays. I then missed my first year of college in Dundee – and doing a dance degree at home, in front of a laptop screen is no fun at all.
I feel I’ve lost my younger self in the pandemic. I’ve lost that youthful exuberance and joyfulness I once had. I feel like an old man: even though lockdown is over, I just want to stay in now – read a book and drink some tea.
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The damage continues because the threat and actuality of Lockdown and restrictions are still there. The symbolic masking a constant reminder. Speaks for itself.
Agreed. The threat is palpable, along with a sense of the people in power being able to decide, if they think the public is getting too unruly, that restrictions on spurious health grounds can be reinstated. The state now know that people will turn into Stasi informants, spying on their neighbours at the drop of a hat, so enforcing restrictions and lockdowns will now be a regular tool of population control.
I used to read the Grauniad; they seem to be having problems with the definition of certain things.
How about redefining “Covid-19” to mean “Gross over-reaction”? Then it would make more sense After all, there has been no shortage of redefining things to manipulate people’s understanding.
We need to be careful that we do not fall into a trap of creating a new narrative that is just as false and damaging as the lockdown narrative. We all know that the young paid a very high price, indeed perhaps higher than any other group – although that will partly depend on where they were (e.g. what country in Europe, what state in the US – some stayed more sane than others) and what type of family background they had. Families that do not get on bended knee to the almighty State, hollowed be its name, will have probably shown greater resilience than others. But all age cohorts paid a huge price, and within the cohorts some far more than others. People in cushy office jobs, particularly government jobs, will have enjoyed the many months of missing out on long commutes in crowed trains and been happy to work from home at full pay. Many of the self-employed, many small business owners did not enjoy these luxuries and either saw their businesses go under or take a hit from which they may never recover – for people in their 50s or 60s this may mean a serious deterioration… Read more »
Jane – Top Class.
Most of the population have been victimised but as you say we must not consider ourselves victims and we must keep the need for revenge always in our hearts.
Never forget, never forgive.
It is better to be violent if there is violence in our hearts, than to wear the cloak of “non-violence” to cover impotence.
Who said that? Yes, Mahatma Gandhi.
Indeed.
My main concern is that enough people realise that this only happened because we allowed it to happen. And that simply refusing to comply means it won’t happen again. Last January that stooge Rutte wanted to keep the shops shut, even though no one else in Europe had shutdown, clearly for a reason that had nothing to do with public health. Shopowners got together and said they were opening, no matter what; mayors, in charge of local enforcement, said they could not and would not enforce – within hours the government announced shops could open. It had no choice – if the masses simply refused to comply, it would have been obvious within minutes that the government was nothing but bluff, the backdown allowed them to keep the illusion of control.
I’m not so concerned with revenge, more with awareness and getting people to understand we cannot allow this again, unless we wish to find ourselves in the absurd situation China is now in, with people locked in their homes without food or income whenever the authorities wish. Naturally, if in this great awakening some people get what they so rightly deserve, that’s fine by me.
I am reminded of the generations of young people who went to war in 1914 and 1939 because older, greyer men were playing politics. It is always the same. The young people are sacrificed for the common good but the toll it takes on their future lives is incalculable. Although the lockdowns were nothing like the horror of trench warfare, there is a sort of comparison. Of course, it wasn’t just young people, it was all of us but many of us have already enjoyed those vital developmental years of social interaction and of the joy of seeing the world as full of possibilities and opportunities without such a massive interruption. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to have had your whole youthful social world reduced to being with mum and dad. Well, they all have their phones, yes, but do we really want our young people to be even more dependent on them? No. The people who imposed this world were the same grey men – and some women – who always impose things on others and we always say the same at the end – “This must never be allowed to happen again” – and… Read more »
And I am not sure what the realisation that 2020 was less deadly than every year before 2009 will do to them.
Heck, it has left many capable adults feeling like there’s no point to it all.
Scamdemic.
Kids, people in government are never there because they care about you. They are never there because they know the right thing to do. They are (or quickly become) corrupt control-freaks. Know this, and I believe you’ll learn to cope with all the other problems life throws at you.
This just infuriates me. The cognitive dissonance that it was the virus rather than governments’ reactions to it that caused all of this is off the scale. I’m not in the young cohort by any means but I know it ruined my mental health, including contemplating suicide seriously for the first time in my life. We are seeing hysterical calls to mask up again, as if that’s stopped if you need to go into most health care settings. We both refuse but are constantly on edge for the argument that’s about to come.
I am also constantly afraid of further restrictions this winter and you can’t trust Liz no more lockdowns as far as you can throw her. I’m sure she doesn’t think mandatory masking is a lockdown measure anyway.
I have recently taken the conscious decision to interrupt anybody who utters the words “because of Covid” and correct then to “because of The Lockdown”. I doubt they will change their views, but it makes me feel better! Fortunately on the whole I seem now to be living in a hysteria-free locality, with only rare, localised, institutional or highly-individualised obsessions with masks and restrictions. The main offenders are some state schools, who keep all the terrifying signage in place and throw open all the doors and windows “to keep Covid away”.
Absolutely, make it crystal clear at every opportunity that every single thing that happened was because of unlawful choices made by human beings. Here too we had an f-wit health minister continually tell us that the ‘virus’ was doing this that and the other – the virus was clever, the virus could get past masks, it could outsmart the vaxx, the virus wasn’t done with us yet, yada yada yada. And the man that people were listening to spouting this nonsense was a primary school teacher! A teacher (no offence to teachers), not a virologist, doctor, etc., just as the last 2 health ministers in the UK were, if I’m not mistaken, people from the field of finance. Whenever someone here tells me that I ‘chose’ to be discriminated against and have my constitutional rights denied me because I ‘chose’ not to inject experimental gunk into my body and in fact remain physically the same as I was prior to the arrival of the lurgy – in other words, I made no choice whatsoever – I make it absolutely clear that I did not choose anything, but that, indeed, the government chose to violate the constitution, breach any number of… Read more »
I might run out of superlatives.
Excellent once again and in full agreement.
Young people didn’t give up anything for older people: they were arbitrarily imprisoned, the same as everyone else, using old people as an excuse and a scapegoat. The Guardian hates the Post-War Bulge generation and wants them all dead, because they consider them to be class traitors: majority working class kids who grew up and embraced Thatcherism. I’m 47 and I feel like my life’s out of control too. I’d only just moved away from London when the lockdowns hit. I have no friends nearby, I’m a freelancer who works from home, so all my work is now done remotely and the only people I see are my elderly parents, with whom I now live and take care of, and our neighbours. I haven’t met the majority of my work ‘colleagues’, conducting most of my work conversations by phone or email. The local companies I’d started working with went bust, so I’m reliant on London clients. With lockdowns and demented restrictions being a Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads indefinitely until political parties have the cojones to disavow them, I no longer feel in control. When Labour gets into power, does anyone doubt that masking and social distancing, indoors… Read more »
Do the stooges at the Guardian realise that they’re “part of the problem”?
In a moment of madness, I remembered one definition of stooge: it’s a conjunction – combination of “huge” and “stool”.
Many of them probably feel despair when they keep getting told that there was/is a pandemic. Even websites like this one, continuously trotting out the same words of officialdom abusers, therefore supporting the fake reality.
I realise the authors are strictly adhering to facts for fear of looking like “swivel-eyed conspiracy theorists”. But the fact is, that the definition of ‘pandemic’ conveniently changed right at the start of this revolution. This fact should be repeatedly raised at every opportunity.
not just the young ,this sounds like me!
This was entirely predictable and indeed was predicted. Still, from the Globalists’ point of view, if you destroy the confidence and life-chances of a generation they’ll be even more controllable in the future.
Shame there weren’t far more youngsters and their parents refusing to comply and standing up for their civil rights.
Complaining now is 2 years too late.
Yes exactly. I don’t recall seeing one third of young people engaged in peaceful protest or even non-compliance.