Coronavirus Australia: Hurrah for Freedom Day? But we’ve forgotten how to socialise

A packed Opera bar in Circular Quay before Lockdown 2.0. Picture: Damian Shaw.

It was midday on Friday when my phone rang.

I begrudgingly peeled my eyes away from the Sex and the City rerun I was watching for the fourth time this year, to look at my screen.

It was my editor calling. A surprise call, coming a few hours before my shift was scheduled to begin.

“Ellie. How are you?” my boss asked.

I looked down at the coffee in my hand I’d had delivered by Uber Eats for $2.99, the pair of trackies I was wearing caked in that morning’s layer of toast crumbs and the copy of The Goldfinch resting beside me that I would pick up and pretend to read if anyone entered the room.

“Yeah, I’m doing really well,” I said.

Could I write a piece for the paper about how young people are feeling about coming out of lockdown, he wanted to know.

As a relatively spritely 23-year-old with a tendency to stay a little too late at work drinks, I understand why it would be assumed that I’d jump at the opportunity to write about the joy of opening up.

Bars, pubs, clubs, dinners, lunches, parties, weddings. All good things, right?

Hanging up the phone, I turned to my two 20-something housemates to inform them of my assignment.

They both looked up at me from our makeshift co-working space in the tiny living room of our apartment.

Dead behind the eyes, one of them said, only half-jokingly: “But Ellie, we’ve forgotten how to socialise.”

It is a problem that comes with many sides.

The first is completely shallow, and centres around the general theme of “I am not ready for the world to see me.”

We’re talking haircuts, leg waxing, the gym … you name it, I‘ve missed it, and I’m not prepared for the world to see me without it.

A restaurant employee refinishes the outdoor dining furniture in The Rocks, in Sydney. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Bianca De Marchi

But it goes further than that.

It’s not that we’re not glad the economy is opening up.

Goodness knows we’re the generation that is going to bear the fiscal brunt of the pandemic for the rest of our lives, so every cent that is put back into the economy is worth our while.

It’s more to do with the exhaustion that comes with heading out to socialise with people we hardly know anymore, but would have deemed our best friends pre-pandemic.

That exhaustion, unfortunately, is why our youth has been brought to a halt a heck of a lot earlier than many of the generations that have preceded us.

“Turns out I’m perfectly happy only speaking to, like, three people for months at a time,” a friend told me, shortly after NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet announced the state’s reopening roadmap was to be moved forward.

“Look, I’m stoked for the people who are itching to get back to the club or whatever, but I’m a home body now,” another said.

A third told me he had booked two dinners for when he was allowed out and then cancelled them because it looked like it might rain.

When Lockdown 1.0 hit in March last year, the novelty of the crisis encouraged people to reach out to one another by whatever means necessary.

A virtual escape room with my family? I’m in! A trivia slideshow for my group of friends? Yes please! Zoom drinks after work? I’ll be there, Pinot in hand!

But the dreaded second wave – caused by what my generation has coined “the Delta Goodrem variant” – didn’t carry the same novelty value, and people stopped connecting with one another.

Any suggestion of an online catch up was met with a curt “Sorry gal, Zoom fatigue” or “Maybe we just wait til the 5km rule lifts, and we can go for a walk instead?”

“Unprecedented times” began to feel pretty damn precedented and our day-to-day relaxed into a total state of comfortable monotony.

The weirdest thing about this? No-one seemed to mind.

Sure, it would have been nice to visit my family, or have a couple of friends over for a cheese board.

But the long and the short of it is this: the second lockdown has made me fear the outside world.

I’m not saying I’m never going to go back to being social again. I’ll probably be writing a story next week about how I could never return to dreaded stay at home orders.

But for now, I’ll take my two housemates, my boyfriend, our couch and another Sex and the City rerun.