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Have you ever brought your magic to Walt Disney World like, Hey!
We came to play. Did you tip your tiara to a Creole princess or get goofy officially?
Step up like a boss and save the day?
Or see what life's like under the Tree of Life, did you?
If you could, would you?
When we come through, it's true magic, because we came to play.
Bring the magic at Walt Disney World Resort.
Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show.
Welcome back to the podcast new listeners, old listeners, wherever you are in the world.
It is so great to have you here back for another episode as we of course break down the psychology of our twenties.
So this episode today, it was inspired by an article I saw the other day essentially commemorating the five years since the beginning of the COVID -19 pandemic.
And the article was basically a series of photos from that time, pretty fascinating, but what was really, really interesting and what really inspired me so much were people's reactions to this article because it was honestly such a full spectrum of grief, confusion, frustration, but specifically a lot of people who were, quite frankly, shocked that it had been so long since COVID had begun, because a lot of them reported, a lot of them were saying, they felt kind of frozen in time at the start of 2020.
And those five years didn't feel like the typical five years that we would actively experience.
It's this weird sense that, yes, life has moved on.
We are no longer in an active pandemic, but it feels like a distinct before and after, before COVID and after COVID.
And a lot of us inevitably missed out on experiences, missed out on opportunities and time because of that chapter.
And to this day, we still feel like we haven't really caught up or made up for the experiences and milestones we skipped over because of those years.
And that reaction that reaction to the big five years since the pandemic is one I really want to examine today because many many of my fellow 20 something's have been in my DMS with questions about this idea of the pandemic skip feeling as if we have missed out on so much and are we ever going to be able to make up for that lost time or will it just forever be chapter in our lives that we have to grieve.
We in society at large I think we talk a lot about the long -term consequences of Covid and we talk about it in terms of the loss of precious lives and the children falling behind in school and the lingering economic impact.
All of those are really significant and important, but what we don't consider is the everyday impact of feeling like time has stood still and that we are still behind.
Especially for people in our twenties because this time is so sacred and we are constantly being told, these are like the best years of your life.
Like don't waste them.
Don't blink or they'll be over.
But you know, that time was taken from us even though it wasn't our choice and we're still trying to adjust. You know, not to sound dramatic but we did undergo a collective trauma.
covid was a collective trauma and many of us between the ages of 18 to 34 experience that very differently from other groups and other I guess age brackets in the population.
so what are the consequences of that been for our social development, our emotional development, also just our general sense of life satisfaction But also, how do we overcome this sense of bitterness, maybe resentment, indignation, sadness over the time, the experiences, the opportunities that we lost?
This is really what I want to discuss today.
We can acknowledge the past. We can say this was just awful, that this happened.
But what next? How do we overcome that?
So without further ado, my lovely, lovely listeners, Let's talk about the psychology of the pandemic skip.
So the pandemic skip, this concept, it refers to the sense that our mental age is a lot younger than our chronological age.
Because the pandemic has caused us to miss out on very important life experiences that were essential for our development.
So, essentially, we feel frozen in time, and we feel like our development is delayed.
So, you might be 27, but you still feel 23 or 24, which in our 20s is actually quite a huge jump.
Even if in the grand scheme of things, three years is not that large.
In our 20s, I know people who are now married at 27 who had not even met their partner at 23.
We can have entirely different jobs, live in entirely different places, have entirely new friends.
I really do believe that a year in our 20s is five years, any other time.
And that really goes to show.
It's just think how much could change and maybe should have changed during that period of the pandemic where we were in lockdown, we couldn't travel.
Just we were experiencing a global emergency.
So pandemic skip, pandemic pause, it's all the same thing.
Essentially, there was this isolation and almost break from reality caused by COVID that has resulted in a lot of long -term developmental shifts and also grief, grief for many of us.
So why does this happen?
Why do we feel frozen in time?
What's the long -term reaction to this?
well, I have three psychological explanations for why you feel like you cannot move on from these years and you feel like you cannot move on from the lost time.
The first is that traumatic experiences tend to give us a warped sense of time.
Now the COVID pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns, that wasn't just 30 seconds of trauma, that wasn't even a few days of trauma or even a few months, it was for some people years, years of going through something where every single day you had no idea what was happening, case numbers were rising, you had no idea you know what the government was gonna say you needed to do, if toilet paper was gonna run out, you know if you would be able to see your friends.
That is traumatic because it is so deeply uncertain and threatens our core sense of security.
There was one study done during that time that surveyed thousands of Americans in the first six months of the pandemic and they found that for a lot of them time felt like it had either sped up or slowed down.
This cognitive reaction, this warped sense of time, is actually quite common after some kind of unprecedented collective trauma like a natural disaster or a global pandemic.
So the pandemic also had the effect of really stripping away external markers of time.
So things like birthday celebrations, you know, a lot of them took place over Zoom.
They didn't feel as important.
Job transitions, life transitions, like moving from graduate into your first full time job, commutes, social events, all things that would give us a sense that time was passing, they disappeared.
And that has led to what some psychologists will now call the groundhog day effect, groundhog day after the very famous movie with Bill Murray where his day just feels like it's repeating and repeating and repeating, something that I think a lot of us experienced during the pandemic.
So without the usual kind of milestones to differentiate days, weeks and months time became a blur and many people if they're asked to recall an event and I say did that happen in 2020 2021 or 2022 they don't they don't know it's just one big lump of years to us with no events situations ways to distinguish there was also this interesting interaction and some researchers are pointing to in our age group of people experiencing accelerated aging, but stunted growth.
So a lot of us might feel like we actually aged faster during the pandemic because of stress and uncertainty, having to skip important milestones and just enter the next chapter unprepared, that's leading to a sense that we've aged faster, but then on the other side, we also feel like we have paused our personal growth.
So we are back to living with our parents.
We were stuck in stagnant jobs, stagnant relationships because we had nowhere else to go.
And that duality has created an unsettling experience of being both too young and too old for where you are in life.
You feel like, oh, you know, I'm too old to be going out partying all the time.
But also I still feel young enough to be doing those things because I missed out previously.
So there's another term for this it's called arrested development.
Not the TV show although what a brilliant TV show but the term really refers to young adults people in their 20s who are mentally stuck at a younger emotional age than their chronological age and are not developing mentally at the expected rate because of normally it's trauma or some kind of really intense stressor.
In this case, that stressor, that trauma was the pandemic.
And so there is a stunted growth within young adults like you and me that maybe society doesn't recognize at large, but we definitely feel.
Okay, so the second psychological reason for the pandemic skip, the pandemic took away our sense of agency and it made us feel powerless, we haven't gotten that back yet.
Now, this matters a lot for people in their 20s, having a sense of agency, feeling like you can direct your own life is really, really important to develop during this time.
This period of our life is really the period where we flex that independence muscle, we flex that agency muscle and that is represented by really big moments like moving out of home, solo traveling, earning your own money, dating freely, the pandemic limited.
All of those activities limited all of our choices.
It made us more dependent on our parents.
And we also just, as a result of the lockdowns and of wanting to be safe, we felt very caged and very locked away.
And very much our freedom, the freedom that was promised to us during this decade was something that was taken from us.
Now this diminished sense of agency and freedom against circumstances beyond our control, specifically circumstances that are unpleasant or frustrating, it can create a psychological state known as learned helplessness.
Now, we've spoken about this before on the podcast, but learned Helplessness is essentially a state we get into where we feel like no matter what, we cannot change our circumstances, we cannot change our fate, any bad thing that happens to us is a given.
We cannot escape that.
And even to some extent, anything we want from life, no matter how we work for it, we aren't going to get it because it's only fate and destiny that allows it.
this makes us incredibly pessimistic because we get into the mind frame of why even try?
Like, why would I even bother?
This could be taken away at any moment?
And we start thinking about, how free am I really as a human, how free am I really as a soul?
You can kind of see the spiral that can very quickly get us into.
A 2023 study found that COVID had a particularly profound impact on how in control we felt over our lives, and it's led to, as a result, very naturally high levels of uncertainty, vulnerability, and self -consciousness when it comes to making decisions.
Finally, the final explanation for the pandemic skip comes down to this long term grief that a lot of us are experiencing.
Now grief, we know this, it comes in many, many forms. A lot of us, unfortunately, did actually lose people during the pandemic.
I'm one of those people, I lost my granddad during COVID.
And because of the way that lockdowns and border control was happening in Australia, I actually, I didn't get to say goodbye.
I didn't get to go to the funeral.
I went to the funeral over Zoom, which was just, it's still to this day, so surreal, and I didn't really have a support network at the time.
I wasn't living in the same state as my family, and so here I was completely alone in, like, my college room, not even my college room, it's like my share house room, having to mourn someone.
And that still hurts.
It still really hurts that I didn't get to say goodbye and I felt like my grief was really, really stagnant.
I don't know, it just felt like I felt guilty for not being able to mourn quick enough because I just felt so detached from when it actually happened.
And I will say like this is a common experience.
And you can say I know that lockdowns were vital.
I know that all those health measures were incredibly important.
I get that. But still, it did hurt me emotionally.
And there were things that I missed out on, that have had a lifelong impact on me.
You can believe both of those things at once, and you can feel sad, for the version of you that did really really miss out.
It's this idea actually of disenfranchised grief.
Grief that society might not really understand that well, might not be quick to accept, might not think it's appropriate, but if you're feeling it, it is appropriate.
just because your grief isn't about the death of a loved one.
It's about the loss of an experience, loss of a potential experience that you were promised.
That is still painful.
You can still grieve the things you missed out on at a really formative juncture in your life.
And let's think about what we did miss out on.
Firstly, the big one, we missed out on travel.
You may have missed out on exchanges, measures.
You missed out on in -person graduations.
You may have missed out on moving out.
You missed out on job opportunities.
You missed out on dating.
You missed out on making friends.
You missed out on just being able to be outdoors and socialize and build community and to be honest at the most simple, simple form of this you missed out on the potential to make memories, you may not have even known you were going to make.
The spontaneous kinds of memories.
I think we missed out primarily in three distinct ways.
We've missed out on experiences.
So the fun stuff, the dating, the travel.
We also missed out on the loss of connection.
And we know that loneliness can be as deadly and dangerous as smoking 10 cigarettes a day.
So what's the long -term health consequence going to be of being isolated for two to three years and only connecting with people through Netflix Watch Party and Zoom and TikTok.
Like, that's the first thing we really missed out on.
We missed out on milestones, so the graduations, the academic opportunities, the professional opportunities, the 21st birthday parties, the 30th birthday parties, the 18th birthday parties, the anniversaries, all those kinds of things.
One report from 2021 actually found that the number of non -employed college graduates went up by almost 20 % during that time.
A lot of us haven't been able to come back from that and we still feel like okay so I'm 25, 26 now, going for the same jobs that people who are 22 and 21 are going for and I feel like I'm behind, I feel like I'm time, because I couldn't do anything during this period.
One final thing that we missed out on, and it's not so much that we missed out, but we, we stayed, we stayed in situations that we didn't want to be in.
Let me explain this a little bit more.
I was talking to a friend about this the other day who was dating someone during COVID and she said to me, you know, if COVID hadn't have happened, I would have broken up with him.
And yet I stayed in this relationship for another two to three years, I think another two years because of the fact that we were living together.
And because of the fact that I needed him, this was my support network.
I couldn't leave him during this time and now I'm 29.
I'm, she's almost 30.
And she's like, well, I feel like I got to have my like fun little floaty period, but now I'm 30.
But I feel like I'm 27.
I feel like I'm ready to settle down but I almost feel like I've missed the boat.
I've missed the boat because I wanted to go about this in my own time, take my own timeline and it was actually a really profound conversation where she was like if COVID hadn't have happened maybe I'd be married now because I would have broken up with that person three years earlier, I would have done my fun dating period three years earlier, I would have meant the love of my life three years earlier.
So it's very complex and I think that that is a situation that a lot of us can really relate to.
So what is the outcome of this, what is the outcome of this disenfranchised grief, this warped sense of time, this sense of regret, resentment.
I think firstly we get really stuck in our brains.
We get really stuck in this thought spiral of, this is so unfair and you You know what it is unfair, but we feel resentful and upset and that lingers and we have no one to blame and so we end up just feeling really sad.
And eventually we can become really depressed about it, really depressed about the fact that there is this thing we can't change.
If we linger on it for too long, it takes over our life.
We also experience a sense of displacement.
You know, this fractured reality like I should be in two places at once, I should be here but I'm here.
I can't really tell what happened these last few years.
There's this big chunk of time that where I just feel like who even was I?
There's a rise in catch -up mentality.
I have to do the next three four years of my life at two times speed.
We also forget how huge this thing was.
It was a massive thing we went through and what we end up doing is we project a sense of personal failure for feeling behind, not realizing that the entire world through, you know, went through this with us.
We are not the only ones who are behind and when we feel this way it can be incredibly isolating and incredibly damaging for our self -esteem and our self -concept.
So this brings me to the skip part.
We skipped some of our 20s important periods of our life because of the pandemic.
We didn't have proper time to live our 20s actively and richly and fill it with the experiences that we wanted.
That cannot define us for the rest of this decade nor for the rest of our life.
So, how do we ensure that we can still make the most of this precious time and let go of any indignation or grief or sadness that continues to linger?
We're gonna talk about all of that and so much more after this short break.
Hey, have you ever brought your magic to Walt Disney World like, hey, we came to Plec.
Did you tip your tiara to a Creole princess or get goofy officially, step up like a boss and save the day?
Or see what life's like under the tree of light, did you?
If you could, would you?
When we come through, it's true magic, because we came to play.
Bring the magic at Walt Disney World Resort.
Hey, it's Amy Brown from the Bobby Bones show.
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Learn more at MeaningfulBeauty .com When we feel deep resentment, bitterness, indignation towards a situation, that can really infect our mind and make it such that we see the world differently, we gain an entirely new perspective on how unfair the world is, how awful life is.
It can also just lead us to become quite obsessive and continually focused on everything that isn't working out for us, rather than the things that are.
You know, that unfairness that we've all experienced, it's quite a toxic feeling and it's one that, you know, sometimes our brain finds quite satisfying and enjoyable to self pity and to say, God that was so unfair and this is so awful.
I think there is a time and a place for that.
There is a time and a place to acknowledge that the pandemic really sucked and has left long -term impacts, but there is a stage where you have to realize that you can either let go or be dragged.
You can either let your thoughts about how unfair the pandemic was continue to infiltrate the next five years of your life, or you can find a way to live with it.
And I think the healthiest kinds of people psychologically and emotionally and mentally, it's not that bad things don't happen to them, it's that they understand how to hold complex emotions at the same time.
They understand how to still be excited and happy, and also nostalgic and sad.
It's definitely a fine line between honoring your emotions and also not allowing them to pull you down, but I think the really important attitude to adopt is one of a stoic.
Adopt some of the principles of stoicism and stoicism is this important philosophy around acknowledging and observing your circumstances and the bad things that have happened to you and not letting them influence you deeper than you would like them to.
So it's basically about being a ship in a really big storm, riding the waves, riding with the rocking of the ship, knowing that there are some things you cannot change, but you can endure them, and you can come out the other side if you don't invest too much emotionally in them.
If you don't invest too much in your sense of injustice or unfairness.
In terms of recovering from the sense that you've missed out, I think some of the best tips that I've found have actually come from people who have experienced chronic illness.
So people who have found themselves trapped in a body, trapped in a life, struggling with a condition, that it's meant that they can't do all the things that are sold to them as the glamorous parts, the romantic parts of being in your twenties.
So they've had some kind of major health setback.
They have been inside for six months because of illness.
They've been in hospitals when other people have been out partying.
They've been exhausted when other people have been out dating.
A lot of people with chronic illness actually do have remarkable tips for those of us struggling with pandemic skip.
And so I actually asked some people, I said, from your learnings, what would you wish other people would know?
What do you think would help other people?
Some of the tips people gave me were to manage and prioritize quality over quantity.
So really create a list and be quite particular about what experiences are really important to you, what are the big experiences that you really do feel like you missed out on, how can you prioritize them with the time that you do have, with the resources that you do have. Some other tips was don't compare your timeline to others, of course, so powerful.
Anytime you find your thoughts, your eyes, your attitude, straying and clasping onto someone else's life and saying, that's evidence that my life isn't good enough.
Please direct it back inwards.
Try and find something about your life, small things that you are grateful for and that you are joyful for.
A try not to ruminate on the past was another one.
And I loved this one in particular, this one I actually found online and it was to be spontaneous with your good days.
So when you've got a day off, when you're feeling amazing, when everything is working out, take advantage of it.
Don't do the things that you need to do, you know, don't say it's a beautiful Sunday but I have to do my chores, embrace the spontaneity and the opportunity of good days, of free time, of the time that you do have. So I love those tips.
I think they're wonderful.
We can learn from the experience of so many other people.
I do have some of my own and my first in that same line of stoic philosophy is to really come to terms with and accept the fact that you cannot make up for that time and I know that's scary and I know that's upsetting.
But please take... Take, I don't know, So take what you need from this, take what you need from the fact that you weren't the only one and you weren't the only person who lost it.
So this is something that's always very comforting for me is knowing that anything I've been through I did not experience in isolation.
Someone else has gone through this, someone else is probably also feeling just as behind and confused as you.
In fact I can give you evidence for that.
I have thousands of DMs to prove that a lot of us are struggling with this.
the thing is yes nothing I say is gonna give you back that time but I can tell you how to use the time you do have better I think that you need to take a gap year now who cares if you're 27 of your 28 it's better to take a gap year now than 48 you know the urge is still going to be there what is holding you back it might be that you don't want to disappoint people you want to stay ahead in terms of your career goals, do you want to stay on track?
Who cares? Like genuinely, who cares?
It's a career, it's a profession, it's a job, that's not the entire point of your life.
The point of your life is to make good memories and actually enjoy your experiences and to just be alive.
So if you want to take a gap year now, honestly, who Who cares what anyone else thinks?
Who cares if it's not the right time?
Who cares if you're too old?
Like genuinely, the people who might say that to you, gosh, how miserable are they?
How miserable are they to never accept when we go off the book or we go off the timeline and we just have to give up on those experiences that were promised to us at a certain period?
You don't want to be like them.
You want to be like you.
So take the gap year now, do the things you wanted to do back then, now, I would also say create a bucket list. So all those things that you really thought you were going to get done between 2020 and 2022 -2023.
Make a bucket list now of the things you really want to do, things you really want to see in the next two years, and actually commit to ticking them off.
Like make a visual or make it something tangible of what it really is that you felt you met missed out on, see if you can bring those into your life now, make it a priority, make it a goal to get those things done.
I also think that it's important that we all sit down for a second and rethink the goals that you set for your twenties before the pandemic happened.
I am guilty of this.
I set a lot of goals for myself.
And I came out of the pandemic expecting me to still be able to complete them in the timeline that I'd given myself at 19 and 20.
And the thing is, that was no longer possible.
There was a huge spanner in the works.
There was a huge barrier to completion.
That doesn't mean I failed.
People face setbacks all the time.
It just meant that I needed to adjust my goals a little bit to make up for just this extraneous external thing that came in and kind of ruined the day.
So if you're feeling the pressure of the catch -up mentality, you're feeling behind, I would really ask you do your goals need revising based on what has occurred.
Do they need to be modified a little bit?
There's no shame in that.
They're your goals.
It's not like anyone else has a list. It's not like anyone else knows what they are.
They're your goals.
You can complete them in your own time and I also want you to remember, timelines are literally fake.
There is no universal timeline.
In fact, I can promise you I promise you I'm going to put a hundred bucks on the table right now.
You can get a hundred twenty -something year olds.
If you can find two people with the same timeline I will literally give you a hundred dollars.
Like it's just impossible.
It's literally just impossible.
Everybody is doing things differently.
They're starting uni at ages they're graduating at different ages they're taking different internships jobs they're doing trades they're not going to uni there you know pausing studies going part time for a little bit going back to full time like every single person has a unique path through life I really want you to ask yourself the grand perfect timeline who set that up and who do you know that's actually meeting it.
And are they happier than you?
Are they happier than you?
You don't know! And can you promise me that you would be just as happy as them if you did it the way they did it?
Answer is probably not, because you have your own unique preferences, you have your own unique desires for what you want to do with these ten years.
I also think it's totally okay to feel like you can tap a few extra years onto the end part of your 20s and keep calling yourself 29 if you really want to and continue to really be selfish and to be, I don't know, possessive with the time that you want to take to experience the things that you wanted to experience in your 20s.
I'm also gonna say this, don't forget to pause, don't forget to just enjoy the moment you're in now as well instead of trying to relive and make up for lost time.
This period is just as important as the periods that have come before this.
Focus on you know all the depths of experiences that you're having right now.
Really sink into the moments that you were having right now.
How important it is to be here and the fact that you know things have maybe worked out not in the way that you wanted them to but how do you know it would have been any better?
If there is just a couple of things that you were grateful for that you have in your life at this instance, know that you may not have had them if the pandemic hadn't have happened.
It's not me trying to be all toxic positivity on you, you guys know I hate that.
It's more that I just want you to make sure you have a balance between yeah feeling a little bit upset about it every now and again and also appreciating the present moment so that you're not constantly in like a delayed happiness cycle.
You can only feel happy about that moment in three years' time, or I'm constantly trying to catch up.
I'm never going to feel at that point again.
At some point you really just have to say it happened, but I'm here right now.
and I don't want to miss out on this moment.
So that's really how I've thought about it.
I hope you can relate to it as well but that's my best kind of pieces of advice for dealing with this like what is a very, very, very strange emotional experience.
One that we will probably never go through again.
Now let's have some like, let's have a bit of grace and pause for that.
Like it was traumatic.
We're never gonna hopefully go through something like that again.
So now you can really get to living.
You can exit survival mode.
You don't have to be hyper vigilant and you can start making up for those experiences by prioritizing the quality really beautiful experiences that you always wanted to have and having them now.
Oh right, I think it's time that we turn to our listener questions because you guys flooded my DMs with so many brilliant, brilliant questions that you wanted answered.
so we're going to take a quick pause but we'll return shortly so stay tuned.
Have you ever brought your magic to Walt Disney World like hey we came to play.
Did you tip your tiara to a creole princess?
Or get goofy officially?
Step up like a boss and save the day?
Or see what life's like under the tree of life, did you?
If you could, would you?
When we come through, it's true magic, cause we came to play.
Bring the magic at Walt Disney World Resort.
Hey, it's Amy Brown from The Bobby Bones Show.
Join me in supporting St. Jude Children's Research Hospital for a chance to win a trip to meet Meghan Maroney at the 2025 iHeart Country Festival in Austin, Texas on May 3rd hosted by Bobby Bones.
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So this is a new thing that we are trying out on the podcast where for each topic that I do, each solo episode, I do ask you guys to share your questions to share some of the things that you want answered.
You know I do my best to really cover as much as I can as much as the psychology and you some of the science and the ideas behind these topics.
But sometimes you guys just have such a brilliant ideas and brilliant questions about things that are quite niche or are quite specific.
So this is what this little section is for.
Make sure you are following me on Instagram at that psychology podcast. Two weeks before an episode goes live, I do put out the polls slash question boxes to get your questions on the topics that are coming up in the future.
So stay tuned for those.
Let's talk about this first question.
This first question says, is it valid to identify with a younger age because of pandemic skip?
Yeah, absolutely. I have this ongoing joke with all my friends that I'm still 22 because I still feel 22.
If, I don't know, I don't think it's bad to just have a little joke about it but also to just seriously be like, okay, I can tell myself what I want to feel.
like if it's gonna make you feel better about the pandemic and what you may have missed out on, saying to yourself okay yes I am 21 now, I'm still 21 I'm still 22, I'm still 23 and I'm going to live my life as if I actually am this age.
If that works for you, please please go for it I think that's fine.
I'm sure someone's gonna say you know oh but that's gonna create this like complex relationship with aging and it might make us stunted.
I think that if that's gonna be a problem you can fix it when you get to it.
For now if this is your biggest issue and the biggest source of mental distress is feeling younger than you actually are and feeling like you've missed out you can literally just tell yourself you're younger than you actually are.
I give you permission.
So this is the next question that I received.
I really like this question.
Should I feel guilty for desiring that unstructured free time again?
I miss being myself.
Was this not one of the best parts of the pandemic?
There was a lot of really awful stuff and a lot of really terrible experiences, but the free time that we had that unstructured time was incredible.
Think about all the different like challenges we were doing.
What was that like cream coffee that we were making all the time.
We had to do arts and craft projects to deep clean our house to read, to watch TV.
It was just complete leisure.
And of course sometimes that became problematic because it got a little bit boring and it got a little bit toxic and felt yuck sometimes because we've been doing it for so long.
And maybe you did kind of miss the discipline at the time.
But I do think that some element of what we were doing during the pandemic and all that free time is how we're meant to be living now.
We are actually meant to have more free time.
We are actually meant to have more unstructured time for creativity, for curiosity, for play, just for making things.
So, no, I don't think you should feel guilty for it.
I actually think it's entirely normal because there were parts of it that were actually quite good.
I do understand also that your guilt is maybe referring to the fact that, you know, did lose their lives and people did get really sick.
Maybe you feel bad for saying to people I kind of enjoyed it.
Just because there was an experience that someone else had doesn't mean that your experience is completely invalidated.
And it doesn't mean that your experience doesn't also count for something.
It's not saying that you are glad that that happened by no means.
You're saying, in my little corner of the world for what this did to me, I'm not entirely ungrateful for it.
So that's my answer to your question.
This next question is something we've only loosely discussed, so I am really glad that someone asked this.
What affect has the pandemic skip had on dating?
Dating is one of the, I think one of the big challenges of our twenties and the things that we think about most, you know, thinking about love and am I going to meet the right person?
and it's something hugely on our minds.
I think that the pandemic has made it harder.
I'm not gonna sugar coat it, it's made it harder.
People are less likely to commit, but we're at the age where society wants us to commit and it's mismatched, right?
So again, you may be 27, 28, maybe 29, maybe in your 30s.
And there is this real pressure of like, I haven't met anyone yet, I haven't met anyone yet, like oh I'm getting older, I'm getting older, which is complete bullshit by the way it's just this whole societal game, but you do feel that way.
And then there's this also other equally compelling sense of I want to take my time because I probably took a break from dating for a huge chunk, a huge period, and I still feel like I want to have the experiences of casual dating and getting to enjoy myself and meeting more people.
And so the chapters don't align, there's these two versions of you who are battling it out for kind of what to do with your heart, I guess, and I think that can especially cause frustration when two people are dating or two people are, you know, courting each other who are in different, who are the same age, but in different phases.
Someone has experienced this pandemic pause, pandemic skip, the other person hasn't, the other person is pushing for commitment, and the first person is saying I'm not ready.
It makes it very, very hard. I also think that it's probably created a little bit of social anxiety within us, you know dating and socializing and making friends in connection.
I truly believe that it's a skill and it's a, it's something that we build with practice and we get better at, especially during our twenties, but if of course you didn't get the opportunities to practice and to go on dates, you might be feeling a little bit rusty.
I'll just say this, love is not something you need to rush.
It's also most certainly not something that you need to put a million rules on of when I should meet someone and how it should go and all these things.
It will happen. Please find a way to make it as most the most enjoyable and fun that it can be for you.
I did an episode recently on how to reclaim your power in dating.
I think if you're struggling with that, that episode is exactly what you need to hear.
Okay, one final question.
How do you come to terms with the fact that you missed out on the iconic chapter of your life?
Now, I chose this question because we've really kind of already talked about this, but we haven't talked about this language, this language of the iconic chapter.
I just want to maybe give you a bit of hard love, but I think it's comforting.
You actually haven't missed out on your iconic chapter.
You haven't, you've only missed out on a couple of years.
I think that it can feel like there's a lot more magnitude to it and it can feel a lot bigger because every single year within this period really counts, but you haven't even missed out on a third of it like you have so much more time on either side to really push out those experiences.
I also think that as a collective, as a society, we need to be better at acknowledging that your 20s are probably not the best years of your life.
Sure, they're iconic.
You know Sex and the City only began when everyone in that TV show was 32?
That's such an iconic TV show of exploration and fun and career success and and love and heartbreak and glamour.
Like I really think we need to get over this idea that you turn 30 and you know you're dead, like your whole life is over and you've never had more, you're never gonna have fun again.
The people I know who are in their 30s are having a lot more fun than the people I know in their 20s.
And they're hotter and they do it better and they have more money and they feel more secure and they're just having the best time.
And again with this myth that you've missed out on an iconic chapter, I do get the grief and I feel like some of the other advice I've given can definitely help with that.
But, you know, there was another study from 2018 and I talk about this study a lot that actually found that your 20s are not the best chapter.
The best decade, what we tend to think is the best decade of our lives is the one that we are currently in.
So if you were in your 20s, of course, you're thinking, oh my God, this is the best year of my these are the best years of my life.
In your 30s you'll think the same.
In your 40s, in your 50s, in your 60s.
So, appreciate, make the most of the time you still have during this decade, but know that there is not a single experience during this decade that is confined or, you know, restricted by age.
You can come back and do the things you missed out on at 70 if you really want.
You have heaps and heaps of time.
And that's really the sentiment that I want to finish the episode on.
You have so much time, even if it feels like, even if it feels like you've missed out.
There's so much good stuff coming, the pandemic was awful and I'm glad we're out of it, but don't let it ruin your life, don't let the remnants of that emotional traumatic experience define the rest of the many many many brilliant years you have in front of you.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode, if you have made it this far I want you to you know I love living in emoji at this point.
You can do like the virus emoji maybe?
Yeah, I feel like the virus emoji is cute in like a weirdly morbid way.
I love knowing how many of you really listen all the way to the end and you know I love also hearing your questions, your feedback on this episode, anything that I haven't talked about that you think you could contribute, drop it in the comments, other people might agree, maybe they weren't but it's just such a great way to see this conversation continue.
Make sure that you are following me on Instagram at that psychology podcast. Obviously, you know, the book is coming out so, so soon.
So if you don't want to miss updates, make sure you are following me there and follow along wherever you're listening, leave a five star review.
Only if you feel called to do so, of course.
And until next time, stay safe, be kind, be gentle with yourself, and we will talk very, very soon.
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The Unshakable podcast is kicking off season two with an episode you won't want to miss.
Join host Ben Walter, CEO of Chase for Business, as he welcomes a very special guest, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Diamond.
Hear about the challenges facing small businesses and some of the uh -oh moments Jamie has overcome.
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