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 nineteen pandemic. And the article was basically a series of photos from that time. Pretty fascinating. But what was really really interesting in 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 twenty twenty, 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 what I really want to examine today because many, many of my fellow twenty something things 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 a 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 take 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 eighteen to thirty four experienced that very differently from other groups and other I guess age brackets in the population. So what are the consequences of that bin 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 is 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 this 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 for azen in time and we feel like our development is delayed. So you might be twenty seven, but you still feel twenty three or twenty four, which in our twenties is actually quite a huge jump, you know, even if in the grand scheme of things, three years is not that large. In our twenties, you know, I know people who are now married at twenty seven who had not even met their partner at twenty three. We can have entirely different jobs, live in entirely different places, have entirely new friends. I really do believe that a year in our twenties is five years any other time, and that really goes to show. I 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 thirty 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 going to say you needed to do, if toilet people was going to 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 for 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 that 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 experience 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 twenty twenty, twenty twenty one or twenty twenty two, 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 is also this interesting interaction that 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, you know, 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 twenties, 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 hence stressor in this case, that stress of 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 twenties. 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 you know, as a result of the lockdowns of wanting to be safe, we felt very caged and very locked away, and very much like 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 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, you know, how free am I really as a human? How free am I really is a soul? You can kind of see the spiral that can very quickly get us into. A twenty twenty three 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 higher 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 my college room, not even my college room as like my sharehouse 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 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 is 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. 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 experience, 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 ten 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 twenty first birthday parties, the thirtieth birthday parties, the eighteenth birthday parties, the anniversaries, all those kinds of things. One report from twenty twenty one actually found that the number of non employed college graduates went up by almost twenty percent 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, what twenty six now going for the same jobs that people who are twenty two and twenty one are going for, and I feel like I'm behind. I feel like I'm behind 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 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 twenty nine and she's almost thirty, and she's like, well, I feel like I got to have my like fun, little flirty period, but now I'm thirty, but I feel like I'm twenty seven. 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 met 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 regrets that meant 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 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 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 right I just feel like who even was I? And there's a rise in catch up mentality I have to do the next three four years of my life at two time 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 twenties, important periods of our life because of the pandemic. We didn't have proper time to live our twenties 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 going to talk about all of that and so much more after this shortbreak. 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. 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's 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't 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 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 has 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 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, you know, from your learnings, what would you wish other people would know? What do you wish 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, worrying 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. 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 know 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, oh, 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, 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 going to 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 twenty seven of your twelve It's better to take a gap year now than forty eight. 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, 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 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 twenty twenty and twenty twenty two, twenty twenty three, 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 something tangible of what it really is that you felt you 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 time that I had given myself at nineteen and twenty. And the thing is is that 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 one hundred bucks on the table right now. You can get one hundred twenty something year olds. If you can find two people with the same timeline, I will literally give you one hundred dollars. Like it to the It's just impossible. It's literally just impossible. Everybody is doing things differently. They're starting UNI at different ages, they're graduating at different ages, they're taking different internships, jobs, they're doing trades. They're not going to UNI, they're 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 do 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 twenties and keep calling yourself twenty nine if you really want to, and continue to feel like you're mad, 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 twenties. I'm also going to 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 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 than 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 constant in like a constantly in like a delayed not delayed like a delayed happiness cycle, like 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, Okay, 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 which, 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 want to ask answered. So we're going to take a quick pause, but we will return it shortly, so stay tuned. 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 know, 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 twenty two because I still feel twenty two. Like if I don't know, I don't think it's bad to just like have a little joke about it, but also to just seriously be like, Okay, I'm 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 twenty one. Now I'm still twenty one. I'm still twenty two, I'm still twenty three, 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 going to 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 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 is 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, people 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 is 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 effect 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? It's something hugely on our minds. I think that the pandemic has made it harder. I'm not going to sugarcoat 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 maybe twenty seven, twenty eight, maybe twenty nine, maybe in your thirties, and you know, there is this real pressure of like, oh, I haven't met anyone yet. I haven't met anyone yet, Like oh, I'm getting older, I'm getting older, which is to completely 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 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 and connection. I truly believe that it's a skill, and 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 the most enjoyable and fun that it can be for you 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, you know, maybe give you a bit of like hard love. But I think it's company. You actually haven't missed out on your iconic chapter you have it, 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 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 as a collective, as a society, we need to be better at acknowledging that your twenties 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 everyone in that TV show was thirty two. That's and like, that's such an iconic TV show of like exploration and fun and career success and love and heartbreak and what and glamour. Like I really think we need to get over this idea that you turn thirty and you know your debt, 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 thirties are having a lot more fun than the people I know in their twenties, 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 twenty eighteen, and I talk about this study a lot that actually found that your twenties 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're in your twenties, of course you're thinking, oh my god, this is the best year of mine, these are the best years of my life. In your thirties, You'll think the same in your forties, in your fifties, in your sixties. 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 seventy. 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 feel like even if it feels like you've missed out, there's so much good stuff coming. The pandemic was awful, and God, we're out of it, But don't let it ruin your life. Don't let the remnants of that emotional traumatic experience to find 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 h You know, I love living an 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 won'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 cool to do so, of course, and until next time, stay safe, be kind, be gentle with yourself, and we will talk very very soon

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 nineteen pandemic. And the article was basically a series of photos from that time. Pretty fascinating. But what was really really interesting in 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 twenty twenty, 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 what I really want to examine today because many, many of my fellow twenty something things 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 a 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 take 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 eighteen to thirty four experienced that very differently from other groups and other I guess age brackets in the population. So what are the consequences of that bin 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 is 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 this 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 for azen in time and we feel like our development is delayed. So you might be twenty seven, but you still feel twenty three or twenty four, which in our twenties is actually quite a huge jump, you know, even if in the grand scheme of things, three years is not that large. In our twenties, you know, I know people who are now married at twenty seven who had not even met their partner at twenty three. We can have entirely different jobs, live in entirely different places, have entirely new friends. I really do believe that a year in our twenties is five years any other time, and that really goes to show. I 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 thirty 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 going to say you needed to do, if toilet people was going to 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 for 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 that 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 experience 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 twenty twenty, twenty twenty one or twenty twenty two, 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 is also this interesting interaction that 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, you know, 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 twenties, 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 hence stressor in this case, that stress of 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 twenties. 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 you know, as a result of the lockdowns of wanting to be safe, we felt very caged and very locked away, and very much like 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 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, you know, how free am I really as a human? How free am I really is a soul? You can kind of see the spiral that can very quickly get us into. A twenty twenty three 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 higher 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 my college room, not even my college room as like my sharehouse 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 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 is 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. 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 experience, 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 ten 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 twenty first birthday parties, the thirtieth birthday parties, the eighteenth birthday parties, the anniversaries, all those kinds of things. One report from twenty twenty one actually found that the number of non employed college graduates went up by almost twenty percent 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, what twenty six now going for the same jobs that people who are twenty two and twenty one are going for, and I feel like I'm behind. I feel like I'm behind 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 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 twenty nine and she's almost thirty, and she's like, well, I feel like I got to have my like fun, little flirty period, but now I'm thirty, but I feel like I'm twenty seven. 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 met 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 regrets that meant 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 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 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 right I just feel like who even was I? And there's a rise in catch up mentality I have to do the next three four years of my life at two time 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 twenties, important periods of our life because of the pandemic. We didn't have proper time to live our twenties 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 going to talk about all of that and so much more after this shortbreak. 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. 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's 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't 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 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 has 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 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, you know, from your learnings, what would you wish other people would know? What do you wish 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, worrying 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. 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 know 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, oh, 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, 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 going to 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 twenty seven of your twelve It's better to take a gap year now than forty eight. 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, 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 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 twenty twenty and twenty twenty two, twenty twenty three, 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 something tangible of what it really is that you felt you 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 time that I had given myself at nineteen and twenty. And the thing is is that 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 one hundred bucks on the table right now. You can get one hundred twenty something year olds. If you can find two people with the same timeline, I will literally give you one hundred dollars. Like it to the It's just impossible. It's literally just impossible. Everybody is doing things differently. They're starting UNI at different ages, they're graduating at different ages, they're taking different internships, jobs, they're doing trades. They're not going to UNI, they're 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 do 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 twenties and keep calling yourself twenty nine if you really want to, and continue to feel like you're mad, 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 twenties. I'm also going to 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 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 than 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 constant in like a constantly in like a delayed not delayed like a delayed happiness cycle, like 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, Okay, 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 which, 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 want to ask answered. So we're going to take a quick pause, but we will return it shortly, so stay tuned. 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 know, 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 twenty two because I still feel twenty two. Like if I don't know, I don't think it's bad to just like have a little joke about it, but also to just seriously be like, Okay, I'm 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 twenty one. Now I'm still twenty one. I'm still twenty two, I'm still twenty three, 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 going to 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 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 is 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, people 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 is 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 effect 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? It's something hugely on our minds. I think that the pandemic has made it harder. I'm not going to sugarcoat 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 maybe twenty seven, twenty eight, maybe twenty nine, maybe in your thirties, and you know, there is this real pressure of like, oh, I haven't met anyone yet. I haven't met anyone yet, Like oh, I'm getting older, I'm getting older, which is to completely 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 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 and connection. I truly believe that it's a skill, and 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 the most enjoyable and fun that it can be for you 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, you know, maybe give you a bit of like hard love. But I think it's company. You actually haven't missed out on your iconic chapter you have it, 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 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 as a collective, as a society, we need to be better at acknowledging that your twenties 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 everyone in that TV show was thirty two. That's and like, that's such an iconic TV show of like exploration and fun and career success and love and heartbreak and what and glamour. Like I really think we need to get over this idea that you turn thirty and you know your debt, 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 thirties are having a lot more fun than the people I know in their twenties, 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 twenty eighteen, and I talk about this study a lot that actually found that your twenties 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're in your twenties, of course you're thinking, oh my god, this is the best year of mine, these are the best years of my life. In your thirties, You'll think the same in your forties, in your fifties, in your sixties. 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 seventy. 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 feel like even if it feels like you've missed out, there's so much good stuff coming. The pandemic was awful, and God, we're out of it, But don't let it ruin your life. Don't let the remnants of that emotional traumatic experience to find 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 h You know, I love living an 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 won'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 cool to do so, of course, and until next time, stay safe, be kind, be gentle with yourself, and we will talk very very soon