By Andres, 18, London, UK
Up until a week ago, I was spending my time doing schoolwork. Obviously, the volume of work which was completed was a lot lower than before school’s were shutdown, nevertheless, I was still getting through the tasks which had been set. However, we then received an email from our school’s head of academics telling us that the internal assessments in May will not go towards our final grade. As you can imagine, it’s pretty much impossible to be motivated to do any bit of work at all now. Therefore, I haven’t been doing much except for going on a run for one hour a day and then trying to do other things to get through the day. With all this spare time I’ve managed to catch up with old mates from when I lived in Australia, which is good, but I will need to find something else to do to keep me busy. I’ve been watching a lot of sports highlights to get over the fact all live sport has been cancelled.
The way I feel about my life is a weird one. It’s hard to say. But I think everything has been incredibly anticlimactic. For me, the main motivator making me work hard was the fact that I’d be able to have a really fun, planning holidays with mates and just having a laugh. All that seems less likely by the day now. Not only that, I remember the final week of last year’s summer holidays feeling really motivated to work hard throughout the year in order to do well in my final exams. You expect everything to go one way, and you feel prepared to do it that way, and then last minute that’s all taken away it can be a bit shocking. Even if we do still manage to have a summer it won’t be the same without the final push for exams, the summer term celebrations and the relief when you’re finally done. That’s why everything is a bit underwhelming. That being said, as my parents constantly remind me, we could be worse off. They’re right to be fair, but it’s still frustrating. For the world, this is probably good, at least when it comes to nature. We keep seeing stats where carbon emissions are dropping a lot and the world is ‘healing’ in one way or another. The advantages don’t repeat themselves for human life though, it seems likely that we’ll enter a recession and loads of people are struggling now that they’re not able to work.
The impact for my generation is a guessing game. If this problem lasts years as opposed to months our generation will have fallen behind with their education, and employers will know that. Furthermore, coming out of university it will be harder to find a job. However, if the virus is solved in a few months and the world goes back to normal, we will forget about this in a few years and the impacts will be very minimal.
Overall, people will realise that we shouldn’t take too much for granted but that won’t last for too long. Soon enough, we will all get used to our normal every day lives and go back to the way we lived before this. That being said, hopefully this serves as a time to reflect and some positive change comes out of it. Only time will tell...