Being and Becoming among Young People Revealed through the Experience of COVID-19

Abstract

The lockdown of society arising out of COVID-19 can be viewed as a microscope exposing the existential conditions and challenges of young people’s lives and their manner of dealing with crises. This study employs a qualitative research methodology using semi-structured interviews of 19 young people, aged 16–17 years, after the second COVID-19 lockdown in Denmark, March 2021. An analytical strategy was applied using reflexive methodology taking concepts from Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Buber, and Martin Heidegger to interpret the participants’ experiences of existential themes important to them, such as identity. Drawing on Kierkegaard’s idea of different “interpretive spheres” of life, we suggest that crisis revealed a disruption of the young peoples’ performance-oriented approach to life that made it possible to reflect and relate to themselves through aesthetic, ethical and self-transcending spheres. We suggest that the relationship to the other—as an ethical obligation, as an affective Being-with, and as something bigger than themselves—is crucial to the ways in which young people handle and relate to existential challenges and the experience of being and becoming themselves. The findings contribute to education and well-being, pointing out mental challenges among young people and stressing an existential focus as a priority in educational practice.

1. Introduction

This study aims to contribute to knowledge about young people’s existential conditions and well-being. We examine Danish young people’s existential experiences in relation to the changed conditions of life caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Denmark, the COVID-19 pandemic first led to a lockdown of society from 11 March 2020 and again from January 2021. The restrictions limited the amount of physical contact outside the household, required the wearing of a mask in public spaces, the lockdown of schools and leisure activities, and made working from home obligatory for all companies where possible (Nyhederne TV2 2020; Sundhedsstyrelsen [National Board of Health] 2020). One of the main arguments for the restrictions made by the government was the need to show social responsibility towards the wider community and vulnerable people under the motto: “Together, separately” (Clotworthy et al. 2021; Sørensen 2020). Although some young people experienced positive consequences such as an increased sense of gratitude and empathy (Beames et al. 2021; Kerekes et al. 2021), the consequences for the mental health of young people in general have been negative (Meherali et al. 2021; Nearchou et al. 2020). Lockdown in particular with the lack of social contact and the challenges related to online schooling generally seem to have had an impact on young people’s well-being (Almeida et al. 2021; Kutsar and Kurvet-Käosaar 2021; Scott et al. 2021). In Denmark, it was the second wave of COVID-19 that particularly affected young people in a negative way (Würtzen et al. 2021).

One of the explanations for the negative effects of the lockdown for young people may be that youth is characterized as a period where they can be particularly challenged in relation to their identity. It is a period of development that often includes processes of emancipation from the family, of re-orientation, and of experimentation with who they are and what they should become (van Halen et al. 2020). From perspective of existential theory, it is particularly necessary for young people to be a part of communities and relationships that facilitate their development of identity, values, and meaning in life (Rumianowska 2020). We have little knowledge about how young people experienced existential conditions when faced with the COVID-19 pandemic or of how they created meaning under these new conditions. The COVID-19 crisis changed existing existential conditions and thus also represents an opportunity to examine existential well-being and health among young people in general. This can be conducted by looking at their existential conditions and their reactions, experiences, and ways of handling their everyday life when faced with the fundamental disruption of everyday conditions that the lockdown of society entailed.

We understand existential well-being and health as being supported by having a worldview and an approach to living that helps people to function in daily life, to meet responsibilities, and to find their way when facing situations of crisis and loss of meaning (DeMarinis 2008, p. 66). Support of this kind develops in relation to something transcendent—such as religious faith or spiritual practice—through secular approaches, which might include science and technology or as a mixture of transcendent and secular approaches (Andersen et al. 2021; DeMarinis 2008). Existential health is often presented as one of four health dimensions, alongside biological, psychological, and social health, which constitutes a multidimensional health model focusing on mutual interaction between the four dimensions (DeMarinis 2008; La Cour 2021).

This study thus examines what changes related to COVID-19 (lockdown, focus on infection, social distance, etc.) mean for young people’s experience of themselves and what they experience as meaningful and important during these changed conditions. Such knowledge can contribute to an understanding of how young people’s approaches to living are experienced by themselves in their everyday life and when facing changed conditions of being. It plays an essential part in supporting and facilitating existential well-being in a range of different institutional contexts and in preventing distress and mental illness among young people.

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. Design and Participant Information

Using semi-structured interviews (see interview guide in Appendix A), 19 young people were interviewed, 13 individually and six in pairs, in a total of 16 interviews. The interviews were conducted via Zoom during the first days after schools re-opened in the spring of 2021 after the second COVID-19 lockdown. The participants were recruited from 10th grade at a private school in a large Danish provincial town. The teacher passed the invitation to participate to 36 students and 20 responded and received detailed information via email from the first author. One student withdrew due to illness.

A total of 13 girls and six boys participated. They were all between the ages of 16 and 17. For 13 of the students, the 10th grade was the first year at the private school; three students had attended the school 1–2 years earlier, and three had attended the school between 6 and 9 years prior to the 10th grade. The students had as a rule attended state schools before starting at the private school. The interviews lasted between 15 and 46 min (mean 28 min). Most of the interviews were conducted during the normal school timetable, which is why most interviews lasted between 20 and 30 min.

Teachers and students were informed orally and in writing about participant consent and about possibilities for withdrawing from the project. All interviews were recorded digitally, pseudonymized, transcribed, and stored securely in accordance with GDPR on a password-protected server.

2.2. Analytical Strategy and Theoretical Background

The approach of the analysis can be described as reflexive methodology (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2009). In reflexive methodology, researchers alternate between immersing in the empirical material and being in a dialogue with a broad repertoire of theoretical understandings, which leads to a reflected choice of how to analyze the empirical material. To understand the young people’s situation and experiences during the COVID-19 lockdown, we chose an analytical strategy based on existential phenomenology. The phenomenological commitment means that each case was analyzed in its own right with a focus on the subjective way to make sense. Before looking across cases, we strove to study and understand the life world of each individual and how each of the participants described their experiences of the existential themes. Secondarily, we drew on understandings and concepts from the existential philosophers Søren Kirkegaard, Martin Buber, and Martin Heidegger (Buber [1923] 1997; Heidegger 1927; Kierkegaard [1845] 1962), while ensuring constant reversion to each case to maintain a firm basis in the data.

The COVID-19 lockdown can be understood as a crisis that disrupted young people’s daily lives, their routines, and ways of relating to themselves. In his Stages on life’s Way Kierkegaard ([1845] 1962) describes how a crisis can disrupt the “philistine’s” way of life as a confrontation with the human conditions of being, i.e., the subjective confrontation with the existential tension between what is possible (freedom) and what is necessary (conditions). Characteristic of the philistine is a compliance with the norms and expectations of society. If young people in late modern society are considered as philistines in this Kierkegaardian sense, it could be said that they follow the given societal, cultural, and subcultural norms concerning, for example, education, leisure, use of social media, and the ideal of being “the best version of yourself” and constantly go with the tide (Hjortkjær 2020). They could consider their lives within the overall ideal of doing their best and keeping up with the demands of the times because this is the dominant norm. It also means not keeping up with the demands of the times requires a break with the current norms. From an existential perspective, such a break is often initiated by a disruption of ordinary life, such as societal or individual crises, confronting the individual with the existential dimensions of human life (Kierkegaard 1980). According to Kierkegaard, the individual can choose either to go back to living a life of the philistine or to take an active stance to own life and decide to live according to either an aesthetic or ethic sphere of life. Whereas the aesthetic person makes choices based on enjoyment and pleasures in the here-and-now, the ethical person chooses based on values such as conscientiousness, integrity, trustworthiness, and security. Using an interpretation of Kierkegaard’s ‘life stages’ (Kierkegaard [1845] 1962), we can look at how young people take an active stance within the already given and established horizons of meaning (Taylor 1991) or ‘spheres of life,’ (Jacobsen 2000; Nordentoft 1972; Peteet 2017; Nielsen 2018).

In the first part of the analysis, we will show how the COVID-19 lockdown challenges young people’s way of life and relationships with self, especially as regards the standards of the philistine and standards of the aesthetic sphere of life and how these challenges force young people to relate to themselves, make choices, and create meaning in new ways. In Kierkegaardian terms, it could be said that young people must find a new way to ‘become themselves,’ because the previous way they have handled the relationship between possibility and necessity has been destabilized (Kierkegaard 1980).

The second part of the analysis shows how young people handle their way of life and their self-relationships to a greater or lesser extent through different and overlapping spheres of life. In particular, we show how they increasingly related to themselves through an “ethical sphere of life” (horizon of meaning), which includes the relationship with ‘the other.’ To understand how this happens, through what we refer to as the self-transcending self-relationship, we draw on Martin Buber ([1923] 1997). Buber describes the self-relationship as a concrete I–Thou relationship, where the relationship with the other in intense moments of meetings comprises a purpose in itself. We also found that being together with others involves an affective relational becoming. To analyze how affective aspects of Being-with others are essential to the self-relationship, we use a Heideggerian (Heidegger 1927) understanding of how our existential mode of Being-with others is experienced as mood or attunement.

The interpretation of the themes of the analysis is presented through an interaction between quotes from the young people and selected concepts from Kierkegaard (1980)—the philistine and the self-relationship through the aesthetic and ethical sphere of life—from Buber ([1923] 1997)—the relationship with the other as constitutive of the self—and from Heidegger (1927)—mood or attunement as bodily ways of Being-with.

The findings contribute to an understanding of young people’s existential conditions and illustrate how existential relations to self and others might be changed as a consequence of crisis and changed conditions.

3. Results

In a Danish context, attending 10th grade is not mandatory and thus implies an active choice for the young people. Each interview therefore began with questions about their reasons for choosing 10th grade before the conversation centered on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their lives and well-being.

3.1. Societal Functionality: The Philistine

In the conversations with the young people, they generally described their choice of 10th grade as based on a need for more time to mature: “so that we could correct the last things that were missing” (Emma), before they were ready to continue in the educational system. Emma’s description reflects a way of relating to self in a self-reflective and self-corrective manner. She is an individual who has been assessed and whose shortcomings have been detected. She consequently needs to work on herself before she can move forward. This indicates an evaluative external view of oneself based on an unwritten norm of when one is ready to move forward and on a written norm that one must move forward (Uddannelses-og Forskningsministeriet 2016). The choice of 10th grade can thus be understood as a functional approach in which 10th grade becomes a means of preparing the individual for the rest of the educational system.

In this explanation of the choice of 10th grade, the young people thus identify with society’s performative and goal-oriented view of life, such as the ideal of the goal-oriented, effective student with (individual) responsibility for his or her own learning and education (Brinkmann and Petersen 2015; Hjortkjær 2020; Uddannelses-og Forskningsministeriet 2016). The young people seem to relate to themselves and evaluate themselves according to these societal standards.

They act as Kierkegaard’s philistine, who chooses to live according to given societal norms without basing that choice on a personal stance. They do not relate to themselves or take an active stance on who they are, who they can become, and how they wish to live their lives. The “spiritless life,” which Kierkegaard calls the philistine’s life, is lived based on secure identifiers that society provides to allow young people to identify and measure themselves against—identifiers such as student, girlfriend, or consumer. Such social identifiers also function as Heidegger’s “concealment of being,” whereby existential questions are concealed, and the existential confrontation with who they actually are and can become is avoided.

In the context of education, the young people further describe a focus on achievement and a discourse that “where there’s a will there’s a way”:

[To] get the best out of life and so on, achieve as much as you possibly can… my parents are very much like that, that is, you can become whatever you want…. It gives me strength to kind of believe that I can achieve what I want. I will achieve what I set out to do.

(Sidsel)

I put a lot of pressure on myself because I want to get the best grades so I can have the most opportunities in the future because… First of all, there’s a lot of pressure on us, and everything is judged by grades, that is, what’s on paper, not what’s inside a person.

(Lina)

to be the best version of yourself.

(Lina)

The young people here describe grades as determining their prospects and as a part of society’s educational standard which is experienced as a pressure. They feel a pressure coming both from their own internalized societal standard, which Lina expresses as her pushing herself to get the best opportunities in the future, but also from the experienced pressure from outside, which is increased by associated discourses that the grades are more important than the person. When there is a focus on the person, it is about the individual’s responsibility for achieving the best version of themselves, and here again the young people relate to themselves based on a standard of optimization and performance. Another participant elaborates on this self-relationship:

You can make yourself the best you are, that is, you can work on yourself, on the areas where you are weak, so that you become stronger mentally, as a person.

(Justin)

According to the standards of the philistine as interpreted trough the current analysis, life is about singleness of purpose and thus becomes a project involving achievement or performance. In addition, young people are subjected to a self-optimizing discourse according to which life is about achieving as much as possible while they can potentially achieve whatever they want. In several of the interviews, the young people talk about their individual responsibility both for their own lives here and now but also for whether the COVID-19 crisis, for example, will affect their future. Sidsel explains:

If I decide that it shouldn’t, then it’s not going to either … I’m kind of responsible for that myself, so I can do something extra to make sure it’s not going to have an impact on my future.

(Sidsel)

If young people are offered a societal standard of achieving the ideal and optimal (“be the best version”), against which they evaluate themselves, while at the same time nurturing a belief that they can achieve what they want and that they have sole responsibility for their achievement, there is a risk that they will be affected in their self-relationship. That is, there is a risk of an existential crisis when they cannot live up to the given standards of the ideal life.

Kierkegaard describes the life of the philistine as the life most people live unless a disturbance occurs, which makes the previous life impossible and thus confronts the individual with the existential dimensions and the possibility of a choice. This is illustrated in the young people adopting a standard from which they also experience a great deal of pressure. This is the standard that the educational institutions and societal discourses present them with, and it is easier to adopt the norm than actively and reflexively to choose something different (e.g., not being the best version of one-self).

3.2. Crisis as Disturbance

In the young people’s descriptions, the societal lockdown resulting from COVID-19 figures as a disturbance that confronts them with their own existence:

It has taken a year away from my social life… I’m a very positive and happy person, but I think it’s been really hard to keep that, well, I think it’s all just falling apart.

(Emma)

… in this [lockdown], I have felt maybe a little more confined, I didn’t feel I had the same opportunities, for example, that you could sit outside a little… I get very uncomfortable and become very sensitive and quickly irritated… then you hit a wall, and you feel that things are almost only going downhill.

(Hannah)

Both Emma and Hannah describe how being deprived of opportunities had negative consequences for their mood occasioning irritability, lower tolerance, and reduced joy. The discomfort and lowering of mood that both Emma and Hannah experienced can be understood as an existential crisis, because the demands and limitations of COVID-19 substantially reduced the range of opportunities they had for conducting their everyday life in this period. In this way, their self-relationship was challenged. Lina expresses what limitations to the self meant as follows:

Everyday life, it’s just very fixed, like it’s just come to a standstill… we’re in the process of finding out who we are, our personality and who we are as people, and what goals we have. So, I think it’s difficult for many young people, the thing about not being allowed to explore who you might like to be.

(Lina)

Lina explains how experiencing the restrictions in daily life as a “standstill” conflicts with the need for opportunities to explore own personality and identity. Thus, for young people, the restrictions were experienced as limiting their existential being and development. The COVID-19 pandemic also disrupted the general mindset that “everything is possible if you want it.” At the same time, the changed conditions during COVID-19 also facilitated more time for self-reflection for the young people and thus became an opportunity for them to pause and relate to themselves and the challenges and opportunities of their lives.

The analysis revealed several examples of young people who, not only due to COVID-19 lockdowns, independently moved beyond the goal- and performance-oriented standards of the philistine and related to themselves and others through the aesthetic sphere of life.

3.3. Aesthetic Sphere of Life

In the interviews, we asked the young people what was generally most important in their lives. The goal and meaning of life were described by the young people as a matter of feeling good and being happy. At the same time, “feeling good” depended on the individual’s ability to focus on making the most of life’s opportunities:

You just have to live the life you have, because you have to die at some point. So, you shouldn’t compromise.

(Bastian)

Here, there seems to be an overlap with society’s established norms as described above. However, for the “philistine,” the motivation to go after what one wants lies in an attempt to fulfil society’s expectations. For the aesthetic person, on the other hand, it is a way of actively and personally relating to an existential dimension, in this instance, death. Seen as behavior, these actions can look alike though their motivation is totally different. For one of the participants, a death in the immediate family led to what might be called a ‘carpe diem’ approach to everyday life. The focus is on enjoyment in the here and now, in the aesthetic sphere, and this becomes a way of relating to oneself and one’s existence when a disturbance in life’s normal round has occurred.

Cecilie sets up a contrast between the monotonous ‘routine’ of everyday life and the desire to ‘make something good’ of it, where ‘good’ is equated with ‘exciting’:

that you get to spend it [life] on something, so you don’t end up just wasting it in one way or another… we only have one chance to be here, so you might as well make something exciting of it, something good of it… as long as it doesn’t become too monotonous, but that it sort of becomes a life instead of a routine… life just has to be lived, and, well, rather die young with a lot of fun memories.

(Cecilie)

For Cecilie, death as a condition is the backdrop for her focus on enjoyment and her rejection of routine. The young people’s focus on fun experiences and getting the most out of life can be seen as a reflection of the aesthetic sphere of life, as a way of relating actively to the existential dimensions.

3.4. Ethical Sphere of Life

Simultaneously with societal performativity and the aesthetic sphere of life, the interviews consistently showed that the young people related ethically towards themselves and their surroundings. This ethical relationship with the other person can be found in Kierkegaard’s ethical sphere of life. It was generally expressed as an independent stance on the ‘golden rule’: “I think you should treat other people the way you would like to be treated yourself” (Jacob), but also in elaborations or variants such as:

I think you should accept others as they are, and not look down upon people.

(Lis)

Don’t always think about yourself, but also think about others.

(Sidsel)

Give people a chance and sometimes, people may need a number of chances.

(Hannah)

What is characteristic here is the commitment to an ethical approach and an active stand on how to live one’s life with a focus on values such as compassion, love, and loyalty. In the material, it was for example expressed as: “I will always support a friend, no matter what the person did” (Marc).

The ethical sphere of life is also characterized by “wanting to be oneself” (Kierkegaard [1849] 2011, p. 18), i.e., the choice of oneself as the person you actually are. Justin puts it this way: “You shouldn’t be something you’re not. So, the only thing you can become is who you… are”. Justin here articulates his perception that the only option is to choose oneself as the person you are. In the ethical sphere of life, not all choices are possible, but it is possible to “become who you are,” to choose oneself as a “socially situated individual in a concrete practice” (Nielsen 2018, p. 79). In the ethical sphere of life, taking responsibility for ourselves and becoming who we are involves an acceptance of weaknesses and inclinations over which we have no control, for this is precisely how we can take ourselves seriously (Hjortkjær 2020; Sløk 1983). Choosing the ethical sphere of life is, then, in contrast to philistine compliance that accepts the societal standard suggesting that young people they can become whatever they want, whenever they want it, and which focuses on them being “the best version of themselves” rather than “the actual self in a specific context.”

The analysis of the data indicates that to a certain extent young people do follow society’s performative and goal-oriented standards, but that many are in the process of relating reflectively to themselves through the aesthetic and ethical sphere of life. Confronted with crisis, adolescents take the opportunity to reflect on their own way of living, whether that way involve a philistine, aesthetic, or ethic sphere of life.

3.5. The Self-Transcending Self-Relationship

The young people related not only to themselves as an individualistic project but also through something bigger that transcended the individual, such as their relationship to other people. Friends and family were generally described as important to the young people’s lives, and the importance of close friendships was accentuated by the COVID-19 lockdown:

You don’t think much about how important they are. But when you are sent home and you don’t have them, you realize how much you need them in your everyday life.

(Bastian)

Family was described as an important support in the various choices of life, and relationships with friends and families were generally seen as providing strength, as a help in difficult times, and as central to existence.

The analysis of the data material indicates that with the COVID-19 lockdown, the young people gained an increased focus on how fundamentally important relationships were to them and on the significance of their own actions to the lives of others. Moreover, the young people focused on the importance of acting in the best interests of others:

Then I’d rather that I sort of miss out on something if I can save other people’s… lives, for example old people.

(Sidsel)

The young people described how the consequences of the lockdown, such as being cut off from physical contact with other people, helped to clarify what was important to them in their lives. Several of them also spoke of an increased gratitude for their own lives when compared to other young people living under less favorable circumstances. The young people in this study understand themselves and the opportunities and limitations of their own lives as part of a larger whole. Their lives gain meaning by being lived through relationships with others, as something bigger than the individual, the older generation, for example.

The young people’s relational approach transcends the instrumental logic, whereby the individual relates to other people as consumer, as a means to achieve a goal, and where the focus is on the self. To echo Buber, it could be said that the relationship with the other person becomes a goal in itself and so becomes something bigger that goes beyond the functional here-and-now. In Danish society, a central element of the COVID-19 discourse argued that the restrictions had to be observed for the sake of the community. This can be understood both as conforming to societal norms and as the ethical sphere of life, where the individual chooses to comply with the restrictions as an obligation, and thus the ethical sphere of life can be seen as part of the new societal norm under COVID-19. The ethical sphere of life is also related to trust, and the level of trust in the Danish government was generally very high in Danish society. Even before COVID-19, young people seemed to understand themselves through the ethical sphere of life, and the new ethical norm established since then builds on the independent ethical reflection that already existed. In addition to this, some of the young people also relate to society at large as a way of understanding themselves, seeing that relation not only as an ethical obligation but also as a relational self-understanding. To relate to oneself through something greater, such as a relational self-understanding, is in line with Kierkegaard’s concept of self-relation through “the other.” The importance of relating to oneself through “the other” can be found in Lis’ story:

In the first lockdown, I had, uh, no [common] holding point at all. At that time, I had no motivation and I had… nothing that, like, inspired me to be able to do anything… I’ve talked to friends on the phone but it’s not the same… it is definitely music and my favourite band that keep my spirits up… who make music for their fans about having to love themselves and accept each other and themselves, and they really made me open up to myself. Um, and also the way they are as people has also made me feel better, in relation to how my mood has been… I study them closely every day. So, if there is another lockdown, I think it will be easier for me.

A: Yes. And is it because of that band?

L: Yes, it is.

(Lis)

Here we see how the relational self is existentially challenged by the confinement of physical contact with other people related to COVID-19. For Lis, it was the band that became an inspiration and provided meaning during the second lockdown in contrast to the first lockdown. Lis’s approach to music is thus about understanding herself and the goal and meaning of her own life through the songs and not only about songs as entertainment value. When Lis describes how practicing music and listening to other musicians’ work have given her motivation, inspiration, and “a holding point” during the second lockdown, it can be understood as “the other,” even though music may not be another person, Lis has a relationship to the music and other artists through which she relates to herself. From the description it could be interpreted as if Lis relates to the music as a goal in itself. This can also be seen in relation to Buber’s relational understanding of the human being: “I come into being when I say you,” which emphasizes that the meeting with the other person (or with nature or spirituality) as a goal in itself is a prerequisite for coming into being as a human (Buber [1923] 1997).

It was not only close relationships that seem to be important to the young people. Several of them also mention the importance of work. In the role of shop assistant, they experience that encounters and relationships with other people have a qualitatively different meaning, since it is a physical meeting ‘in reality’ and not online. The meeting can be mundane, short-lived, and fleeting yet significant, as Angie explains:

It [the work] also gives… a completely different energy, and it has also made me think, … how important it is for you to talk to someone, uh, and to have a relationship with people in real life.

Another girl explains how she has missed being met with a classmate’s smile when she enters the class. The young people seem to appreciate seeing another person and, perhaps only briefly, experiencing a meeting without a defined purpose or a specific function. In relational existential psychology and philosophy, the positive experience and significance that the young people describe indicate a recognition of other’s existence as a human being and confirm that these interpersonal encounters indirectly facilitate their self-relationship. In other words, they become “an I” (without this being the goal or purpose).

3.6. Affective Bodily Anchoring

The analytical themes reflecting the young people’s existential conditions are classically existential in the sense that they revolve around the individual’s self-relationship and existence and how the self comes into being by relating to societal standards and through relationships to the other. At the same time, the young people indicate not only how the intersubjective encounter results in cognitive meaning but also how it is an affective relationship. Angie, describes how

I meet a lot of people due to my work and that is what helped me the most to get out of my house and get a completely different energy, it makes me happier, and I’m not so depressed, and I’m more energetic and fresher in my brain.

To understand these affective aspects, we will supplement our analysis with a Heideggerian existential, phenomenological, and social-ontological understanding of how the subjects being in-the-world [Da-sein] fundamentally entails a Being-with others [Mit-sein] (Bank 2021; Heidegger 2004, 1927). What Angie experiences as a “different energy” and “becoming energetic and fresher” can be described with Heidegger as a fundamental way the subjects are bodily present with others.

Heidegger uses the terms mood and attunement [German; Stimmung] to describe how we experience the fundamental relational and affective aspects of Being-with. Moods and attunements are therefore not just individual feelings but a fundamental way in which we are affectively present and together with others. Mood and attunement are therefore intersubjective, cultural, and bodily experienced (Bank 2021). The concepts of mood and attunement reveal why a particular physical, social encounter cannot simply be replaced by a virtual one because our relational existential coming-into-being as an affective bodily relationship is created through physical, social contact with “other bodies,” not only through acknowledgement or mutual recognition (Honneth 1996). If we look at the negative consequences of isolation, the young people describe how online meetings with family, friends, and peers are experienced as inadequate, even though they may be experienced as better than no contact at all.

The difference between meeting online and meeting In real life is described as having major consequences and as important for self-perception and well-being. The young people get tired, bored, and lose motivation and inclination. Online teaching and online contact with friends are also experienced as challenging for being oneself:

I’ve been very um… distant… it’s been hard to get in touch with the outside world, um… and at the same time it’s been easier than ever before. So, it’s been really weird, I think, with all this online and… uh, “let’s talk on the phone” instead of “let’s meet up”… it’s been really, really tiresome.

(Cecilie)

Getting in touch with others through online media is described here as difficult, and Cecilie’s experience of becoming distant is described as a negative consequence. The confinement of physical social contact in relation to COVID-19 can, therefore, challenge being and becoming oneself.

4. Discussion

The young people described a performance-oriented interpretation of life, which in the present existential analysis is seen as the social standard offered to young people by society (“You can become what you want”). We found that the societal standards and the aesthetic and ethical sphere of life were present in the young people’s lives to a greater or lesser extent and that they overlapped. Life during the lockdown of the COVID-19 crisis was full of demands and limitations, which made it difficult to experience opportunities and freedom and to live according to the societal standard about the ideal life. Furthermore, the societal standard also seemed to change as a result of COVID-19 (cf. the ethical sphere of life as a new norm for the philistine). When opportunities became few and demands many (restrictions to avoid illness and death), the young people were challenged in their relationship with themselves through “the other” as something bigger than themselves, which made it difficult to be and to become themselves. The changed conditions of being thus challenged the young people’s self-relationship and called for an active consideration of who they actually were and could become.

The societal discourse that the young people were offered (the philistine) further contrasted with what they focused on in the crisis. Despite the challenges the COVID-19 restrictions, what they experienced helped them and gave them energy, namely the interpersonal, physical encounters through which they could feel and understand themselves. The analysis points out that the relationship to the other person, as an ethical obligation, an affective Being-with, and as something bigger than themselves, is decisive for the young people’s existential wellbeing and self-relationship and is what helped the young people to find a way through the crisis. COVID-19 restrictions provided no benefit for the young people, but the pandemic’s disruption of their normal way of living became a “magnifying glass” that permitted a view of what can be regarded as existentially important for the young people to be themselves.

4.1. Implications of a Self-Relation That Transcends the Individual

Young people’s dissatisfaction during the COVID-19 lockdown may be due to a lack of social support, which is implicit in the themes of the analysis. However, the analysis also indicates that young people did not only miss “functional relationships,” understood as relationships that provide social support. The young people altogether felt there was a different quality in the physical, human contact that serves no evident purpose, such as a smile, and it was also this purposeless contact that they miss. In an existential framework, this can be interpreted as the need for a basic existential acknowledgement of being human, to be seen and encountered as a human being in addition to the particular purpose of the encounter, relationship, or social gathering (such as support). The young people seem used to describing their lives and thus also relationships in a functional language and from a functional perspective. This is clear from several places in the material. However, the analysis indicates that it is not only the function the relationships have for the young people that is significant for their life and being. The interpersonal encounter itself as an affective Being-with and as something bigger than themselves (a smile, meeting people in the shop, etc.) also plays a significant part.

This group of young people has grown up with the internet and screens as a result of their intensive employment in Danish education and society. Although they might be considered alienating, young people’s acclimatization to this technology prior to lockdown might lead us to suppose that they would describe online contact with peers as facilitating an interpersonal encounter. On the contrary, the analysis indicates that the young people do not find that this sort of contact facilitated their self-relationship through the other person but simply as maintaining a form of contact when there were other relational physical points of contact, such as the family. This is also in line with other research into young people (Kutsar and Kurvet-Käosaar 2021) and with research showing self-transcendence as a buffer against the effects of COVID-19 isolation among adults (Wong et al. 2021). Despite the possibility of online contact with friends, it is the physical, interpersonal meeting that the young people describe as energizing and as emotionally decisive for their well-being. This finding supports an Australian study showing socializing as the most used coping strategy promoting resilience and positive experiences among adolescents during the pandemic (Beames et al. 2021). An exception to this is cases when interpersonal challenges result in withdrawal. Here COVID-19 isolation provided a welcome withdrawal from the risk of social judgment and social demands. This can be traced in international reviews showing negative mental health outcomes in young people related to social isolation as a pandemic restriction (Nearchou et al. 2020; Almeida et al. 2021). From the perspective of existential theory, the interpersonal encounter without purpose functions as a recognition of the other as a “you,” as a human being (Buber), and thus the self-relationship is made possible via one’s relationship to oneself through the other (Kierkegaard). The analysis shows that the young people were finding their way not only by reflecting on themselves but also by relating to themselves through the other and through an affective bodily Being-with (Heidegger). Paradoxically, in the presence of the other, as a recognition of something greater than the individual itself, the possibility of becoming oneself arises.

4.2. Research Considerations

Most interviews were conducted as part of the school day with a tight schedule. It can be seen as a limitation of the data that the interviewer and participant knew about the time frame and did not have the opportunity to go beyond it to pursue a theme in the interview. On the other hand, all interviews followed a semi-structured interview guide, which means that all participants were asked the same questions with the opportunity to elaborate along the way. The interviews were conducted online. Based on the analysis above, this format can challenge the interpersonal meeting, which helps to facilitate the conversation between interviewer and participant. In order to counter relational challenges caused, for example, by technical issues with fluctuating sound quality, the interviewer made this clear and gave suggestions for possible corrective measures; the video was switched on in all interviews, and the interviewer was careful to make clear facial expressions. Although we cannot know how the interviews would have been if the interviews had not taken place online, the participants were very open and participatory.

In our position as researchers, we see ourselves as active co-creators of both the empirical material and the theoretical analyses (Brinkmann 2014). Choosing other methodological approaches or theoretical perspectives would have influenced the analysis and the support of the material. At the same time, the theories are chosen based on an existential-phenomenological reading of the interviews from the beginning of the analysis, and the interpretation is closely rooted in the material.

The researchers have a background as psychologists with experience from clinical practice (anonymized) and social work with young people (anonymized).

5. Conclusions and Implications for Practice

For the young people in this study, the COVID-19 lockdown constituted a disruption of their normal lives, in which they followed society’s performative and goal-oriented standards. At the same time, they dealt actively with the existential conditions through the aesthetic and ethical spheres of life. Using context of the challenging situation of pandemic lockdowns, the analysis showed that in order to relate to themselves and become themselves, the interpersonal encounter of an affective nature without purpose was essential. The study points to a contrast between societal norms (“when you perform, you can become what you want”), and the existential, relational approach that helped the young people to function and create meaning when faced with adversity and altered conditions (the ethical relationship itself and the non-performative meeting without purpose).

In continuation of this, the study shows that the limitations of online media for young people reduce opportunities for interpersonal encounter and can thus reduce opportunities for existential health and well-being.

The relationship to the other person as an ethical obligation, an affective Being-with, and as something bigger than themselves, was decisive for the young people’s existential well-being and self-relationship and helped them to find a way through the crisis. This existential-phenomenological perspective should therefore be considered in educational and clinical contexts if the society and healthcare system want to prevent mental ill-health and take care of young people’s well-being and education.