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.

Keywords

• existential well-being
• young people
• COVID-19
• existential health
• existential phenomenology
• education