The Pandemic and the Challenges for Young People of Living Well in the Anthropocene

Abstract

This article builds on work in which we have engaged nearly 100 young people in video-based interviews in two separate projects that have been concerned with asking young people about their lives in the present (that was 2020–2023) and the challenges and opportunities that they imagined in their futures—personally and more widely concerning the crises of the pandemic, the climate and global capitalism. That work has been framed by a critical engagement with young people’s health and well-being, and the issues that impact their hopes for living well in the Anthropocene. In this context, we tell a version of two young people’s stories and introduce, and then extend on, the idea of socio-ecological understandings of young people’s health and well-being, to argue that while these models offer productive possibilities, they fail to critically account for the crises of capitalism and the climate that the pandemic is a consequence of.

Introduction

Throughout the different waves and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been much policy and public commentary—local, national and global—about the impacts of the crisis on the health and well-being of young people. In Australia, this commentary has come from agencies such as the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW, 2021) and Mission Australia (MA, 2021). Much of that commentary has focussed on the mental health and well-being of young people as public health responses during 2020–2022—such as lockdowns, school closures and the cancellation of ‘social’ activities—meant that many young people experienced isolation, increased anxieties and more severe mental health challenges.

In this article, we will build on the work we have undertaken since 2020 in which we have engaged nearly 100 young people in video-based interviews in two separate projects in the inner northern suburbs of Melbourne and in the large regional city of Geelong (both in the state of Victoria in Australia). The focus for this article is on our project in Geelong, a provincial city, located 75 km southwest of Melbourne, comprising suburban, coastal and country areas in the south-western part of the state of Victoria (City of Greater Geelong [COGG], 2018). Broadly speaking, these projects have been concerned with asking young people—often those who are disengaged, marginalized and/or from areas of historical disadvantage—about their lives at the moment (in the ‘present’ that was 2020–2023), and about the challenges and opportunities that they imagined in their futures—personally and more widely in relation to the crises of the pandemic, the climate and global capitalism. Our contribution here is to focus on the place-based dimensions of the regional, national and global responses to the uncertainties and sense of crisis provoked by the pandemic. The data generated in these projects suggest that young people’s uncertainties and anxieties during the pandemic, and in its aftermath, signal a concern with what it means to be able to live well in the present and the future. Here, living well points to the complex and ambiguous entanglements between young people’s health and well-being, their education, training and employment pathways, their sense of belonging in diverse groups and communities and how they imagine futures (Kelly et al. 2023b).

In this sense, we will argue that the COVID-19 pandemic provides a powerful reason to view young people’s health and well-being in alternative modes—including through the more expansive lens of ‘living well’. ¹ With this purpose in mind, we will introduce, and then extend the idea of socio-ecological models of young people’s lives and their health and well-being (Brown, 2022). The US Rural Health Information Hub (2023) outlines how these models highlight ‘the interaction between, and interdependence of, factors within and across all levels of a health problem…[and]…people’s interactions with their physical and sociocultural environments’. In the section that follows, we will develop this initial understanding and locate these models in the context of the pandemic. There, we will suggest that while these models offer productive possibilities for developing understanding of young people’s hopes for living well that move beyond a focus on the individual young person, they fail to critically account for the crises of capitalism and the climate that the pandemic is a consequence of (see Brown, 2022).

We will situate these arguments in a description of our Geelong-based project, where we will tell the stories of two of the young people—Daisy and Elijah—who participated in video-based interviews during 2021. We will suggest, in ways that draw on ‘more-than-representational’ approaches to writing qualitative research (Coffey, 2022), that these young people’s stories reveal their hopes for living well in these times of crisis and uncertainty that we, and others, call the Anthropocene (Haraway, 2015, 2016). Our contribution points to new place-based ways of storytelling about young people’s hopes for living well in particular places, such as Geelong, that add detail and complexity to more abstract narratives about the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on the health and well-being of young people from agencies such as AIHW (2021) and MA (2021).

In our final Discussion section, we will use these stories as a ‘jumping off’ (Coffey, 2022) point to suggest that the work of Lupton (2022), Frost (2016), Haraway (2016) and others, provides ways of rethinking how socio-ecological models of young people’s well-being move beyond human-centred relationships, communities, organizations and policies. These theoretical contributions can contribute to new ways for sociologies of youth to tell geostories of young people’s concerns for living well that consider the multi-species entanglements of humans (young and old) with nonhuman agents such as the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

The Pandemic and the Socio-ecological Challenges for Young People’s Health and Well-being

Our starting point for locating these place-based stories emerges from the findings of the MA Youth Survey Report 2021, which analysed survey responses by 20,207 15- to 19-year-olds. These findings indicated that the pandemic was causing significant concerns for young Australians (MA, 2021). Four out of 10 young people were extremely or very concerned about stress, mental health and school or study problems. Also, in 2021, the AIHW presented what it called an ‘ecological analysis’ of the impacts of the pandemic on young people, in which it referenced a range of survey-based data. The AIHW (2021) reported several interrelated effects of COVID-19 on young people aged 15–24, such as their psychological distress worsening between February 2017 and April 2020, the monthly unemployment rate rising from 12% in March 2020 to 16.4% in July 2020 and 28% of young people aged 18–24 failing to pay their rent on time in the previous three months compared with 15% of Australians aged 18 and over. They argue for ongoing comprehensive monitoring of the impact of COVID-19 on young people’s well-being because life trajectories are set in place at this time (AIHW, 2021).

The data and findings that the AIHW presents drew primarily on national surveys conducted by UNICEF Australia during 2020–2021. The AIHW (2021) argued that the primary concerns for young people at this time were ‘isolation from friends and family, disruptions to education, and a friend or family member’s contracting COVID-19’. These sorts of claims resonate with similar ‘pandemic era’ data and concerns from various national and international agencies in different contexts (see, e.g., OECD, 2021; UNESCO, 2022). However, the importance of different social, cultural, political and economic responses in these different contexts, and the differing impacts and consequences for different populations of young people in these spaces, point to some of the limitations of the data and claims presented by the AIHW in its somewhat limited ‘ecological analysis’.

There has been significant interest in these concerns in the ‘youth studies’ literature (broadly defined), including a double special issue of this journal (see Bengtsson et al., 2021). In this literature, much of which emerged in 2020 and 2021 in the midst of the early uncertainties associated with the pandemic, there has been a focus on young people’s often precarious education, training and employment pathways, their health and well-being, and hopes and concerns for their futures. A number of contributions to the special issues provide a means to situate our interests here. In their analysis of the impacts of the early days of the pandemic on young hospitality workers in Melbourne and Newcastle (Australia), Coffey et al. (2022, pp. 344–345) examine the ways in which these young workers navigated a number of the challenges and opportunities of this time through their identification of themes such as ‘work’, ‘support from family’, ‘coping without family support’ and ‘sense of the future’. In terms of this final theme, they suggest that most of the young people they interviewed ‘did not envision the pandemic as completely changing their future trajectories’. These young people identified ‘delays to their plans or concern about “falling behind” rather than feeling the need to completely reinvent themselves or re-evaluate their future plans’. At the same time, Coffey et al. (2022, pp. 344–345) do identify a number of differences in these orientations and concerns between ‘more privileged participants’ and those young people ‘struggling without financial or family support’.

The contribution by Vehkalahti et al. (2021) draws on a series of interviews with young people who were already participants in a longitudinal study of ‘emerging adulthood’ in rural Finland when the pandemic emerged, and these rural areas went into lockdown in the spring of 2020. Vehkalahti et al. (2021) present an analysis that highlights two key themes: the sense that adulthood had been further placed on hold by the emergence of the pandemic, to produce what they identify as ‘stretching the yo-yo transition’ and the various ‘emotional challenges’ that accompany the ‘rearrangement of social relations’. What is of interest here, given our focus on the place-based dimensions of these global crises, is their argument (Vehkalahti et al., 2021, p. 411) that ‘instead of viewing emerging adulthood as a universal concept’, their data and analysis points to the complexity of youth transitions and the importance of social and cultural contexts in shaping’ what they call the ‘contingency of emerging adulthood in a global risk society’.

It is in this context that we are interested in thinking differently about the many challenges that the pandemic has posed for young people’s social, physical and mental health and well-being. And with locating these concerns in spaces such as those mapped out by Deborah Lupton’s (2022, p. 8) extensive scholarship on COVID Societies, in which she is concerned with identifying the ‘narratives, imaginaries, practices and feelings concerning risks and uncertainties that pervade COVID societies’. ² However, this focus on ‘well-being’ has tended to create a number of challenges for critical sociologies of young people (Kelly & Pike, 2017). McLeod and Wright (2016, p. 777), for example, suggest that: ‘Concerns about wellbeing… inform everyday understandings of young people, policy discourses and social practice’ (see also Wright & McLeod, 2015). The ‘currency’ of this concept, however, tends to ‘individualize the challenges experienced by young people—their personal wellbeing problem—and at the same time to offer a solution, a space of hope, a site of intervention, with attending to young people’s wellbeing increasingly perceived as a do-able solution for a fix-able problem’ (McLeod & Wright, 2016, p. 781).

Julia Coffey’s (2022, pp. 67–68) recent exploration of the embodied dimensions of young people’s well-being emerges, she argues, from ‘sociological critiques highlighting the individualising effects of wellbeing discourses’. Building on new materialist understandings of ‘affect’, Coffey develops a ‘specific focus on embodied sensations and “felt” dimensions of wellbeing, and what these “do” in the context of young people’s negotiation of the conditions and constraints of their everyday lives’.

For these reasons, we framed our project through the ways in which socio-ecological models of well-being consider not only the individual young person and their family but also the larger social networks in the place where the individual lives (Brown, 2022). Urie Bronfenbrenner’s (1979, p. 2) ecological framework for human development was the earliest work to use the term ecology to describe the different levels of socializing influences and forces operating in ‘a nested arrangement of concentric structures’. Bronfenbrenner referred to these structures as the:

micro—how an individual experiences activities, roles and relations in a setting such as a school;

meso—a system of microsystems, focused on the interrelations of settings such as a home, school and neighbourhood;

exo—one or more settings that an individual does not actively participate in but is affected by what happens;

macro—systems which comprise the consistencies in the form and content of the micro-, meso- and exo-systems, including things such as culture or ideology.

Bronfenbrenner also added the chronosystem as a fifth socially organized system that refers to the dimension of time and its shaping of ecologies over the individual’s lifespan.

In the projects we reference here, our reading of ‘socio-ecological’ models provided an initial means to engage young people and other stakeholders in discussions about:

the pandemic,

the contexts that have shaped its emergence, and

the ways in which, as a ‘global’ event, it played out differently in different ‘socio-ecologies’.

These models also provided a means to extend discussions about young people’s health and well-being beyond a limited focus on the individual. However, our explicit aims in the conduct of these projects have been to situate the pandemic, its emergence and the consequences for humans (young and old) in the broader, unfolding crises of global capitalism, of earth systems and of biodiversity loss. As Settele et al. (2020) have argued in a paper for the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services:

There is a single species that is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic - us. As with the climate and biodiversity crises, recent pandemics are a direct consequence of human activity—particularly our global financial and economic systems, based on a limited paradigm that prizes economic growth at any cost. (Settele et al., 2020, p. 1)

Nelson (2020, p. 305) has also suggested that the pandemic ‘has exposed weaknesses’ of capitalism and that a ‘novel coronavirus is more likely to arise given massive industrial agriculture’. For Albert (2024, p. 32), the massive injustices and inequalities that characterize global capitalism suggest it is ‘less likely if not impossible that it could roll back the broader earth system crisis’. Rosi Braidotti (2019) has identified these multiple but connected crises as signalling a convergence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution ³ and the Sixth Mass Extinction ⁴ : ‘between an advanced knowledge economy, which perpetuates patterns of discrimination and exclusion, and the threat of climate change devastation for both human and non-human entities’. With these concerns in mind, our Discussion section will develop a more critical account of ‘socio-ecologies’ by drawing on Frost’s (2016) work on ‘bio-cultural habitats’ and Haraway’s work (2015, 2016) on the Chthulucene/Anthropocene to include a critique of the extractive and exploitative characteristics of techno-capitalism as these shape the ongoing crises confronting the biosphere (Settele et al., 2020; see also Lupton, 2022).

The Project

The (title provided after review) project conducted a series of video interviews with young people as we tracked their education, training and employment pathways in COVID ‘normal’ socio-ecologies that are profoundly shaped by historical and contemporary processes of disadvantage and marginalization.

Geelong (population 270,000+) was, for much of the twentieth century, a booming regional centre, boasting an array of industrial manufacturing operations (Johnson, 2009). However, during the last four decades, the impacts of processes of neoliberal globalization, successive economic recessions and government industry restructuring policies have fallen heavily on many industrial towns, cities and regions in Australia and other economies in the OECD and the EU (Noonan & Kelly, 2020). Prior to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the 12-month average of Geelong’s youth unemployment rate to August 2018 was 12.4%, a rate comparable with the Victorian and national averages (COGG, 2018). However, in the Geelong region, the suburbs of Whittington, North Geelong, Corio, Bell Post Hill and Norlane and North Shore have, over a number of decades, been identified as zones of significant economic disadvantage. In these areas, youth unemployment rates are 10 percentage points above the city average, and are home to the highest proportions of people with below Year 11 levels of educational attainment (COGG, 2018). ⁵ The 3214 postcodes (comprising Corio, Norlane and North Shore), for example, recorded the third worst ranking in Victoria across 22 indicators of disadvantage (Crane, 2015).

In this context, young people were invited to participate with the support of a wide range of stakeholder organizations affiliated with the City of Geelong Pre-employment Professionals Network (PPN). The PPN included representatives of youth employment and mental health agencies, disability support services and members of the Geelong Regional Local Learning and Employment Network. Staff at these agencies and organizations assisted the research team to connect with young people. After discussing the project, young people were sent a link to the automated video-capture platform Video-ask. The platform enabled young people to reply to a series of video questions by recording a video, audio and/or text response. In 2021, young people were asked to respond to the following questions and themes:

My life at the moment

Can you tell us about how you view your life at the moment?

The world now, and in the future

Can you tell us your thoughts about the current state of the world at the moment?

My life in the future

We want to know a little about your hopes and aspirations for your future.

Something else?

This is an opportunity for you to say something about your life and the things that you care about.

During 2021, and in the midst of extended public health lockdowns in response to rising COVID-19 infections, 33 young people (aged 16–23) completed Video-ask interviews:

12 young people identified as male,

17 as female,

1 as a transgender male,

1 responded that ‘gender is a social construct’, and

2 young people did not answer that question;

6 of the cohort provided details about their culturally and/or linguistically diverse;

1 young person identified as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander;

many were enrolled in either a year 11 or year 12 programme;

13 were completing further study and were enrolled in an accredited vocational training programme;

5 were enrolled in a Higher Education programme; about half were employed, almost all on a casual basis; most were living in a family home; and

12 young people identified that they had a disability, or were neurodiverse, or were living with anxiety and depression.

Video-ask interviews enabled young people to consider the questions and frame draft responses before submitting a final response. Our experience of the format suggests that many of the young people who participated were expansive and reflective when given the opportunity to respond to the asynchronous video prompt questions (see Watson & Lupton, 2022). For those who preferred face-to-face interviews, the third author arranged video-based face-to-face recordings. As in all qualitative research, some young people were more expansive and thoughtful than others and became ‘key participants’.

In the following section, we tell a version of the stories of two of the young people who were interviewed: Daisy and Elijah. The choices to tell these particular stories are, in many respects, pragmatic and determined by available space. We have told other stories elsewhere. ⁶ We have also chosen to tell a limited number of ‘stories’ rather than provide a ‘thematic’ analysis using a larger number of young people’s voices. In a recent paper, Coffey (2022) provides a compelling example of the ways in which this form can move beyond ‘representational’ logics in qualitative research. As she argues, this type of storytelling is not concerned with ‘uncovering internally-motivated meanings through thoughts and explanations of action’, but rather seeks to ‘explore the co-extensive, affective, processes as mediating, not determining action’ (Coffey, 2022, p. 72). For Phillip Vannini (2015, p. 15), at the core of this kind of more-than-representational writing is an ‘ethos of animation’ that seeks to ‘enliven rather than report’, ‘render rather than represent, to resonate rather than validate…to generate possibilities of encounter rather than construct representative ideal types’. In addition, more-than-representational approaches ‘reject the privileging of human existence over the existence of non-human objects’ as they seek to explore ‘an experimental approach to research’. In doing so, these approaches look to examine ‘material/discursive entanglements of intra-acting phenomena…as the focus of interest’ (Coffey, 2023, p. 850). This mode of representation provides a means to move beyond human exceptionalism and allows us to consider the entanglements between young people and the more-than-human.

In the stories we tell here, young people, who had agreed to be identifiable through the public use (YouTube, www sites, Instagram) of their video responses, have reviewed our account and agreed to the ways in which we represent them. The institutional ethics approval process was explicit in allowing young people to be identified. ⁷ However, the candour of many young people meant the research team was confronted with the challenges of making decisions about whether to ‘expose’ young people in these ways. In this video (https://youngpeoplesfutureslab.org/reflections-on-doing-video-based-interviews-with-young-people/), we discuss a number of these challenges. This video is a precursor to a methodological paper that is in development.

This more-than-representational approach does a number of things here. First, the candour and details of young people’s responses suggested that we needed to develop different modes of telling their stories and different ways to make sense of their hopes for the future. In part, this has meant finding a way to let young people speak before analysing what they said. Second, in doing this research, we have been affected in a variety of ways by young people’s openness, their struggles and concerns, their hopes and joys, and their anxieties and uncertainties. As we have come to curate these stories in the confines of this particular space, we have been confronted by how to make the ‘best’ choices to do justice to these stories—beyond making them fit, somehow, to themes that we identify. In acknowledging that ‘representations can never be fully left behind’, Coffey (2022, p. 72) suggests that ‘the main point’ in exploring the possibilities in these forms of storytelling, ‘is that representational analysis should not be the endpoint for our understandings of complex social processes related to embodiment’. Rather, this approach can ‘illustrate, and…provide the jumping-off point for exploring’ how these hopes are entangled with health and well-being, education, training and employment challenges and opportunities, experiences of crisis and uncertainties, and the temporality, spatiality and materiality of these places at these times.

Daisy’s Story

In 2021, Daisy was 20 years old and living in a shared flat in Bannockburn, a semi-rural area approximately 20 km from central Geelong. At that time, she was working full-time at a school while completing her Certificate III in Education Support, and planned on attending university the following year. ⁸ In her video response, Daisy recalled her ‘struggles’ during the repeated, often lengthy public health lockdowns during 2020 and 2021:

I know for me personally, COVID has been really hard.

It’s been a real struggle coming in and out of lockdowns and then going into lockdown and having them extended.

And, you know, not seeing anyone, essentially which I feel like is really important— connecting to people.

It helps our well-being, a lot for most people to be connected to one another.

I struggle with anxiety and depression, among other things, like many people, and it definitely has not been easy.

At the same time, Daisy felt fortunate and was grateful to be involved in sporting activities and to be able to continue with her employment—even though this was disrupted because of school closures.

I’m very lucky this year.

I guess in a way I know for where I live, sport was able to come back and that was a huge help for me this year, which was, last year, something that we didn’t have at all.

Being able to play netball again and get around the community and, you know, it was a huge help.

I’m very lucky in the sense that I still have had my job, but it’s been very different to what it would normally look like working at a school and not being able to go to school is such a challenge for everyone, especially the kids.

In reflection on her work and study, Daisy spoke passionately about her concern for others who were struggling: ‘And I know for me personally, I’m really concerned about how this is going to impact kids and people in the future. Some people, you know, are going through things that are worse than I am, and it’s really hard’.

Daisy also spoke about how the pandemic and other global crises affected the planet, particularly vulnerable populations in other countries.

There are so many people and countries struggling with many things in so many different ways, you know, and I feel like recently a lot of those are no longer spoken about.

Like, we have countries that still struggle with access to health care, or access to clean water or food or…we have climate change…and pollution is still a big issue…extinction and habitat loss.

And they’re still so important. And I feel like some people, with everything that’s going on with COVID at the moment, are no longer giving these a second thought.

In addition to these sorts of concerns, Daisy also worried about how the debates about the mandating of the COVID-19 vaccine was, during this time, polarizing communities:

We also have the vaccine, which I feel is dividing a lot of people on whether you should or shouldn’t be vaccinated, or if you’re not, what then comes from that, where you can go, where you can’t go.

I have seen people on both sides be really, really nasty about these sorts of things, and it’s really disheartening to see.

As she talked about and reflected on the ways in which the pandemic and the public health crisis it produced were evolving and being managed, Daisy responded to our question about how she imagined her future with some hope in terms of where she wanted to be living, the sort of work she wanted to be doing and the importance of her well-being:

I want to be living maybe down by the coast or the country, the city’s not really for me.

I hope to be working as a teacher, particularly working in the well-being side of teaching.

Working with kids and wellbeing are two things that I’m extremely passionate about.

I think it’s just really important to never forget to look after yourself and take care of yourself because it is extremely important.

I feel like this is something that a lot of people have learned over a time like this.

I hope in five years that I’m able to learn and grow from what it is that I’m facing at the moment and then you know, use that in order to motivate and shape the person that I hope to become.

Daisy’s focus on her own future well-being was balanced, as in most parts of her reflections, by her keen sense that the pandemic had provided an opportunity for herself and others to think about the importance of the connections that we are able to make with others and the support that these connections can provide: ‘I think if going through all of this has taught us anything, it’s that, you know, in hard times we really need to focus on working together rather than against each other’.

Daisy’s sense of the importance of these interconnections and relationships, and the ‘lessons’ she and others might take from the pandemic, was expressed in the hopes that she held for the future beyond COVID:

In five years, I hope people have been able to in a way move on and really work towards, you know, what it is that they want to achieve and that things get better for everyone.

And you know, we see some improvements with how the world is run and how we’re taking care of our planet.

We only have one, and it’s just super important to take care of the planet, but not only that but also take care of ourselves.

So, I hope five years in the future that’s exactly what I’ll be doing.

Listening to and telling a version of Daisy’s story invites us to consider the ways in which her sense of the importance of her own well-being is shaped by and filtered through feelings of being isolated in the context of ‘lockdown’: ‘And, you know, not seeing anyone, essentially which I feel like is really important—connecting to people’. This isolation, of having the normal, everyday connections to others disrupted by the spread of the more-than-human virus, brings into sharp relief the relational entanglements that are fundamental to many young people’s lives and their abilities to live well, or to imagine what it means to live well. Daisy’s struggles are, at the same time, not just about her own well-being, but also about the challenges that she imagines for other young people that emerge from her education training, and work in a school as a teacher’s aide: ‘I’m really concerned about how this is going to impact kids and people in the future…’. Daisy’s sense of what it means to live well is also expressed in her concerns about the social divisions that were amplified in debates about vaccine mandates and in the economic and health inequalities, the challenges of the climate crisis that had, seemingly, been pushed into the background by the pandemic. These divisions and disruptions, for Daisy, make clear the importance of, and the need to, ‘live well together’: ‘I think if going through all of this has taught us anything, it’s that…in hard times we really need to focus on working together rather than against each other’.

Elijah’s Story

In 2021, Elijah was 18 years old and living with his mother in Curlewis, a rural locality on the outskirts of Geelong. Elijah connected with the project through a youth service provider that supports young people to develop skills for, and to find, employment. He was enrolled in a Certificate III in Information Technology at a local vocational provider, and suggested that he was interested in further study in 2022. At that time, Elijah was employed casually ‘up at the shops’ and was also developing his own online business as a graphic designer. When we spoke with him, Elijah described his life and his connections to others as ‘pretty grim’:

My social life over the last two years has gone completely down the drain.

Right before the first outbreaks at least I was still going to parties and still talking to people like regularly.

These days, I reckon I might talk to like three or four people a week, on Facebook Messenger, like not even phone calls.

And I’ll have maybe one night that I’ll talk on the phone, like an actual phone call or a video chat.

The series of public health lockdowns not only affected Elijah’s capacity to care about his social life but also affected the quality of his relationships with his friends.

It really did kind of demolish my social life and a lot of my mates’ social lives, that I don’t even talk to anymore. I haven’t heard from a lot of them, to be honest.

And I think a lot of people are kind of in that boat where, you know, ‘What’s the point in even having a shower every day?’

Like, there’s no point if you’re not going outside, you’re not seeing people, you don’t care, then what’s the point?

In his reflections, Elijah acknowledged the challenges that those around him, including his teachers, had faced during this time.

In the same kind of way, I think, a lot of the teachers were feeling near the end of the course.

It even seemed like they were becoming demotivated and by the time you were kind of in the fourth week of the course and you’re already giving up units, and you know, you’re going to fail…it really didn’t help.

Just the general disorganised, kind of mess that it was, it was really, it wasn’t very fun. It was quite demotivating.

This process of ‘demotivation’ took various forms, including in the ways in which the course requirements exceeded the capabilities of the technology that he had access to away from the classroom:

I know one of the practicals I had to do, I had to run two virtual machines and my computer was really having a rough time with that, because it’s not that it’s an older motherboard, it’s just not meant to do it.

It was kind of demotivating for everyone I think and considering we had two classes of roughly 20–25 students and finally, I think eight people passed.

In spite of these difficulties, there was a sense for Elijah that there was a temporal dimension to the challenges, a dimension that offered the promise that ‘demotivation’ might be temporary:

I’m now continuing to do the course for the next six months.

I will definitely pass, I don’t have a doubt in my mind about that.

I’m optimistic for the future considering now that I’m on my way to an advanced diploma.

Elijah’s aspirations for the future also included becoming financially independent by renting his own place and, in that process, caring for his mum:

Hopefully in the next two to four years I’ll be able to move out of here and, you know, rent a place. But at the same time, honestly, supporting my mum and all that, at the moment, is more key than doing that—I don’t really feel the need to at the moment.

In listening to Elijah talking about these concerns, it became apparent that he responded to the pandemic, the public health measures it provoked and the government financial support systems ⁹ that were put in place, both as a set of challenges and as a series of opportunities:

It gives a lot of people time to actually do things they want to do, and which they enjoy.

I definitely did as well.

Especially with the payments at the start of the first lockdown, with Centrelink. ⁹

People had a lot more money, especially in Melbourne, and didn’t have many places to spend it.

Like many others during this period, Elijah identified a business opportunity that emerged at the temporal and spatial intersections of the pandemic, lockdowns, government income support schemes, the affordances of digital technologies and personal capabilities:

So they went online and, you know. I run an online business and I freelance.

I do design for clients, businesses, and pretty much anyone and, you know, the orders definitely went up when the money was around.

There weren’t many places to spend it.

There was a lot, a lot more traction and like, obviously to grow my business, and continue to keep it growing and yeah, just being financially stable at the moment, that’s kind of one of my main goals.

In this context, Elijah also saw the development of ‘generalized life skills’ as a key element in enabling people to ‘enjoy their lives more’. For Elijah, these skills were developed in his vocational training certificate, even if he may not have seen the value of these prior to the pandemic:

I think learning those practical skills like, applying for an ABN or like, you know, literally just accounting, like how to use Excel to account. ¹⁰

Like how to keep up stock and those kinds of more critical things.

Learning those more generalised life skills should be a much bigger focus now considering, you know, with more working from home and kind of having to manage your own time.

Developing a sense that the building of seemingly mundane ‘skills’—connected in this case to the opening of unanticipated opportunities—could have ‘benefits’ in terms of ‘motivation’ appears, also, to be a new form of understanding that emerges from these intersections:

I think not being able to socialise as much, at least being able to own a skill or trade or something that you want to kind of improve in—it’s really important because otherwise you will become demotivated.

Like a lot of, a lot of friends at the moment, they hate their jobs and you know, they can’t stand working in a trade and they can’t leave either. They don’t have anything else.

Elijah’s story is also a story of the challenges for living well that many young people experienced during the public health lockdowns in 2020 and 2021—although for Elijah these consequences were expressed differently and took a number of different forms. In the first instance, Elijah was very explicit about how he was feeling disconnected from his previous relationships with ‘mates’: ‘My social life over the last two years has gone completely down the drain’. These disruptions to the social relations that were a feature of his life prior to the pandemic had also produced a profound sense of ‘why bother’, of ‘what’s the point’, of doing the things you normally did if ‘living well’ had previously meant ‘making an effort’ in the context of conducting and maintaining various relationships. ‘What’s the point in even having a shower every day? Like, there’s no point if you’re not going outside, you’re not seeing people, you don’t care’. What is also of interest in Elijah’s story is the way in which he never directly spoke about his ‘well-being’. Rather, in talking about his isolation, his thoughts about ‘making an effort’, even in the ways in which he told us about the opportunities that the pandemic had presented to develop his on-line design business, Elijah appeared to use the idea of ‘demotivation’ as a proxy for his sense of being able to live well in the context of profound disruption and crisis: ‘I think not being able to socialise as much, at least being able to own a skill or trade or something that you want to kind of improve in—it’s really important because otherwise you will become demotivated’.

Discussion: Young People and the Problem of Living Well in the Anthropocene

From the beginning of this project, we have focused on young people’s present and how they imagined their futures both personally and more broadly in relation to the multiple crises of global capitalism, earth systems and biodiversity. As we have indicated, our engagement with stakeholders and young people was structured through initial readings of the concept of socio-ecological models of well-being. We sort to construct discussions and scenarios in which stakeholders and young people such as Daisy and Elijah could consider and speculate on the ways in which their past, present and future, their well-being, their ability to ‘live well’, emerge from and are shaped by the socio-ecologies in which they live their lives. However, while these models were productive, and particular stories might be told using them, they did not allow us to include a critique of the extractive and exploitative characteristics of capitalism and techno-capitalism as these shape the ongoing crises confronting the biosphere.

Importantly, we have wanted to develop a way of thinking about the more-than-human ‘otherness’ of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, a more-than-humanness that Swanson et al. (2017) might categorize as a ‘monster of the Anthropocene’. We were looking for a way of thinking that could account for the ways in which this profoundly dangerous more-than-humanness provoked a variety of public health, social, cultural, economic and political crises—many of which continue to echo in different ways in the lives of different populations of humans—young and old—in different places around the globe.

It was in this context that we wanted to move beyond the limitations of socio-ecological orthodoxies to develop an understanding of young people such as Daisy and Elijah as ‘biocultural creatures’ who are entangled with diverse others—human, more-than-human, material and immaterial—in ‘biocultural habitats’ (Frost, 2016). For Frost (2016, p. 152), this concept, situated at the intersections of feminist posthumanism and studies of techno-science, provides a means to ‘bring within the ambit of “culture” all the chemical, spatial, thermal, viral, bacteriological and nutritive factors, as well as all the social, political, aesthetic and economic practices that…provide the conditions’ in which young people live and thrive, or not. Thinking of these entanglements between biocultural creatures and biocultural habits provides us with more complex ways of understanding the ways in which Daisy and Elijah, and other young people, talk through the importance of their relationships and connections and how these emplaced entanglements shape their sense of what it means to live well. For Daisy and Elijah, the COVID-19 virus and their diverse connections to different networks and relationships in this place have profound consequences on their capacity to live well and enjoy their lives. Here, we are able to make the first moves in developing a critical account of socio-ecologies that connects place-based ‘bio-cultural habitats’ to the earth systems that are being reshaped by the climate crisis, the emergence and spread of the more-than-human monstrousness of the virus, and the globalizing economic, social and political processes that have profound consequences for different populations of young people in different places. In this sense, as we have suggested elsewhere, the concept of living well can point to the complex and ambiguous entanglements between young people’s health and well-being, their education, training and employment pathways, their sense of belonging in diverse groups and communities, and how they imagine futures (Kelly et al., 2023a).

Donna Haraway’s prolific contributions to the ‘Anthropocene debate’ (Moore, 2017) provide a productive means to do some of this thinking and suggest ways in which it might be carried forward. In framing what he and others call the ‘Capitalocene’, Moore (2017, p. 594) argues that we need to come ‘to grips with capitalism’s planetary crises…as a system of power, profit and re/production in the web of life’. For Haraway (2016, pp. 55–56), the concept of the Chthulucene is a response to stories of the Anthropocene and Capitalocene. In this account, humans are not the star actors in the story, but the main plot is that ‘human beings are with and of the earth, and the biotic and abiotic powers of this earth’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 55). The Chthulucene matters not only to humans ‘but also to those many critters…which and whom we have subjected to exterminations, extinctions, genocides, and prospects of futurelessness’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 55).

Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour, Haraway (2016) argues for the need to change the narrative about human exceptionalism to tell Gaia, or geostories, stories of the biosphere that bring into the foreground many things that used to be in the background. Moving towards telling geostories would help capture the complexity of Daisy, Elijah and other young people’s lives in ways that move beyond their ‘nested’ relationships with their families, peer groups, teachers, schools or communities. These stories enable us to see young people as being entangled with the human and more-than-human in the face of widespread disruptions—such as the pandemic—that may make many of the bio-cultural habitats that comprise the planetary bio-sphere less conducive to the promise of being able to live well in these present and future.

When we think of how to tell a version of Daisy and Elijah’s story in these ways, they appear as more than the sum of their personal characteristics and circumstances, as imagined in socio-ecological orthodoxies. They can, in this sense, be imagined as being entangled with a multitude of multi-species, bio-cultural assemblages (Swanson et al., 2017)—an entanglement that for many became more apparent, or was amplified, by the emergence of the virus, the spread of the disease that it causes, and the social, cultural, economic and political consequences produced in and by the pandemic. As Lupton (2022, p. 125) argues, these approaches can enable us ‘to better understand the affective forces and relational connections…generated with and through humans’ encounters with nonhuman agents’. For Lupton (2022, p. 11), this means that we need to ‘work towards better conditions for people across geographical regions and cultures’ and to develop new ways of thinking and storytelling (including from ‘Indigenous/First Nations cosmologies’) to ‘better care for the more-than-human worlds in which we are emplaced’. ¹¹ If we want to take up these challenges, then in the doing of sociologies of young people’s health and well-being, we need to continue to experiment with how to tell different (geo)stories about young people such as Daisy and Elijah and the promise of their being able to live well in the Anthropocene.