By the fall of 2020, many of the seniors at Oakland Technical High School had become nocturnal.
Already confined to their homes for half a year and desperate for fun, they stayed up all night. They were making TikToks, watching porn, playing Fortnite. In the monotony of the pandemic lockdown, “time didn’t matter, I suppose,” said Nadav Stamper-Kurn, so they found ways to socialize even if they were alone. Nadav built a bespoke server to play Minecraft with friends and viewed simulations of the life he was not able to participate in. He watched the YouTuber David Dobrik travel and party with his jokester crew, and all nine seasons of “The Office.”
Ruby Chan-Frey, perpetually not studying for the SAT and then marinating in her stress, frequently watched movies with friends on Discord until sunrise. Eventually, she took up running, setting out at 11 p.m. When she returned at 1 a.m., she’d sometimes encounter her father in the kitchen. “I’d be like, ‘Oh. Hey,’” she told me.
Oakland Tech had gone “remote only” in March, and the dullness was suffocating. The school day, just three hours long, started at 9. Distance learning was both ridiculously easy and excruciatingly hard: In these extenuating circumstances, teachers had simplified the material so no one would fail, but for many students, remaining attentive to Zoom felt impossible, like climbing glass. Nadav had two monitors on his desk. On one he would be “present,” camera on. On the other he would be watching the Oakland A’s. Ruby couldn’t focus at all. She would log on, say a few words in class to establish her presence, then turn off her camera and go back to sleep.
Ruby’s friend Veronica Liu entered her senior year with earnest intentions. A first-generation college-bound student with excellent grades, she imagined herself a shoo-in at Berkeley. She made a desk by pulling a folding table up to the edge of her twin bed. But by Thanksgiving, the desk was so covered with debris — papers and binders, a rock garden, her sticker collection, plushies, masks, K-pop fan memorabilia and food wrappers — that Veronica had to take a running jump to get into bed. She started attending class with her mic muted and the sound off, her camera pointed upward so that only her forehead showed on the screen. Veronica felt trapped.
She slept all the time, and “Oh my god, don’t even talk about my hygiene,” she said. She stopped brushing her teeth and washing her hair. When her calculus teacher checked in, she told him: “I’m really sorry. I don’t care. I don’t care about this class, and I’m letting you know now. I just need to graduate.” Her A’s turned into C’s and D’s.
On March 13, 2020, a Friday, most members of the Oakland Tech class of 2021 were 16 years old and immersed in their junior year, spending all day at school practicing debate and lacrosse, beefing up G.P.A.s. They were dating, smoking weed, working out, nurturing fledgling dreams of becoming chefs, wrestlers, teachers, activists, data scientists, engineers. The announcement of the school’s closure was met with unanimous celebration as “a much-needed break from hamster-wheeling life,” said Ahmed Muhammad, who was taking college-level math and played on the basketball team. After hearing the news, Nadav, in the hallway outside the bathroom, gave a classmate an ecstatic hug. Casey Shea Dinkin, Nadav’s best friend, remembers a party that night with illicit booze. Ruby ditched last period to drive to Silicon Valley with friends to see a play. Everyone told me they had expected to return to school after two or three weeks, refreshed.
On May 24, 2021, most students re-entered the school building together for the first time in 14 months, after one of the longest lockdowns in the country. Wearing masks, they waited in line to pick up graduation tickets. They barely recognized one another, and when they did, they didn’t know what to say. They had grown taller, bulkier. They had changed their hair.
“We’d become different people,” Cierra Brown observed. Their worlds had shifted, shriveled: Everyone “missed a year of social development,” Cierra explained. She spent the pandemic in a house with nine people, including her grandparents and herself, and when she left to attend the University of California, Santa Cruz, she was deeply altered. As a young teenager, Cierra had felt “really free,” she said, but in the pandemic she became “anxious to interact with people — like I had forgotten how to be outside, how to hold a conversation.”
What does it mean to lose more than a year of high school? Not in terms of academic achievement, which is measurable, but in the nonempirical sense of personal growth. First sex, first car, first job — these cherished rites of passage generally occur between the ages of 16 and 18, the very years the class of 2021 languished in their bedrooms. High school may be an educational experience, but it is also, importantly, a bodily one. The physical campus — its theater, cafeteria, bathrooms, playing fields, library and locker rooms — is the site of so many instances of anguish and excitement, attainment and failure. What are the lasting effects when high school goes missing?
There is no robust data on how students’ social-emotional development was affected by long school lockdowns; the pandemic is too complex a phenomenon and individual experiences of it too idiosyncratic to measure. But Oakland Tech, a racially and economically diverse urban public high school of 1,790 students, offers a rich microcosm for inquiry. I spoke to a dozen members of the class of 2021, a few repeatedly, in person and at great length, to get a sense of how they thought this interruption had changed them. They are 21 and 22 now, on the cusp of full adulthood.
All of them conveyed, in different ways but with deep thoughtfulness and mostly good humor, what might be described as a long hangover of disconnection: a lasting unease communicating with others in person, especially in situations with emotional stakes, where they feel vulnerable or exposed. But they also said they were coping with it because they want to grow up, have stability, a purpose, live in the world. They are applying to graduate schools, interviewing for jobs, trying to save money. They are reckoning with their weaknesses and disappointments, and mindful — if not entirely in control — of the malignant, seductive pull of their phones. For the first time, Nadav is “maybe falling in love.”
The depression, anxiety and suicidality of Gen Z were well established before the pandemic, but the pandemic made each of these conditions worse. High school kids were drinking less alcohol and having less sex in 2021 than in previous years, but many more of them — 42 percent, up from 37 percent — expressed “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which collects annual data on adolescent well-being.
According to a 2023 research review on the effects of loneliness on children and teenagers in the pandemic, kids with no previous history of mental health issues developed habits of self harm, and the acuity of anxiety and depression among kids with prior diagnoses increased. Poverty, violence, poor health, parental instability and housing insecurity exacerbated these effects. Chronic absenteeism soared in the pandemic to about 30 percent nationwide, and high school graduation rates dropped in 31 states, including California.
In some American cities, especially in blue states, pandemic school closures stretched through two springs. On May 29, 2021, the overcast, windy day that Ahmed, bound for Stanford, gave the valedictory speech at Oakland Tech, his senior classmates in purple or gold gowns were seated outdoors on the football field, masked and six feet apart. A smattering of parents looked on from distant bleachers. Ahmed described his peers as feeling “trapped in a glass jar” and “unable to fly.” He said, “If our high school experience has taught us anything, it’s that we have absolutely no idea” what will happen next.
Pamela Cantor, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and founder of The Human Potential L.A.B., offered a theory of the long-term effects of lockdown. Adolescence, she told me on a video call, is a time to experiment — with independence, sex, identity, friendship — as well as to develop competencies, always at the terrifying risk of mockery from peers and disapproval and punishment from adults.
In remote school, Cantor proposed, teenagers were able to “try things out with much greater control. You could manipulate how the world saw you. You could protect yourself from embarrassment.” Their screens offered a buffer against making public mistakes. Cantor compared the class of 2021 to a company of actors rehearsing for a play alone and online — and then, once the lockdown was lifted, being asked to perform it onstage before a live audience.
“Imagine the amount of anxiety that unleashed in them, when all of a sudden there’s no buffer anymore,” she continued. “You’re being seen in the flesh.” And, she added, “you don’t get to practice without risk.”
Veronica still describes her college application process with residual mortification. In lockdown, it was hard to get application guidance from school, and she and Ruby had no clue about how to proceed. Veronica knew her competitive standing had dropped, and without strategic advice, “How am I supposed to evaluate what’s good?” she asked. “I didn’t know what college was.” The friends shared university websites and their anxieties, by text, late into the night. Veronica applied to more than 30 colleges and was rejected at every one of her top-choice schools. For years, she internalized these results as a verdict on her worth.
In 2021, 49 percent of the graduates of Oakland Tech enrolled in a four-year college, down from 53 percent in 2019. Ruby’s friend Daniel Hersom was on track for college but found remote school so paralyzing that he did not submit any applications and joined the Army National Guard instead, taking a job as a mechanic on tactical equipment.
After graduation, Aaron Hernandez-Aporillo briefly became a professional wrestler, fulfilling a goal. Still, he is “filled with regret,” he told me. “Sometimes I think, oh, if the pandemic didn’t happen, what would my life trajectory be right now?” In particular, “I just wonder how I would have developed socially,” he said.
Throughout the Oakland school district now, teachers have a renewed focus on helping all students learn how to study together, collaborate and talk to one another.
Cierra woke up on her first morning at U.C. Santa Cruz in August 2021 and, finding her roommates gone, became saturated with loneliness and dread. These feelings persisted for a year, until, with her family’s encouragement, she returned home. She is 21, working in retail and enrolled in community college. She believes her isolation during the pandemic is related to her current aversion to small talk. If a conversation is not deep, “it feels not real to me,” she said. When Daniel was deployed to Kuwait with people he didn’t know, he “didn’t interact much,” he told me, hanging out mostly with his roommate. He had never considered himself an extrovert, but since the pandemic, he believes, he became more introverted. He has not had a “full-on relationship” since high school, and now, at 22, he finds “it is a lot easier to just call and text and not really go out as much,” he said. “It’s mainly been one-nights. And friends-with-benefits type stuff.”
Upon arriving at U.C. San Diego, Veronica felt that her charisma had evaporated. She had always made friends easily. She was upbeat and approachable. But “people were not biting,” she remembers. “I would say, ‘Oh, we should hang out,’ and they were like: ‘Oh. I’m sorry. I’m busy.’” It was as if, she says now, they were accustomed to being guarded, a habit they learned in Zoom school.
In lockdown, Veronica was very conscious of the perils around her. Friends had severe mental-health crises. Everyone knew that hundreds of thousands were dying. Once, when I video-called her, she showed me a photo on her phone of the Halloween-orange sky in Oakland in September 2020, when Bay Area wildfires raged out of control. She had taken the photo from her apartment window. The world felt scary and the teenagers could not see through their screens enough to trust who was on the other side.
“Everyone was putting on such a face,” Veronica said. Devices enabled defensiveness. “You just block that person. Ignore that person,” Veronica reflected. “But then in real life it doesn’t work like that. You can’t just be like, ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’” This year, Veronica applied to master’s programs in education and has recently been accepted at Harvard, Berkeley and Northwestern.
While Veronica was trying to make friends in San Diego, Casey and Nadav traveled together on a gap year to Israel. They had known each other through Jewish circles since childhood. For Nadav, the gap year was an opportunity for fun, after “this fun drought,” he told me. But some deeper part of him also suspected that he had not matured enough beyond the 16-year-old he was in March 2020. Nearly two years in his bedroom had cost him the ability to develop close relationships with everyone but immediate family.
Even now, as a junior at U.C. Santa Barbara, he struggles with this. “Phone calls, I’m fine. Zoom calls, fine. But I notice a fear of one-on-one interactions in person with someone. Put me in a room with a person and I just crash out.” Nadav especially hates the silences at the conclusions of conversation topics. “There’s anxiety there. Where do we go now?”
Soon after Casey’s arrival in Tel Aviv, he started to struggle. He was living among other Jewish students, most of whom identified as Zionist. When, provoked by their political views, he offered the anti-Zionist perspectives he had adopted in his leftist home in the East Bay, he was shouted down. One of his new friends called him a terrorist.
Casey had always been popular: conventionally good-looking and socially smooth. Now “I was upset and socially ostracized for the first time in my life,” he said. Far from home, he could not maintain the weight lifting regimen that had provided structure and stability in the pandemic. He developed stress acne. He could not look in the mirror. He started having panic attacks, hyperventilating three or four times a day. “If you had asked me in November of that year, ‘What is wrong?’ I would have said, ‘I am fat and I have acne,’” he told me.
Casey is a junior at Brandeis University now, majoring in German and comparative literature. In retrospect, he thinks his isolation impeded his ability to decode large-group dynamics. During the pandemic, he had a tight inner circle but no “hallway friends,” as he put it, no larger crowd to whom he had to be visible and accountable. He can see how his behavior in Tel Aviv might have come across to others as tone-deaf. “I would be really obnoxiously loud, like: ‘You’re being evil. And I’m going to stand up for what I believe in,’” he said. He has come to see that he his new peers might have received his views better if he had been more chill. “Because then they would have trusted me, knowing that I wasn’t a left-wing brainwashed maniac.”
Ruby entered American University in August 2021. The school was not a good fit for her, she told me, but “coming straight out of the nobody time,” she was thrilled to assert her independence. Introverted before the pandemic, she became outgoing in college, the kind of person who would strike up a chat in the grocery store, “and that feeling never left.”
She spent her first year in college exploring Washington, D.C., and developing a deep sense of herself as a city person. Memorizing the Metro and the bus routes while discovering neighborhoods made her feel connected to herself and others in a new way. She loved how a city was a living, loving organism — “people yelling over there and celebrating something, and there’s someone on the phone with their mom.” She already had a BART tattoo, for Bay Area Rapid Transit, and she got a tattoo of the Metro, too.
I met Ruby on a springlike day on a bench at Berkeley, where she had transferred in her sophomore year. The air smelled as it does in the East Bay, of pine and eucalyptus, and across the street at Caffè Strada, students were talking about job interviews at hedge funds and showing one another their dating apps. Ruby comes across as a serious person, and she speaks carefully.
She rejects the “slacker” label placed on her generation by anxious adults, saying it is mostly unfair. But she says it is also partly earned. “In some way the pandemic gave us permission to disconnect,” she said. “And it’s work to invest and involve.” Sometimes, she added, “it can feel like people asking you to invest and involve is an unreasonable expectation.” But looking around, especially at her privileged peers at Berkeley, she has seen how some people claim exemptions to relieve themselves of their responsibilities as students and as citizens. To avoid reading the news “for my mental health,” Ruby said, “feels like a choice to ignore massive issues and revel in one’s peace and privilege.”
But Ruby acknowledges that lockdown changed the way she relates to other people, for better and worse. At 16, she learned to be vulnerable by DM and text. She recalls a remote friendship she made during the pandemic. She knew everything about him, his most private thoughts and secrets, but when she went to visit him in person, she hadn’t accounted for all kinds of other information, such as how he prepared dinner or how he drove his car. “I had to confront how much I didn’t understand him. And it was jarring.”
Ruby believes strongly in the value of face-to-face intimacy and works hard at it. But recently, she was having an in-person “D.T.R.” — define the relationship — conversation and found herself yearning for the easy comfort of texting. With texting, “I feel so much more in control,” she told me. She can reread what the person says. Think about it. Respond. Edit her responses. “Make sure what I’m writing reflects what I’m feeling,” she said.
In her fantasy world, she told me, she would be sitting next to someone she cares about, scooched together on the couch, and they would text their true feelings back and forth. “To me it feels more honest to do it like that.” She laughed a little at this indulgence. And I thought about whether love really has to be negotiated out loud, or whether the class of 2021 was offering a new way to speak.
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