WERE your lockdown experiences deeper and more meaningful than everyone else’s? Do you need to tell them? Here’s how:
Brag about how much it improved your relationship
Being at home with your partner allowed you to explore each other’s personalities at a deeper level than even before, leading to some great sex. Or your partner got so sick of hearing you go on about your true self they started boning you to shut you up.
Hype up your own depth
Don’t say: ‘Being stuck in all day was dull as f**k. I was totally depressed.’ That’s too normal and prosaic. Do say: ‘I felt the walls were closing in, leaving me staring into the abyss of my own thoughts. There’s nothing worse than existential ennui.’
Wank on about spiritual stuff
Did you take up meditation during lockdown? Or practice ‘mindfulness’? Or just do something vaguely relaxing like painting stones? Drone on about it until even the Dalai Lama would square up and punch you hard in the face.
Claim you have ‘learned so much’
About yourself, obviously, because that’s what interests you most. But you also caught up on your reading and strangely it was all Kazuo Ishiguro, David Foster Wallace, JM Coetzee and other writers you can namedrop to impress people. Funny, that.
Exaggerate how hard it is getting back to normal
You’re so sensitive and perceptive, going back to the office wasn’t ‘a bit weird’, it was ‘a profound culture shock’. You’ll soon get a taste for this faux-naif crap, and by afternoon will claim nipping into Pret for a tuna wrap was ‘like entering a surreal dreamscape’.
Write a column for the Guardian about it
There’s an audience for your poncery ready and waiting. And you can spend your fee on a new poncey thing like online oil painting lessons when the government f**ks it all up again and we’re back in lockdown forever.
