2022 Was the Year of Survival

Well, well, well. Here we are. At the end of another blissful year of living, breathing and doing our best to survive in an increasingly turbulent and polarised world.

Petrol is more expensive, the price of a small coffee at my local cafe now costs $5.50, and I’m about to start selling my foot pics online to afford my groceries and rent. But hey, it’s not all that bad. At least we’re not in lockdown anymore, right? RIGHT?!

As we emerged from the pandemic that robbed everyone of two years of their lives, leaving some with crippling mental disorders, house evictions and without the means to make a living, others emerged as new people. For them, it was a moment of reflection, self-awareness and learning. At the start of 2022 some of us were ready to take the world by storm. I did that by going on a month-long bender, over-socialising, and vomiting on dance floors as a way to make up for the angst I felt by losing my early-20’s. 

While I’d like to say that there were some lessons learned in the process of figuring out how to be a valued member of society again, and not a holed-up goblin festering in Uber Eats bags and Netflix binges (Shout out Tiger King), I can truthfully say that humans are still humans. Did we really learn anything? Hm, we’ll get to that at the end.

For right now – after we were released from sad, stark lockdowns – it was obvious that we were just flesh-bags on a rampant path to make up for lost time. Honestly, we went a bit cuckoo. But hey, at least we had the tedious Byron Baes to balance us out a bit. 

As the media does best, it went into a rampant whirlwind finally free from the clutches of reporting on daily coronavirus numbers, making us all wonder what was real and what wasn’t. Every young person and their dog started dressing like baggy-jeaned R&B stars from the 90s and early 00s, or forgotten emo kids of the Myspace era. The 20 year trend cycle was apparently setting in. But was it all an echochamber of the online world? Or was indie sleaze really set to return? Who the fuck knows. 

People started going “goblin-mode” – a term so cringe yet popular enough that it became the Oxford Dictionary’s 2022 word of the year. People were munching through vapes (it’s now an epidemic in itself), quitting their jobs with fury in the “great resignation”, and curling up in foetal position over the rising cost of buying a house. 

Aided by the polarity of the online world, the extremities of the far-right began to rise. Anti-vaxxers continued to march in Australia, even though lockdowns, and vaccine mandates no longer existed. Young people, who had spent so long inside that their brains worked as if terminally online, made kinda absurd TikToks that Boomers would describe as “extremely woke” (think the argument that one tiktoker made that consuming dairy is inherently anti-feminitst). There were also a few climate change protestors who glued their hands to stuff.

A definable culture war between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X and Boomers, metastasised over housing prices, cost of living and boundaries at work – and weirdly the smashed avocado argument never really came into the picture. The younger generations were ‘quiet quitting’, berating partners for ‘weaponised incompetence’, and learning psychology techniques from TikTok.

The conservative government in Australia fell after 10 years and we waved bye bye to Scott Morrison and hello to Anthony Albanese… but it didn’t really matter, because Australians were losing faith in the government anyway, losing faith in Jeezus (meh), losing faith in everything. The floods at the beginning of the year rocked our belief that government funded agencies were actually there to help. Teachers were striking, train drivers were striking and young people were striking off to Europe to live out their “find themselves” fantasies.

On a good note, in the political sphere, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation was declared a hate group. Nice one.

So here’s the part where we get all sentimental and talk about what we learned. Perhaps it hasn’t just been the year of survival, or the year of chaos. It has also been a time of (groans) change. Mostly learning how to survive in a post-pandemic world… but learning nonetheless. 

Survival doesn’t always mean progressing past bad things and being left a shell of a human. In the time it takes us to process a moment that didn’t go our way, (sometimes) we come out the other side with a new perspective and new handle on how to overcome it next time. 

This year was a year that overwhelmingly saw people learn about their own worth through the basis of surviving a dwindling economy and dollar value. Yes, they were quiet quitting, mass resigning and going on strike. Yes, the government switched leadership (which seemed to change nothing) and the right-wing extremists emerged with extra fervour. Yes, there was that fucked up Balenciaga campaign and Elon Musk bought twitter (but really, who uses Twitter except journalists and famous people). And yes, women were leaving their “Man-children” for better options. But the world became a bit more outspoken about which way they wanted things to go. We were a bit more angry. We all wanted a bit more say.

And so Australia started shifting. There was more drive, whether it was for change, or for respect, or something else. The convoy from the Northern Territory to Canberra to bring Indigenous Voices to Parliament, aside the boycotting of Australia/ Invasion Day by Channel 10, marked a shifting momentum for First Nations sovereignty (even though there’s a long way to go). The NSW Government realised it’s ghastly error in deadening the now ghostly Sydney nightlife, did a 180 lurch, and the city has begun to resurrect. And workers, at every level, began pounding mastheads for their God given rights, like a 4-day work week (note to my editor: sounds like a good idea, huh?). Even menstrual leave materialised through the thinly veiled capitalist machine. Out of the rubble, we started to dig our way out.

Yep, there’s no doubt we went through some shitty things, but our will to survive kept us going.

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