Millennials aren't designed for lockdown

OPINION: Up until last week, it had probably been six months since I did a proper supermarket shop.

I'd nipped in every few weeks for bin bags and detergent, but otherwise most of my food habits were pretty much modelled on the most Millennial stereotype you could imagine.

I, like a lot of Millennial women, have always lived like I'm Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada.

We like to live our lives as a certain type of glamorously stressed young woman who's forever stepping out of Ubers clutching coffees and text-walking into meetings shaking out our blow-dry in a too-busy-to-deal-with-everyday-banality kinda way.

Someone who survives off coffee, nervous tension and Afterpay on her extensive collection of just-above-mid-range handbags. Someone who, if she does make time to eat, lives on Uber Eats, takeaway salads, and weekends brunching out. Someone who, if she does cook, gets those dinky meal kits that have transformed dinner-for-one from a sign of spinsterhood to that of successful career girl.

READ MORE:
* Millennials ashamed to admit they're lonely
* Flashy Vain and Lazy? Millennials are just like you
* Lockdown tips: a great time to experiment with cooking

Aka. someone who's absolutely buggered if the apocalypse and/or Covid-19 comes.

I realised the full extent of my predicament last weekend when my dad looked into my fridge and recoiled in horror at its sole occupants: a pot of hoisin sauce and one carrot that had shrivelled into a gangrenous orange toe.

"Verity," he said a deliberately calm voice, "you need to go to the supermarket."

It hadn't really occurred to me that, in the event of a pandemic, given my current level of hunter gatherer skills I'd be living off the mould at the back of the fridge. So I took Dad's advice, returned home from Countdown laden with carrots and bananas and promptly came down with a sniffle.

It took only a week of self isolation for me to realise that firstly, New Zealand was hurtling toward lockdown and my lifestyle was about to change dramatically. And secondly, many of my Millennial attitudes to food were absolutely bananas – especially that of being conspicuously undomesticated.

The aforementioned don't-you-know-I'm-far-too-busy-to-cook lifestyle isn't necessarily a sign of laziness. For many of us, it's actually a sign that we're winning in life. A lot of Millennial lifestyle is about pace. We're not necessarily achieving anything, but the constant sense of exhaustion from over-activity makes us feel as though we are. It's a model we learned in school from being rewarded for stuffing our lives with exams, hockey, music, Kumon, competitive cucumber carving and every other extra curricular activity with which we were over-optimised. It means that you grow up into an adult who has to be exhausted to feel as though they're working "at their potential". And so living off caffeine and sarcasm because you're too busy to cook is proof that you're performing well.

The problem is that it only takes a few days of ploddingly paced self isolation to realise that conspicuous anti-domestication wasn't probably doing squat for you. Now that you can't be overly busy, you're alone in your apartment with nothing but a gangrenous carrot. And of course you've got the time to realise that you were just filling your life with overactivity to plug the gaps left by achievement. And worse, you can't even comfort eat your way through your self realisation because you don't know how to make mac and cheese.

I've also done a complete about-face on the low level of disdain I've always had for domesticity that's made me semi-proud to be someone who doesn't cook. Many Millennial women were raised by Boomer mums, and grew up watching their lives crushed by household minutiae and the need to plan what everyone's eating for dinner. So I never used to like going to supermarkets because I'd walk in and see the threat of a future of tiny deliberations between mince or chicken, dairy or non-dairy, whole tomatoes or chopped stretching out before me…We Millennial women promised we were never going to be Nigella. We'd break the cycle of tinned tomato oppression by being Anne Hathaway instead.

And yet one week in and I'm already thanking God for the exact domestic skills I was dissing last week. Namely, the ability to feed people and – more specifically – packet cakes. Cake has so far been the most reliable way I've found to cheer myself up in this holy mess.

And so all the reasons why I held so tight to my too-busy-to-chop-a-spud Millennial mentality seem to have disappeared faster than people's self control over toilet paper.

Maybe that's because they were inherently just a distraction, or maybe because they were a bit self absorbed, or maybe it's because all real priorities become sharper in a crisis. Whatever it is, as I face lockdown now, I know that I've got a lot of cakes to bake.