Being and Becoming among Young People Revealed through the Experience of COVID-19

The lockdown of society arising out of COVID-19 can be viewed as a microscope exposingthe existential conditions and challenges of young people’s lives and their manner of dealing withcrises. This study employs a qualitative research methodology using semi-structured interviews of 19young people, aged 16–17 years, after the second COVID-19 lockdown in Denmark, March 2021. Ananalytical strategy was applied using reflexive methodology taking concepts from Søren Kierkegaard,Martin Buber, and Martin Heidegger to interpret the participants’ experiences of existential themesimportant to them, such as identity. Drawing on Kierkegaard’s idea of different “interpretive spheres”of life, we suggest that crisis revealed a disruption of the young peoples’ performance-orientedapproach to life that made it possible to reflect and relate to themselves through aesthetic, ethical andself-transcending spheres. We suggest that the relationship to the other—as an ethical obligation, asan affective Being-with, and as something bigger than themselves—is crucial to the ways in whichyoung people handle and relate to existential challenges and the experience of being and becomingthemselves. The findings contribute to education and well-being, pointing out mental challengesamong young people and stressing an existential focus as a priority in educational practice.