In the exodus of residents from the major capitals and in statistics showing few office workers intend to return to their old ways, observers see signs of a grand “reassessment” among people making choices they didn’t know they had.

Lockdown, particularly the long second stretch in Melbourne, did not simply pause the frenetic pace, intensity and spiralling cost of day-to-day city life, they say.

People began to question how they could sustain an existence with less maddening tension between work and “life”, find time to spend on things more joyful than commuting and achieve a more manageable juggle.

Demographer Bernard Salt describes the pandemic as “a time of reflection” that caused many who could to start making plans for change.

“You were restrained from doing things and had to stay in one place, and there was an element of contemplation that encouraged reassessment,” he says. “We have never experienced anything like this before, it [life] has just been a slow grind pushing in one direction.”

Salt says that like the experience of those who lived through the world wars, the shock of disruption and the realisation that what we believed to be permanent could be tenuous encouraged people to seek ways to make the most of their time: “When you go through war or come back from war you want to reinvent or create something new or different, [like a war] this has been a circuit-breaker.”

After ... your job or your business has been decimated, all of a sudden it just seems shallow and there are far more important things in life.

Bernard Salt, demographer

The veteran people-watcher has seen this wake-up call manifest in more couples deciding to embark on fresh starts apart, more workers rethinking their career choice and direction and more kick-starting the dream to relocate to the regions for a kinder pace.

”I wonder whether there’s been a spike people in relationships thinking, ‘I’ve just been going along because it’s easy, now I’ve realised there’s an end to life out there somewhere I’m going to make the most of it’, or ‘I’m just not happy with my the job and it’s time to tell the workplace here is how I want to do my deliverables, how I want to work’.

“Workplaces will be much more responsive to that as a consequence of COVID, it’s given a lot of leverage to workers,” he says.

Australians were already “lifestyle-obsessed” and many had back-pocket dreams of leaving town. The pandemic has spurred them into action sooner than some assumed they could get away.

Others may have been prompted by adversity to embrace positive change they had not considered: “After you have suffered lockdown and maybe your job or your business was decimated, all of a sudden it just seems shallow and there are far more important things in life.”

The expectation we are seeing ... is instead of it being about work-life balance it’s become life-work balance, it’s flipped around.”

Leah Calnan, CEO of REIV and mother of three

Salt predicts the shift to city-country “hybrid” work will be driven by millennials who, faced with the choice of urban house prices plus commutes, will have the attitude “what were you thinking Baby Boomers, there is a better way to do this – we get it that you need to do face-to-face once a week but not five days a week”.

Calnan, a property manager and mother of three, has noticed the difference in her own situation, feeling less stress around working away from her office so she can also collect her sons or attend commitments, and has noticed loosened expectations of a strict work-family divide.

Women who would have struggled to return to similar roles after taking maternity leave would benefit from a newly open attitude to where and how work is carried out, said Calnan, because “whatever stage of life you’re in, you can do more of it from home”.

The change she sees in business mores, which once demanded working parents not allow family demands to be visible, has been “not surprising, but very quick”.

While the lack of after-school sport, for example, was lamentable from a mental health perspective, the lack of the juggle and rush “gave everyone a chance to catch their breath”. Since regular scheduling has returned it is easier to manage, given clients and employers are not fussed if calls are made from school pick-up or even the supermarket.

“People have become more real,” says Calnan. “Previously, particularly in business, you had a business life and you had your home life and they never blended, ever. Now they do blend and I think it makes everything better,” she says.

“It’s a different level of juggle now, in a better way.”

Calnan says estate agents are seeing people move their families into the regions to enjoy a slower-paced lifestyle while continuing to work online, whereas previously they only relocated if a job was available in a regional town.

As the trend gathers momentum, “our data is suggesting we’ll see a greater growth [in property prices] in regional Victoria than in metro areas by the end of 2021”.

Part of the new willingness to embrace significant lifestyle change comes down to the fact people are typically good at adapting to altered social circumstances, according to Monash University associate professor of sociology Helen Forbes-Mewett. Once we got past the anxiety many felt in 2020’s first Australian lockdown, people began to rediscover enjoyment.

“Even if they were working really long hours [at home] they were walking more, some who never exercised started getting out for an hour because you could and most people I talked to reassessed their lives,” she says.

“They’re finding new and better ways of doing things that might have been things they were thinking of doing but were never forced into a situation where they would take it on because we get a bit stuck in our routines.”

Uncertainty about the future “brought about the reassessment: people learned new skills because they had to”. Being cut off from family and friends had highlighted the importance of those relationships and many had placed new focus on them.

“For a sociologist this era is absolutely fascinating [especially observing] how people are changing ... I do think we’ll never go back to what we were in many ways.”

Forbes-Mewett says she expects people will try to avoid over-scheduling their lives, but will still do it to some extent “because a lot of people are driven”. “But I think a lot of our scheduling will be much more selective, we’ll learn to say ‘no’ to things we really don’t want to do.”

Psychologist and social commentator Sabina Read agrees. She is also witnessing shifting priorities. “After a period of change, reflection and introspection for many, I’ve observed people considering and planning different ways of being in the world,” she says.

They are “more mindful, less frenetic and more purposeful in the choices they make both personally and professionally”.

New ways of being have already evolved for marketing business owner Tim Winkler, one of the thousands who have jumped at the chance to use the pandemic as a springboard. He and his wife, University of Melbourne academic Jacqui Francis, realised during lockdown in inner Melbourne that they wanted a more spacious, regional life.

They moved to a “tiny house” located at one end of a large apple orchard owned by their extended family near Shepparton, where Winkler has opened a branch of his regional marketing organisation, Rocketshop. “One of the key drivers that enabled us to move is that last year both of our [jobs] became completely online, that has changed expectations and work practices,” he says.

“Our youngest son, Josh, in particular loves his time outdoors and the backyard in Northcote just wasn’t big enough for him – we got a really, really big back yard, like acres.” Josh now rides his bike through the orchard and takes the bus to the local secondary school with his cousins.

Loading

Like many who have not wasted time getting themselves to a better place, Winkler said he had hoped to make a move at some stage but was “waiting until the conditions were right”.

“There are a whole lot of people waiting for the conditions to be right and who were enduring traffic and mortgage stress but didn’t want to move because they felt safer [employment-wise] in Melbourne,” he says.

“We have clients here who are real estate agents tracking what’s going on and they’re seeing a whole lot of people coming to the regions now for whom COVID has been the game-changer. It’s been that tipping point ... it is making people bolder.”