I feel like a New Zealand patriot.

I’m hardly a nationalist, and as a leftist, my dominant mode is bitter defeat, expecting it in almost every circumstance. But as the country prepares to move from alert level four to alert level three – meaning from a major lockdown to a moderate lockdown – patriotism seems irresistible. In the prime minister, yes, in the public service, for sure, and in the essential-service workers stocking the supermarket shelves, staffing the ports and distribution centres, and caring for Covid-19 patients in hospitals and the community. It almost feels detaching, especially as countries like the US and UK hit their peaks, that life in these islands could resume as normal, as if the virus were only a four-week nightmare.

But life isn’t returning to a normal we would recognise. Or at least a normal our pre-lockdown selves would recognise. Schools can open, but with new rules and restrictions, and some businesses can trade as long as they adhere to strict hygiene and social distancing rules. Our “bubbles” must remain more or less the same.

But the burdens and the sacrifices of the lockdown fall unevenly. In Kawerau, where I live, a town with the worst deprivation statistics in the country, lockdown is punishing. Queues outside the local supermarket form hours before it’s open. Yet queues at the sister supermarket in Whakatāne – a larger and wealthier town – are almost nonexistent. The difference? Well, wealth and income. In Kawerau most people live day to day, meaning a weekly shop or even a panic buy are out of the question. Most people are queuing for one or two basics, and they’ll queue again as soon as they can pull together enough money for one or two additional basics, and maybe a luxury buy if the supermarket bosses keep their lockdown prices low.

It’s tempting to think about lockdown and all the big and small sacrifices it demands, as just that – a sacrifice. But I think framing our experience in the negative misses the point. Lockdown is solidarity. Every moment where we adhere to the rules – like keeping your distance as you walk the dog or washing your hands as regularly and thoroughly as possible – we act in solidarity. Social distancing helps keep other people safe. Every time I potter around the house I hope – and quite loudly – that the government treats lockdown and the post-lockdown world in the same tradition, extending support to the vulnerable as a matter of solidarity. That means extending the already existing wage subsidy, but it also means cancelling student debts, not extending another $1,000 loan.

I could go on, but I’ll leave the manifesto for another time.

Four weeks ago I was looking down my nose at people who were treating lockdown as an opportunity for “personal development”. When the stakes are this high, and the virus is only an outbreak away from taking thousands of lives, focusing on the personal struck me as luxurious and self-indulgent. Yet here I am spending every day thinking about loving gestures and words to help close the physical distance between my partner and I, the two of us caught in lockdown at different ends of the country. I suspect this means I’m doing personal development, too. But I take this as solidarity as well. I mean, what’s solidarity if not a love, and action, taken for others?

The chief benefit of lockdown, at least for a middle-class person like me, is it gives plenty of time (if not necessarily mental space) for pause and thought. Cutting back the shrubs last week, as you do under house arrest, I spent hours in the garden thinking through how, in the “before times”, we were all under pressure to approach life as a project in personal development. Not necessarily for spiritual or intellectual reasons, but for survival in an increasingly competitive world. Is returning to university a worthwhile “investment”? Is it possible to leverage one’s hobby into a book deal? Is reading for knowledge or pleasure a waste of earning time? What strikes me about lockdown, though, and the incoming economic fallout, is it exposes those questions for what they are: false choices.

In the post-Covid world we’re no longer in competition – and none of us can do “personal development” alone any more. What we require, for restructuring economies and rebuilding societies, is solidarity. I’m grateful that, in New Zealand, we’re already a small way there, even if there is more and more work to do.