For months now, I have been watching videos from my home country that inspire the same cringing awe, the same guttural queasiness, as watching someone eat a Tide Pod or free-climb a crane. For instance: While much of the world welcomed 2021 from home, some 20,000 revelers in New Zealand swarmed to the Rhythm and Vines festival, held annually at a vineyard near Gisborne, which has billed itself as the first city in the world to see the sunrise of a new year. The festival is practically a pilgrimage site for teenagers and 20-somethings, who get drunk at neighboring campgrounds and then congregate for a bacchanal, including questionable acts behind the sparse coverage of the vines.

       All par for the course at a music festival. But the videos from this year’s event are so jarring that they might as well be a rip in the time-space continuum. A local Instagram account posted one striking clip: masses of partiers, thousands upon thousands of young people, packed tight against one another, seemingly without even the thought of masks, bopping in unison to the D.J. duo Lee Mvtthews’s spin on a Flume remix of the Disclosure track “You and Me” — one of the big songs of summer back in 2013, when I attended the festival myself. In another video — this one at Rhythm and Alps, a sister event on the country’s South Island — we see another scene that Americans might find impossibly distant from their own recent experience: two female police officers sitting on the shoulders of their male colleagues, mixed in among drunken revelers and fist-pumping along to a hit by the local band Six60.

       This is what life has been like in New Zealand since June 8, when the country’s first national lockdown was lifted. (There have been other lockdowns since, but they’ve been temporary and more regional.) As for Kiwis who don’t do festivals, you can see a steady stream of pictures and videos of them clubbing, going on group hikes, lounging on busy beaches — the start of the year being, in New Zealand, the middle of summer.

       I, and plenty of others, have watched with disbelief. We hold the memory of doing identical things, and yet seeing them now feels like watching an alternate reality. Where I was living, in London, the pandemic meant that the British quickly took the national pastime of queuing and moved it to the few outlets that remained open: the supermarket, for instance, which soon resembled being at Disneyland, waiting to ride Space Mountain. Going to cafes could mean being served through a window while other patrons milled in a loose semicircle, waiting for their names to be called. Socializing was already stratified by our various postal codes; now friendship groups self-edited even further. Back home: none of this.

       The people in these videos always seem reckless, thoughtless, far too close together. Then I remember that their lives have remained largely the same. The instinctive reflex, in both the U.S. and Britain, has been to explain away New Zealand’s success at containing the pandemic as a function of its uniqueness: its remote island geography, its smaller landmass, its smaller population. (Of course, its landmass is similar to that of Great Britain, which is also an island nation.) Something similar has been true of East Asian countries, whose success is often attributed to some supposed cultural difference: a different approach toward collective action, or a willingness to sacrifice personal liberty, and so on, until we reach theories about Confucianism that can veer into full-on racialism. (Many tend to ignore that South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam have entirely different cultures and used entirely different methods to contain the virus.) But surely it has been, on some level, the decisions made by their respective governments that mean New Zealanders can safely eat at crowded food courts while many in the U.S. and Britain order delivery or dine on chilly sidewalks. It is funny how, almost a year later, Britain has turned slowly toward something not unlike the New Zealand model, introducing a tiered lockdown system and hotel quarantines for most incoming travelers.

       Kiwis, for their part, look out and see the world we’re in, beyond New Zealand’s waters, as apocalyptic and rife with contamination. The 6 o’clock news there has shown dire scenes of New York and London: skyrocketing case numbers, overflowing hospitals, empty streets. The isolation of New Zealand’s experience has helped to infect its success with a note of terror; there are calls from pundits and internet commenters to fully close the borders against the world outside. Even though returning citizens must spend two weeks isolated in hotel rooms run by the defense force, they are stigmatized by many, and expat Facebook groups have turned into support centers for life after quarantine. We, hunkered in our lockdowns, stare longingly at Kiwis enjoying crowds and summer and music, seemingly oblivious to the distance between their experience and ours; they look out and see our circumstances as not only harrowing but also threatening.

       For me, the people in these videos always seem, for one brief moment, reckless, thoughtless, far too close together; the things they’re doing feel alien, exotic. Then I remember that their lives have remained largely the same. It is we — the ones outside the bubble of New Zealand — who have changed, in ways that may not fade easily. With the steady rollout of vaccines, we are clearly eager to wake from our socially distanced slumber: Britain has announced a timeline for reopening, indoor dining is returning to New York and social media is abuzz with people’s hopes to gather in crowds and hug one another again. But the full abandon of those videos still feels like a distant prospect. The interactions we’ve dreamed of may be packed with uncomfortable pauses, gingerly approached embraces, hesitations before crossing a bar’s threshold.

       I plan to return to New Zealand in a few months. I will be able to once again join my friends in crowded restaurants and go dancing with strangers under the cover of darkness. But I’m also aware that I will need to break many of the habits I’ve learned over the past year: of double-checking that I have a mask before going out, of balking when I see a bare face in the supermarket, of taking long detours around people on footpaths when out running. I know that what we on the outside have now accepted as normal will sound to people like tales from some far-off dystopia. I will tell people about quests to find flour and pasta, about puzzling out the times we might have contracted the virus and about how we walked around in freezing temperatures, bellowing to one another from several feet away, for the purpose of social connection. They might look at me the same way we watch videos of them: with awe and disbelief.

       Brian Ng is a writer from New Zealand living in Dublin. This is his first article for the magazine.

       Source photographs: Vuk Valcic/SOPA Images/LightRocket, via Getty Images; Nicolas Balcazar/EyeEm, via Getty Images; Flashpop, via Getty Images; Senia, via Getty Images.