For all the tedium, anxiety and misery brought on by the Covid lockdown, some of us have also experienced a strange euphoria. Being banned from going out or seeing loved ones can be painful, but we can at least take comfort in the fact that we are living through a momentous event in history. This time we will tell our grandkids. Movies will be made.
Yet less than 16 months later, just as the official UK Covid inquiry began Last legal restrictions lifted Not only do lockdowns seem to belong in the long past in this country; they also seem to be rapidly fading from our consciousness. Many of us have only vague memories of this period, with little idea of when important events occurred.
I remember a friend of mine commenting on this phenomenon in the summer of 2021, when I visited her for the first time in over a year. “It felt so normal,” she said. “We’ve been through so much, and now it feels like it never happened.” Today, it all feels even more distant.
In a survey conducted this week market research firm prolificShared with the FT, a quarter of a representative sample of nearly 1,000 respondents said they had only a “vague memory” of how they spent their time during the lockdown. A study Meanwhile, a study published last month in the scientific journal PLOS One found that participants surveyed in May 2022 were less likely to recall a timeline of major news events from 2021 than when they recalled events occurring three or four years earlier. Later events were just as bad as earlier ones. The researchers concluded that the lockdown had similar effects on our memory as those observed in people serving time in prison — our ability to recall different points in that time was impaired.
Arash Sahraie, lead author of the study and professor of psychology at the University of Aberdeen, told me part of the reason was monotony: days and weeks repeated themselves during the lockdown. “You need landmarks to remember things,” Sahraie said. “When you remove them, you don’t have any anchors in your time landscape anymore, everything just fits together. Time disappears.”
Stress and unhappiness may also contribute. Those who reported feeling depressed or increased anxiety during the lockdown were more likely to have difficulty recalling the events in the study. “Psychological stress changes the way we see things and our perception of time,” Sahraie told me.
However, those of us who have lost loved ones or become seriously ill ourselves may have very detailed recollections of these events. Most of us probably have specific memories of the start of the first lockdown in March 2020 – for example, the moment the “stay at home” order was first announced, or our last day in the office. As Daniel Schacter, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, The Seven Deadly Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Rememberssaid: “Most people have stories of the first day of lockdown.”
This part of the storytelling stuck with me because it’s key to what’s going on here. Not only do the days go by, our living rooms fail to provide the environmental cues we usually rely on to trigger our memories, but many of us are doing more or less the same thing.
We build memories by what psychologists call “rehearsing” stories that happened to us and others over and over again.It doesn’t do any good to tell your friends how you really love baking sourdough and watch Tiger King Because it turns out, your friend happens to be interested too. In other words, the commonality of the lockdown experience is exacerbating our collective amnesia.
“Given the general confusion of the whole experience, people may not be motivated to discuss things they do remember,” said Norman Brown, a professor of psychology at the University of Alberta. “Given that rehearsal is an important factor in the long-term retention of personal memories, this The absence of mnemonic motivation does signal that the Covid period may not be remembered as much as one might expect.”
There is no doubt that Covid is a pivotal moment in history. Office culture has changed forever. Millions of people have lost loved ones, often without saying goodbye. But it would be a mistake to think that lockdown will loom large in our collective consciousness for decades to come. The Spanish flu outbreak, which killed more people than World War I, is sometimes called the “forgotten pandemic.” Maybe what we’ve been through recently will one day be called a “forgotten blockade”.
jemima.kelly@ft.com