For all the tedium, anxiety and misery of the Covid lockdowns, some of us experienced a strange sort of excitement too. Being banned from leaving the house or from seeing loved ones might have been agonising, but we could at least console ourselves with the idea we were living through A Major Event in history. We would tell our grandkids about this time. Movies would be made about it.
And yet, just as the UK’s official Covid inquiry gets under way, and less than 16 months after the last legal restrictions were lifted in this country, lockdowns not only seem to belong to a long gone past; they also appear to be fading, rapidly, from our consciousness. Many of us have only hazy memories of this period, and very little sense of when important events happened during it.
I remember a friend of mine remarking on this phenomenon back in the summer of 2021, when I visited her for the first time in more than a year. “This just feels too normal,” she said. “We went through so much suffering, and now it feels like it never happened.” Today, it all feels even more distant.
In a survey conducted this week by market research firm Prolific, shared with the Financial Times, a quarter of a representative sample of almost 1,000 respondents said they only have “a vague memory” of how they spent their time during lockdown. A study published last month, meanwhile, in the science journal PLOS One, found that participants, who were surveyed in May 2022, were just as bad at recalling the timeline of major news events from 2021 as they were for events that had happened three or four years earlier. Lockdowns, the researchers concluded, had a similar effect on our memory to that which has been observed in people who have served time in prison — our ability to recollect distinct points during that period has been impaired.
Arash Sahraie, lead author of the study and professor of psychology at the University of Aberdeen, tells me that monotony is partly to blame: during lockdowns, the days and the weeks repeated themselves. “You need landmarks to be able to remember things,” says Sahraie. “When you remove those, you don’t have any anchor points left in your timescape, and everything merges together. Time disappears.”
Stress and unhappiness probably contributed too. Those who reported feelings of depression or elevated anxiety during lockdowns were more likely to have difficulties in recalling events in the study. “Psychological stress changes the way we perceive things and our perception of time,” Sahraie tells me.
However, those of us who lost loved ones, or who became badly ill ourselves, are likely to have very detailed recollections of those events. And most of us probably have specific memories of the start of the first lockdown in March 2020 — the moment the “stay at home” order was first announced, for instance, or our last day in the office. As Daniel Schacter, a psychology professor at Harvard University and author of The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers, puts it: “Most people have a first day of lockdown story.”
This storytelling component strikes me as key to what’s going on here. Not only did the days merge, not only did our living rooms fail to provide the environmental cues that we normally rely on to trigger our memories, but also, many of us were doing more or less the same thing.
We build memories by what psychologists call “rehearsing” the story of what happened over and over, to ourselves and also to others. And it’s not much good telling your friend about how you got really into baking sourdough and watching Tiger King because your friend, it turns out, happened to get really into that too. The commonality of the lockdown experience, in other words, is exacerbating our collective amnesia.
“Given the general crumminess of the whole experience, people may not be motivated to discuss what they do remember,” says Norman Brown, a professor of psychology at the University of Alberta. “And given that rehearsal is an important factor in the long-term retention of personal memories, this absence of mnemonic motivation does predict the Covid period might not be as well remembered as one might expect.”
There is no doubt that Covid was a pivotal moment in history. Office culture has changed forever. Millions of people lost loved ones, often without a goodbye. But the idea that the lockdowns will loom large in our collective consciousness for decades to come is misplaced. The Spanish flu outbreak, which killed more people than the first world war, is sometimes called a “forgotten pandemic”. Perhaps what we experienced so recently will one day be dubbed the “forgotten lockdowns”.