We live in a collective amnesia of the pandemic lockdowns – 06/21/2023 – Equilibrium

For all the boredom, anxiety, and grief of pandemic lockdowns, some people also experienced a strange kind of excitement. Being forbidden to leave the house or see loved ones may have been terrible, but at least we could take solace in the thought that we were living through a great event in history. We would tell our grandchildren about that time. Movies would be made about it.

However, as the official Covid investigation continues in the UK, and less than 16 months after the last legal restrictions were lifted in the country, lockdowns not only seem to belong to the distant past, they seem to be disappearing, fast, from our conscience. Most of us have only hazy memories of this period and very little sense of when important events took place around this time.

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. “This seems very normal,” she says. “We’ve been through so much suffering and now it feels like it never happened.” Today everything seems even more distant.

In a survey this week by Prolific, shared with the Financial Times, a quarter of a representative sample of nearly 1,000 respondents said they had only “a vague recollection” of how they spent their time during the lockdown.

A study published last month, however, in the journal PLOS One, found that participants, who were interviewed in May 2022, were just as bad at remembering the time sequence of major news events in 2021 as events that happened three or four years earlier. Lockdowns, the researchers concluded, had a similar effect on our memory as seen in people who had served time in prison – our ability to recall various points during that period was impaired.

Arash Sahraie, lead author of the study and professor of psychology at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland), tells me that monotony is partly to blame: during lockdowns, days and weeks repeat themselves. “You need reference points so you can remember things,” says Sahraie. “By removing them, you have no anchor point in your space-time and everything blends together. Time disappears.”

Stress and unhappiness probably also contributed. Those who reported feelings of depression or high anxiety during periods of social isolation were more likely to have difficulty remembering events in the study. “Psychological stress changes the way we perceive things and our perception of time,” says Sahraie.

However, those who have lost loved ones or become seriously ill are likely to have very detailed memories of these 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 example, or our last day at the office.

As Daniel Schacter, professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of “The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers” puts it: “Most Most people have a story from the first day of confinement”.

That narrative component seems to me to be the key to what’s happening right now. Not only did the days merge, not only did our living rooms fail to provide the environmental cues we normally rely on to trigger our memories, but 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 again, for ourselves as well as for others. And it’s no good telling your friend how you started baking real bread and watching “Tiger King” because she, it turns out, did that too. The similarity of the lockdown experience, in other words, is exacerbating our collective amnesia.

“Given the general mediocrity of the whole experience, people may not be motivated to talk about what they remember,” says Norman Brown, professor of psychology at the University of Alberta. “And since rehearsal is an important factor in retaining personal memories over the long term, this lack of mnemonic motivation predicts that the Covid period may not be as well remembered as one might hope.”

There is no doubt that Covid was a pivotal moment in history. Office culture has changed forever. Millions of people have lost loved ones, often without a farewell. But the idea that lockdowns will loom large in our collective consciousness in the coming decades is misguided.

The Spanish flu outbreak, which killed more people than World War I, is sometimes called the “forgotten pandemic”. Perhaps what we’ve experienced so recently is a day called “forgotten lockdowns”.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves