Lockdown: is there a silver lining?
“The undisguised brutality of our time is weighing heavily upon us.” So wrote Sigmund Freud in January 1920, two days after his daughter, Sophie, succumbed to Spanish Flu. Now, a century on, we are in the midst of another pandemic – and for those bereaved by it, these are intensely sad times, said The Guardian. Some may feel anger, as well as grief, about the way this crisis has been handled. And with millions of people stuck at home on their own, or in families with pre-existing problems, it is unsurprising that ONS figures show a sharp rise in anxiety levels in the UK population, or that police are pointing to an increase in suicides, and suicide attempts. And yet, not everyone is suffering. Some adults have reported finding “relief from personal demons in the common enemy represented by the virus”.
Still, you’d think that by now, most people would be desperate to get out, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent. And there is a sense that a minority are growing more bold about flouting the rules. But polls indicate that a remarkable number of us would actually like the lockdown to carry on, indefinitely. To avoid economic disaster, we have to leave our homes at some point – but it seems 60% of Britons don’t want to go to restaurants or bars, and 30% don’t even want to see their friends. For this, I blame the press. The media may have been doing their jobs – but weeks of “distressing” reports from intensive care units and interviews with grieving families have created a desperately fearful population.
That’s what I thought, said Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times. But when I commissioned a poll on the subject, it transpired that it’s not just that people are scared of getting the virus. It’s also that they prefer lockdown to their normal lives: 47% said they preferred some aspects of it, and 15% said they preferred most or everything about it. They liked working from home; they enjoyed the lack of traffic, and being able to hear birdsong. It can be a relief not to have to trudge to the office; see people you don’t like; take the kids to the pool. I have found I miss remarkably little of my old life, said Pilita Clark in the FT, and that I can get by on a lot less than I realised. The question is, will this new frugality last, when the lockdown is finally lifted? Or will we, as the economist Prof Tim Jackson has put it, revert to “spending money we don’t have, on things we don’t need, to create an impression that won’t last, on people we don’t care about”? For business, it is vital that we do – but at the moment, “there is no real way of knowing”.