Covid and the fear of freedom

I realised I’d gone a bit weird while standing in the middle of a park, getting the air sucked out of my lungs by the wind. It was February last year and Storm Eunice had made it to London. The storm was one of the most powerful to hit the country in decades and, for the first time in recent memory, people had been advised to stay home all day.

I just couldn’t do it. I was at home reading about the storm and saw the warning, and I stood up like someone had put a spike on the couch. I put on my shoes and my coat and headed outside. Where was I going? I had no idea. I just knew I had to leave, not be indoors.

For the most part of 18 months I’d stayed at home because I’d been told to do so by the government, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t go back. I knew I was being irrational and unreasonable – a storm isn’t the same as a virus – but I just couldn’t reason with myself. I had to leave the flat, to prove to myself that no-one could tell me what to do.

I walked to the park in my neighbourhood and immediately realised I’d made a mistake. The wind was strong. It was terrifying. I was the only person there, and I found it hard to breathe. I looked at the trees, bending at angles that seemed painful, and ran back home.

It was a stupid thing to have done, but an instructive one; the pandemic changed us all, in myriad ways. One of its legacies for me was, clearly, a deep libertarianism that hadn’t been there before. I’ve not quite gone down the full “freeman of the land” road, but I will certainly hiss if you tread on me.

This is why I was both shocked and fascinated by a study released recently by the University of Bangor, which found that people “who followed the restrictions most closely when the pandemic hit are the most likely to be suffering from stress, anxiety and depression [today]”.

Speaking to the Guardian, Dr Marley Willegers, who worked on the research, said that “throughout the pandemic, messaging campaigns were designed to ensure people continued to follow the rules. But there was no messaging campaign as we came out of the pandemic to help everyone safely transition back to normality.”

“Without this, certain personality types have retained infection prevention behaviour and anxiety that undermines their mental wellbeing”. In short: after nearly two years of following orders on what to do and where to go, instinctive rule-takers still feel lost now that they are left to their own devices again.

Though I would hesitate to speak for everyone who also has a problem with authority, I must say that the experience of the people above has been the exact opposite of my own. I broke some rules during the lockdowns but merely because it had never occurred to me, at any point in my life, to ever obey every single set of rules handed to me. I did the best I could and the best was, in this case, far from perfect. It still left me feeling utterly miserable.

“Freedom day” was, as a result, one of the happiest days of my entire life. I still remember it well. I have not once looked back. What a surprise, then, to realise that some people still struggle with this complete freedom I spent so long yearning for. It’s a societal cleavage we never talk about; perhaps because we’d never had cause to notice it.

I wonder if we ought to be addressing it now. I already had libertarian tendencies before the pandemic and am now allergic to the idea of the state meddling with my freedoms. Some people found solace in the state telling them exactly what to do, to the extent that they are still struggling to return to normal.

We’re probably two ends of the spectrum, with many others in between who haven’t fundamentally changed, but it is still worth wondering what it will mean to us, as a people and as a country. How to govern people who now have strong but contradictory reactions to state involvement in personal lives? It hasn’t come up as a policy issue yet but may well do at some point. It should, perhaps, be looked into before then.