I don’t think I’m alone in the fact that I don’t really like to dwell on lockdown too much. It was, after all, a complicated, sad time, and when I do think about it, in my head it’s a weird blur of badly run laps around my local park, Google Hangouts, and endless Netflix. I was fortunate enough that in my own immediate life, nothing very bad happened, but it’s just as true that nothing very good happened either.

Now, to look back on, it just feels like empty time – time that could have been filled by untold experiences, had the world been going around as usual. For some people, though, the impact was world-shaking: perhaps it was a period when long Covid changed everything, or time they could have spent with loved ones that they’ll now never see again. No wonder it’s not really a place our brains like to go to.

Somehow, however, we are now five whole years out from the first lockdown being called in England (my immediate response, upon seeing Boris Johnson’s TV announcement, was to pour a glass of wine and go “right then”, which could also essentially be said to summarise my reaction across the whole year and a bit-long period). As such, perhaps now I should give it some purposeful, and probably overdue, reflection. Half a decade on, what have been the lasting effects of lockdown and the pandemic? Are we all really stuck in a loop of collective trauma? And did any positives – for individuals or for all of usen masse – actually come from it?

When lockdown began, there were suggestions from some corners that it could represent an opportunity for positive social changes to happen. A government that was well known for its extremely laissez-faire attitude towards the most vulnerable suddenly had to start helping people in many different ways, from the homeless being given places to stay, to disabled and very unwell people becoming genuine social priorities. Many hoped that these newly adopted values would stick. Those hopes, we know now, were largely in vain – our society is now more fragmented than ever, and our time apart from each other has probably only made social silos more pronounced, with children and young adults, particularly in their ability to relate to others, some of the worst affected.

The Centre for Mental Health, which has researched the effects of the pandemic extensively, reports as much. “If anything, the pandemic highlighted and exacerbated social inequalities and reduced social cohesion,” says spokesperson Alethea Joshi.

Dr Rowena Hill, professor of psychology at the School for Social Sciences at Nottingham Trent University, who has written at length on the pandemic and our social responses to it, tells me that much of the progress that did emerge – like developments in workplaces that, in many ways, were more inclusive for all, from busy parents to disabled workers – has since been backtracked.

“We did see fundamental changes in some workplaces that were able to become more flexible,” she says. “We also saw great innovation and creativity in developing solutions. Now, however, we see regression back to pre-pandemic customs and practices more than we predicted at the time. We see social norms moving closer to pre-pandemic expectations, but we also see that systems and processes that were suspended in that emergency footing, which allowed for the innovation and creation, now restrict or restrain those beneficial ways of working.”

Many of these “beneficial ways of working” functioned to give employees more of their own time back. I had a full-time job when the lockdown was called, and the move to entirely home-based work meant that I was blessed with time on my hands to do things I’d always wanted to try or perfect or improve on. For me, this was the main upside of the lockdown, if there was one at all. Evenings, suddenly, were spent guiltlessly bingeing TV shows like Life on Mars and The Sopranos, and I got quite good at making mashed potatoes, for example.

The mash wasn’t the only creative pursuit I embarked on, though. Around working from home and my adventures in butter and potato, I wrote a novel – it is rubbish, and has barely seen the light of day. But as for some others, the enforced solitude and the time at home gave me the brain space to really stick to something, and to go after a creative project that I had always wanted to try out. While my own book attempt didn’t really come to much – nor was it coming to anything really the point for me, in hindsight – I remain pleased that I managed to see something through from beginning to end for once.

For many, many others, lockdown was the impetus they needed to kickstart goals and even new career directions (and it makes me wonder, by the way, how many of us would be able to do this more without the relentless pressures of daily life to answer to – which as Professor Hill notes, have returned manifold – and what great art we’re missing out on because so many would-be writers or musicians or painters just have too much on their plates, that they’re not getting help for).

I missed my friends and the support network they provided, I was drinking too much, and my longstanding body image issues got worse, festering with all the spare time to fixate on them

Lauren O’Neill

It’s now not uncommon to hear in the media from a writer, musician or artist who was inspired by that time in some way, for better or worse, or who spent the pandemic making work. My friend, the author Imogen West-Knights, is one of them. Imogen wrote the majority of her wonderful first book Deep Down, a sad but propulsive novel about a brother and sister navigating their father’s death, during the lockdown, and I asked her recently what impact this time had on her work. She told me: “I do wonder whether I would ever have finished my first novel if the lockdowns hadn’t happened. I lost basically all my other writing work for a time but was being kept afloat by the government’s self-employment grants, and so effectively I was being paid to do nothing.

“It really felt unfair to me that I was in a position to take advantage of such a dreadful time in the lives of so many people,” she continues, “and I was lucky not to have any dependents, parents not elderly enough to be seriously worried about, and a certain amount of peace and quiet.”

Indeed, the Centre for Mental Health agrees that some people found that lockdowns offered them the space they needed in various areas of their lives. “Our creative writing project A Year In Our Lives showcased a range of experiences of the lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 – not all of them were bad,” Joshi tells me. “Some people appreciated the opportunity to create new routines; for others living with mental health difficulties, it provided more respite from the stresses of the outside world.”

Ultimately, however, Imogen and I, and others like us, without dependents or vulnerable relatives to look after, were not the norm. As Professor Hill says, “There were benefits reported at the time, but the ways in which these positive impacts were felt was not as systematic or common across groups and demographic profiles, so these were evidenced less than the negative impacts in general.”

Many of these negative impacts were concerning individual mental health. I do of course have some positive memories of the time – the room to be creative, a birthday spent celebrating the return of bog roll to our local shop following the shortage, my first Christmas in London – but for every happy thought, there are just as many awful ones.

I missed my friends and the support network they provided, I was drinking too much, and my longstanding body image issues got worse, festering with all the spare time to fixate on them. I think these relatively small personal concerns are probably reflected by mental health trends at large at the time: loneliness increased, treatment for alcohol misuse was up 10 per cent in the year up to March 2022, and you couldn’t move for pop psychology articles about how staring at ourselves on Zoom was making us all even more insecure about our looks (incidentally, 2022 saw a cosmetic surgery boom, according to the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons).

These effects – plus all of the other myriad changes that happened in the lives of individuals, and socially – do not go away overnight, and realistically, they probably don’t go away ever. As Professor Hill says, “Far from ‘building back’ we are now on a completely new path.”

“The cascades, consequences, compounding impacts and intersectionality of the impacts of the pandemic and how we managed it will be with us for the foreseeable future, entwined with our personal, collective and global experiences for many decades yet,” Hill continues.

There are, then, a lot of reasons why we don’t like to dwell on lockdown. But five years on, perhaps in order to move forward in a better way, it’s something we all – especially our leaders – ought to do more.