The Times newspaper published an article on Monday called “I have lockdown nostalgia, and I’m not alone”. The piece by fashion editor Harriet Walker is concerning but predictable evidence that lockdowns could return at the drop of a hat at some point in the future.
I’ve had several conversations recently — at parties, ironically enough — that confirmed what the guilty little voice in my head has been whispering for some time: for many people, the enforced planlessness of lockdown was actually quite nice.
Many of the laptop class, those who could work from home, actually enjoyed their freedoms being taken away from them. Sad. Their lives were in such a mess, so exhausting and so stressful that they needed someone to imprison them to feel better about themselves. Instead of taking control of their own existence, by changing things that weren’t working for them, they required society to lock them up. Pathetic
In some sense I feel sorry for these people. Nobody should feel that their lives are so out of control that they need something as extreme as lockdowns to subdue the chaos. It’s ironic that the worldwide chaos caused by lockdowns actually returned order to those whose lives were already in chaos.
But these really were first world problems that the laptop class wanted to hide away from. And most of which could have been sorted out by themselves or if external influence was required, with therapy.
Let me get my tiny violin out to play some incredibly sad music whilst I listen to Harriet’s reasons for longing for lockdowns. “Constantly ferrying the kids between things”, “the roster of weekend clubs and activities” and weeknight work events”. Tough life, maybe she should do a life swap with one of the hundreds of millions of people who were pushed into extreme poverty due to lockdowns.
Even single friends I expected to be livid with me for mentioning the L-word said they were wistful for time that didn’t come with the pressure to be used efficiently or productively. In this age of constant omni-channel communication, maintaining friendships can often feel like a second job.
That’s because you have rich friends, Harriet. They sat in their gardens, made banana bread and watched Netflix whilst the furlough money rolled in. I can guarantee that anyone who uses the phrase the “age of constant omni-channel communication” doesn’t have a clue about how the other half live. And if maintaining friendships feels like a second job, stop pretending you have so many friends. They are mainly fake, ditch them and keep the real ones.
The school-aged kids I know remember lockdown (the sunny one, anyway) with something close to fondness, too. Though it was tough for older teens, younger ones enjoyed walking the dog, reading and making up dance routines without worrying about what their friends were doing without them.
Once again, the kids Harriet knows are rich ones. The ones who aren’t part of the laptop class were often trapped in cramped apartments with no outside space. They struggled to complete homework due to the noise in the house and had to cope with stressed parents who had lost their jobs and couldn’t afford food. Many of these kids disappeared from the school system and still have not returned. Some were abused. Some witnessed domestic violence. Some sadly killed themselves. Many still have social anxiety to this day.
To be fair to Harriet, she tries to acknowledge the harms that happened due to lockdowns.
It’s a privilege to think this way, I know. For those who lost relatives and livelihoods, lockdown was beyond awful. It sharpened lifestyle choices to their most intolerable: loneliness among single people; the claustrophobia of house shares; the frustrated exhaustion of trying to work and parent simultaneously.
But these are just noises. If Harriet truly understood the harms caused by lockdowns, she would be too embarrassed to write her article. ‘Lockdown’ should be a dirty word that, even if people enjoyed it, should never be mentioned in a positive light again. And if you are so desperate for another lockdown, then pay for yourself to be incarcerated. Go to therapy, check in to a clinic but don’t force the rest of the world to suffer just because you can’t get your shit together.
We are all still coming to terms with what we went through in 2020 and there is a certain pressure to perform “normal” again. But I’m determined to keep hold of some of that planlessness. It is empty time, I now realise, that keeps me feeling topped up.
And this is why her article is so dangerous. Because a large percentage of the laptop class still feel like this. They can be given stats and figures showing how damaging lockdowns were until they are blue in the face and they would still crave for another lockdown. You could probably show them a starving baby, its family pushed into extreme poverty due to lockdowns and whilst they would feel sad, they would still manage to justify it somehow.
All it would take is for another crisis, any crisis, it doesn’t have to be a pandemic, and these people would feel the pangs of nostalgia return. Power hungry governments would suggest lockdowns and whilst pretending to be enraged, behind the scenes they will push for them to go ahead. Anything to avoid the commute to work. Anything to avoid another face-to-face meeting. Anything to avoid another networking event. There are too many selfish people in our society. They think the world owes them a break because they work so hard in their bullshit jobs, drinking their soy lattes. And the only way to get that break is to dump on the poor people of this world from a great height.
This piece was originally published on the Naked Emperor’s Substack. You can subscribe here.
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If Harriet and her ilk make up the majority then we are royally f***ed! I agree with Jorden. Absolutely bugger all in the way of benefit was achieved. These people are dangerous.
”Not only did all of their measures fail, because nobody was in fact protected by any of their strategies for fighting this invisible enemy, but nobody is being held accountable for this gross failure, despite claiming they had the “tools” necessary to stop a virus. Not only are these forces not being held accountable, the Public Health tyrants are congratulating themselves as heroes of the pandemic.
It’s become pretty clear at this point that absolutely nothing the “experts” and their government partners did was even remotely beneficial. Everything was a net negative. Had the world rightly understood covid as just another Flu season, so much tragedy and carnage could’ve been avoided. Nonetheless, the people in charge got their way, and the economic and societal devastation from their decisions will be felt for decades and decades. Accountability remains a distant pursuit, due to the reality that the vast majority of people in positions of power were complicit in the destruction.”
https://www.dossier.today/p/the-national-covid-emergency-ends
Fascists – that is what they are. Illiterate, ignorant, evil. Happily imo they are a minority – the Harriet’s, the Rona Retard’s are no more than 30%. Yes the morons will still stab, but not many will support another Nazification and LD. Rona should have revealed the ‘naked emperors’ all around us. Most people like Harriet, regardless of money, poshness, their Notting Hill addresses are f*ing stupid. As simple as that.
Sadly it’s people just like Harriet who will exert influence on future lockdowns for “potential pandemics” and “possible climate emergencies” unless many more normal, sane people start to speak up.
The Petitions Oversight Committee has demanded further consideration of the WHO and IHR proposals that are currently being finalised as the concerns raise in the original petition were not adequately answered by the 3 or 4 individuals who supported them having obviously nether read nor understood the implications of the proposed changes.
Sign up now to the worldwide petition set up ny RFK Junior.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/community-forum/health-freedom-bill-of-rights/
Agree on the WHO, the WEF and our useless elite handing over sovereignty. Nothing much we the hoi polloi can do – except – and this is inevitable – rise up and engage in violence. It is going to come to that. The mass protests in London we were in – 1 million or more on 2 occasions – will need to be multiplied by 25x. It is coming to that point in the near future. You will literally need to get off the sofa and put down the laptop and fight.
“…for many people, the enforced planlessness of lockdown was actually quite nice.”
You do you, Harriet. Stay in your kindergarten if you want. Just leave me alone to enjoy my life the way I want to while I have it with the many other adults who feel the same.
And stay the f*ck away from my children.
And that’s the essential clear blue water between how we view the world and how they do – it’s not simply a question of seeing things differently, it’s that our views on how life should be lived apply to us and we have no interest in imposing them on others, for some nebulous “public good”, beyond social norms about behaviour (criminal and antisocial) that have existed since the dawn of civilisation and are generally accepted.
What gets me is how any normal-functioning, rational adult would have the nerve to actually publish something like this in a national paper. It’s massively insulting and only results ( well, hopefully anyway ) in people pouring derision on such an insipid, self-absorbed, entitled idiot who obviously lives in a parallel universe compared to the rest of us who need to actually go through the door in order to earn a living and who’s kids most definitely do best being at school and not having their childhood development screwed up due to lack of socialization.
Basically this sorry excuse for a human being is anything but normal-functioning and rational. She should be thoroughly ashamed to write such complete tripe. Disgusting.
If I had a subscription to The Times, I’d cancel it because of this article
As it is, probably only people with similar views will read it.
I have to keep my anger under wraps in my day to day life or I’d be falling out with everyone.
I did just that more than a year ago when I could no longer tolerate the absence of any understanding and this level of commenting on very real and worrying issues and the total cancellation of any adverse comments about the pandemic mismanagement, safety and efficacy of vaccines etc etc etc..
Investigative intelligent journalism appears to be obsolete for the most part in all mainstream media!
Than heavens for the real journalists at The Daily Sceptic, the Substack writers and all the below the line commenters.
Given I had just moved out of London and was just beginning to build a freelance work base here in Devon, lockdowns were a catastrophe. The companies I was working for down here closed their doors for good, leaving me dependent on London companies for work. I’d moved, in part, because my parents were getting older. I’m now caring for them and couldn’t move back to London if I wanted to. When I lived there, the cost of living meant I couldn’t save anything. My private pension is risible and I wanted to build it for 20-something years down here.
So I’m stuck, wondering what the Hell I can do in the long term, given I haven’t had any work in eight weeks, because my trade is having a post-lockdown ‘adjustment’ where work is sparse. I’d hoped – as I turned 45 in 2020 – that there might just about be time to meet a nice lady and start a family before I got too old. That’s gone out the window now. So it’s my fault for leaving it too late. The state took away my last chance, though, and killed my family line.
So when I read imbecilic articles like Harriet Walker’s I absolutely cringe. People like her are actually dangerous. While she can ‘lah-di-dah’ around her expensive home and do Zoom chats, I’ll be stuck – going crazy – fearing for my future. I came within a week of losing my limited company in the last lockdown. I’ve already acknowledged I’m psychologically f***ed by what’s gone on since 2020. I won’t survive another.
These fascist propagandists (likely salivating at exaggerating bird flu into something restriction-worthy) need putting back in their boxes fast.
Completely out of touch with reality and I would make an educated guess these individuals are masktards and jab junkies too.
I hope these people are jab junkies Mogs, it should see them off reasonably quickly, all being well.
Good luck and try to keep positive.
Ms Harriet Walker, this is what Melinda Gates had to say:
‘What did surprise us is we hadn’t really thought through the economic impact”
Do you know, have any idea of, how many millions, hundreds of millions of lives were adversely affected worldwide?
Please read ‘As If Expendable’ about the effects of government policy on the elderly and infirm in this country.
Then write out one hundred times ‘No more lockdowns without a comprehensive cost benefit analysis’
So that’s why Melinda married Billy Boy. She recognised a perfectly matching lack of emotional intelligence and common sense
And a risk analysis!
It’s seriously improper to refer to these people as laptop class. Sociable extroverts working in office jobs would capture it much better, and working in the kind office jobs where a sizable part of the work day would otherwise go into being present in the office. Another obvious addition would be without close relatives living in distant towns or even distant countries and lastly, what Tim Martin once called dinner party people who have most of their social contacts in their home or other people’s homes (who could thus break lockdown rules fairly easily whenver it suited them). If all of this is given, one can imagine people enjoying lockdown because they can finally spend some time with their family and meet only with the people they really want to meet with. The lockdown kings, clearly.
The next well-off class where people working in non-office jobs our communist overlords considered essential whose lives, minus a requirement to mask up in customer facing roles, continued mostly unchanged as no COVID rules ever applied to work places not open to the general public.
Everybody else lost big time, regardless of them being owners of small shops, of food outlets without signficant delivery service, of them being non-essential consultants and handymen of all kinds, software developers always working from home etc.
Are these based on the opinions of two people only?
The assumption that those who could work remotely via a laptop or PC are well paid and none of them live in cramped apartments is naive at best.
The other side of this is that those working remotely were being paid to do so and still expected to deliver. Lockdown would unlikely have succeeded if it were not for furlough: pay people to sacrifice their freedom. Fiscal Failure Rishi Sunak has done admirably from his inflation-stimulating policies.
It’s called Stockholm Syndrome
I also highly doubt that Harriet Walker found herself locked down at the top of a London housing estate tower block like some unlucky people.
Poor old Winston Smith figured it out the hard way:
“everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”
So the imposition of lockdowns is structurally self-fulfilling. If the political and corporate elites at the top of the food chain, and the “laptop classes” just below are relatively impervious to the impact of lockdown due to their privileged circumstances, then the former will happily toggle the lockdown switch to “on”, while the latter will sit back in their swivel chairs, head out into their large garden and say “There’s another lockdown dear. Oh well, I’ve been meaning to do a bit of gardening. Bit of time off work never hurt anyone”, while the other half have suicidal thoughts.
It is self-fulfilling that those imposing restrictions that are devastating to the working class majority, and ending the careers of small business owners, and all the rest of it, are those who will be minimally, if at all, impacted, by their decrees.
They probably wouldn’t do it otherwise!
Absolutely spot on!
Lockdowns are a crime against humanity. Anyone who advocates for them, supports them, enables them or writes wistful articles in praise of them has got blood on their hands. Walker’s piece is yet one more example of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the ‘respectable’ press. What a disgrace.
Lockdowns are child abuse, abuse of the elderly, vulnerable & disabled & a terrorist act. Wonder if she’d be so nostalgic were she to be subjected to further acts of terrorism or abuse? Lock her into a top floor flat with a broken lift, no personal space & no balcony for the next experiment.
Yes, try being a disabled pensioner, living alone…& (not) being able to walk a mile in their shoes….
I live alone apart from my dog & became incredibly ill at the start of lockdown – my dog saved my life. But I’m lucky, I have a garden & some friends who broke the lockdown rules to make sure that I wasn’t completely on my own. That was hard enough. I dread to think of how isolated others were.
As I said above – it was abusive & a terrorist act on the citizens of this country.
A little common sense would have made all the difference at the beginning of this so called pandemic.
https://brownstone.org/articles/problem-of-lost-knowledge-antibiotic-edition/
But common sense isn’t very common
It’s exceedingly uncommon – especially in the elite ruling classes!
Reposted:
The very people screaming for lockdowns moaning that they should have been longer
and harder are now the very people going on strike because the economy is screwed. Totally in the belief that inflation has not been caused
by paying the very same people to sit on their arses. The BBC have not mentioned once that lockdowns have created the problem. F**king clowns the lot of them.
Harriet Walker should have titled her article “I’m a pathetic, selfish, privileged kid-adult – and here’s the proof.”
She – and people like her – disgust me. They should try walking a mile in other less affluent and privileged people’s shoes ….. but they wouldn’t manage 10 yards.
The Naked Emperor; one of many great substacks I subscribe to and have informed me and kept me sane – though my acquaintances don’t think I’m sane not believing in bullshit like them!
I think that it might be understood that there are some people who apparently enjoy being tied up, suspended by their ankles and soundly whipped across their buttocks with a donkey’s pizzle.
Usually these folk keep rather quiet about their unusual pleasures, rather than writing silly pieces in the Times.
What she’s describing as an ideal life is that of a pre 1980’s housewife. Nothing wrong with that all, but for disguising it as lockdown nostalgia she should be taken out the back and shot.