“Since the age of 14, I’ve had a local pub, somewhere I can just go, make friends, watch the football, talk about music, gossip. There’s a lot of resentment and jealousy, which you just don’t get in London.” He misses cinemas, parks, theatres that don’t show only pantos – he misses everything. Mike Nicholls, 66, a writer from London, moved with his wife, who works in the film industry, to the Suffolk market town of Sudbury after spending some time near Manchester looking after his parents. But if it is irreversible, it is much easier to change the thoughts. Leaving that gap open creates aversive feelings and we try to close it.” If we can close the gap with our behaviour – reverse the decision – then we will do that. They create a cognitive dissonance, a disparity between our thoughts and our behaviour. Regret doesn’t quite work like that.įuschia Sirois, a psychology professor at Durham University, says: “There’s a natural human reaction to mistakes, or decisions that we might regret initially. You would expect some people to have regrets, right? Any choice made in the middle of a crisis will have impulsive elements, uncharacteristic thought patterns surely some of those choices will have turned out badly. Nonetheless, this decade has thrown up some weird conditions in which to make a major decision. There was a huge rush for animals during the pandemic a staggering 33% of households now have at least one dog. The one thing – or 3.2 million things, to be precise – that Covid can take credit for is an influx of pets. Marital breakdown turned out to be more complex, possibly thanks to the recent introduction of the no-fault divorce, or Covid-related financial pressures, rather than the pandemic itself. If there is a labour shortage, blame (whisper it) Brexit. Rates of economic inactivity were unchanged. People largely didn’t leave their jobs, or if they did it was only to move to another one – a timeless choice. ![]() Liverpool ended up with a higher population than before. ![]() Urban life recovered its lustre and many of those ex-Londoners turned out to be young people who had just temporarily moved back with their parents. When the dust had settled, however, a lot of the changes weren’t as stark as all that. ‘I’m like the addict that can’t walk past a bar’ … Kirk McElhearn, here with his wife Sally, got obsessed with breadmaking. ![]() In early 2021, one estate agent noted the “largest exodus out of London in a generation”. Developers in Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool were panicking. Nationally, four in 10 people were more inclined to look for houses in rural locations than they were before Covid. By August of that year, one in seven Londoners wanted to leave the city. The pointlessness of your job leapt out at you, but was it the work itself, or just a proxy for modern life?Įspecially in 2020, this all looked as though it was going to bring about huge life changes. Suddenly, the relationships you thought would endure till death parted you wouldn’t last five more minutes at the same time, the person you met on Wednesday was now living with you. Why not do that thing you have always wanted to do, chuck in your job or get an iguana? Practically speaking, it was a new world, in which life in the city was all downside and no up. Fear of change evaporates when everywhere you look there is upheaval you didn’t choose. There was a lot of big talk during the pandemic as we used that eerie combination of silence and panic to re-evaluate our priorities.
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