I’ve just realised that I haven’t left the house for eight days. I am not ill or trapped under something heavy. It’s just kind of… happened. Not for the first time either, even though each time it does occur I swear to myself that I won’t let it happen again. But I do, and it does. You know how life is.
The proximate cause of my voluntary incarceration was my son becoming old enough to go to school and back on his own. There is now no genuine reason to leave the house so… I haven’t. Like sex, I feel now that it is something I will do, maybe, once everything else has been ticked off my list. But my list is long and ever-renewing.
Such stasis is easily achieved by anyone these days – though as ever it helps if you are already temperamentally inclined that way. There are fewer buzzing extroverts accidentally immuring themselves for over a week than there are natural sloths. They seek the light, the fresh air, the people – the front door.
For those of us less instinctively inclined outwards, for those of us – say – who watched Papillon as a teenager and didn’t understand it because you didn’t understand that solitary confinement was supposed to be a punishment – well, there is little about modern life to supply the impetus we lack.
Supermarkets will deliver all your food and toiletries (ditto the cat’s, who is about to become more or less your sole companion). Argos, John Lewis or any department store at the price point you require will furnish you with replacement appliances, furniture and kitchenware. You need more lamps and you break more stuff when you are indoors all the time – the latter’s just maths and the former is what happens when you need a lighting rig that can meet your day-round needs and not just the few hours you used to be home after work in the evenings.
Ah work – the greatest recent change of course. The pandemic and its lockdowns accelerated the accessibility and adoption of the technology that makes homeworking genuinely feasible, outputs trackable, remote meetings workable and generally cut the ground from under the feet of any boss who had previously objected to the practice. Even if homeworkers are not yet the majority they are certainly mainstream, and most people who want to (and who have the right kind of jobs, naturally) have been able to retreat to the confines of home for at least part of the working week.
As a freelance journalist, I have been working from home for the better part of 20 years. See me for tips. It mostly involves punching yourself in the face every time you reach for your phone and keeping the biscuits in a combination safe whose code your family changes every day and refuses to share. You’re welcome.
It is a blissful state of affairs, really – until it’s not. When I finally did notice that it had been a long time since I had directly experienced the sun on my skin or fresh air in my lungs and began to contemplate an outing – to a café, I reckoned, to see if lattes still existed and whether any major innovations in sandwich-compilation had occurred in my absence – a strange disquiet crept over me. A sort of de-skilling process had already set in. I had to stop and think, quite deliberately and consciously about where I was planning to go and what I would need to take with me.
Phone, cards and – and – keys, that was it. Because of being on the other side of the door eventually. And maybe some cash too, because sometimes those card things don’t work in those shop things, do they? And therefore I will need – a bag. Yes, The missing piece of the puzzle.
Over my latte and ham and cheese toastie (there is no need for innovation, actually – we hit peak sandwich right here. Everything else is just gilding the lily) I thought how frighteningly easily we lose our ease and comfort with the world once we drop out, even a little bit.
I wonder how much we are all still working through the after-effects of the pandemic, what extra effort and mental resources it is still costing us to move through our lives as normal again. More than that, I wonder how unscalable the heights of strangeness must be for those who have dropped out and fallen through much greater cracks, into the ravines carved by poverty, mental illness, long unemployment, homelessness and all the terrible rest of it.
It occurred to me that I should kick my inner sloth up its arse, take my fundamental tendency to hunker down and stay away from everything and give it a stern talking to. It is a privilege to be able to be part of society. Dropping out voluntarily suddenly seemed as immoral a self-indulgence as any other. Plus, there are much better sandwiches out there than you can ever make yourself. I don’t know how they do it, but they do.
