What on earth is non-essential socialising?

The pandemic has been difficult for numerous reasons; the feeling of constant threat exacerbated by daily death tolls, grieving family and friends who haven’t survived the virus and the economic fallout and disruption to work and education. But perhaps the most understated of all has been the impact on our social lives which, until now, were completely ours to control. 

Over the course of the lockdowns, we went from seeing anyone we wanted to no one outside our household to five friends at a time and back to some semblance of normality. But in that time, the pandemic stripped grandparents of their final Christmas with their families, created a cohort of babies who had never met anyone apart from their parents, forced unmarried couples to go months without seeing each other and left those living alone entirely isolated from face-to-face interaction. 

Yesterday, Dr Jenny Harries, head of NHS Test and Trace told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that people can do their bit to reduce the spread of the omicron variant by reducing their number of social contacts. “In winter and particularly around Christmas we tend to socialise more,” Dr Harries said, before encouraging “not socialising when we don’t particularly need to.” 

The logic behind Dr Harries advice is clear, the more people you see, the more people you could spread the virus to. But how do we decide when counts as “socialising when we don’t particularly need to”?

Looking back on my social life in the last week, it is hard to see how any socialising could be deemed non-essential and attempting to order my social interactions in a sort-of hierarchy of need leaves me feeling demoralised and quite sad. When visiting my parents at the weekend I popped round to see my neighbour who I haven’t seen in over a year. This, by Dr Harries metrics, was probably socialising when I didn’t need to, but it made us both happy and it was important to me to see an old friend. 

I also saw my own family, my boyfriend’s family and a group of friends at the weekend. A busy, but not unusual weekend during the festive season (and including two birthday celebrations), which felt necessary for my own sense of wellbeing and connection with the people in my life.

Throughout history, any threat to humankind has often been countered by the formation and maintenance of social groups. Our primate ancestors were able to forage for food by day rather than night when they lived as groups and communication between groups allowed for sharing of ideas through language, helping us develop essential tools for survival. 

More recently, wars are fought by armies that succeed through their collective determinism and communities at home come together to boost morale and ignite “blitz spirit”, often touted as an essential part of surviving war.

Perhaps this is why it feels so difficult and unnatural to teach ourselves that reducing social interaction is the correct response to threat and danger. 

This is not to say Dr Harries has bad intentions. After all, socialising less would make her life far easier as her team untangle the various social webs of those testing positive for Covid-19. But after the last eighteen months of various periods of isolation and estrangement from our friends and family, her words struck a nerve. 

I would be comforted slightly by Boris Johnson’s contradiction of Dr Harries words, saying we should not cancel Christmas plans, but after last year, I’m understandably reluctant to put any faith in the Prime Minister to save Christmas.

If we minimise our social lives every time this virus mutates, we set ourselves up to live our lives more online than ever. Parasocial relationships might replace real ones and in the process, we risk losing our rich levels of empathy; research has shown that empathy is built through eye contact, paying attention to tone of voice, expression and body language, all of which are lost or minimised when interacting virtually. Not to mention the release of serotonin and dopamine person-to-person contact can provide. 

Encouraging the booster programme and increasing testing for inbound travellers are necessary cautionary measures, encouraging people to rank their social interactions is a definitive way to create an anxious, unempathetic and miserable country, just in time for Christmas… let’s hope the Grinch doesn’t listen to the Today programme.