We're at boiling point.

How five years of pressure has brought us to the edge

I’m feeling nervous - for all manner of reasons.

As I watched the far-right marching in London this weekend, I couldn’t help thinking about the conversation I had with Lucy Easthope earlier this year.

I’ve had a feeling about 2025 all year… and I keep thinking of the way Virginia Woolf set her war AND pandemic novel, Mrs Dalloway, on a single day in June, 1923, five years after that double event of mass-death.

Why 1923? Five years? I have always thought.

When I pitch publications to media, I always reflect on the fact that we are now exactly halfway through ‘the COVID decade’.

With the World Health Organisation declaring that COVID-19 was no longer a pandemic-level threat, and the winding down of vaccine developments, we might think that the impact of COVID-19 is coming to an end.

This would be wrong.

This is why my nerves are jangling.

The world feels very heavy right now. Imagined dystopias are beginning to feel very real.

The Information Minefield

Today, I heard someone say:

“3 million reportedly marched at that event and yet SkyNews are saying 150,000 - they don’t want you to know”.

I felt squeaky, uneasy, hearing this conspiratorial mindset.

The information environment is incredibly testing. Men that own our social media platforms calling for violence on the streets, the dissolution of parliament and speaking of it as ‘revolution’. Billionaires manufacturing the outrage that is being spewed.

It is incredibly intentional and emotional division (I have a whole other Substack post in me to talk about why the drop in reading and literacy rates across the years is a monumental concern here).

This kind of sentiment doesn’t feel like it is going anywhere sadly.

So I returned to something Lucy Easthope told me - her fear of what has been fermenting under the surface for the past five years since the pandemic.

The world has descended into a negative ideological cycle of political violence, the temperature has gone up, and up, and up…. and now it feels like we’re at boiling point.

Lucy talked to us about the ‘overboil’ concept:

Historical Echoes

Anti-immigration/migration discourses are a historical occurrence in the aftermath of pandemics and plagues. After waves of disease, come waves of hate. Social isolation takes its toll and tensions begin to escalate.

Scholars of early modern England have shown how plague and protest go hand in hand. The Black Death of 1348 laid the groundwork for the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, for example.

During the Peasants’ Revolt, peasants executed members of the Royal government, broke open jails, and burned public buildings.

Although plague and protest did not occur concurrently, and the revolt itself occurred thirty years after the Black Death swept through Europe, Mark Senn suggests the plague exacerbated the oppressive social conditions that already existed, leading to revolt.

Post-pandemic unrest

The increase in anti-immigration sentiment in the UK has been compounded by the xenophobia and racism already inherent to the pandemic, and resulting from the recession in 2023-2024.

Economic competition theory predicts anti-immigration sentiments increase in periods with high unemployment. High unemployment rates are associated with a high level of economic concern over immigration. The relationship is stronger among low skilled workers who believe they are competing for scarce resources and jobs.

Living at Fever-Pitch

This “overboil” has been building for five years, it’s not just about politics or economics, but also about what the pandemic did to our inner worlds.

Unresolved grief has leaked into anger, cynicism, simmering in the background.

Trust has thinned and conspiracies borne from the underbelly of the internet (go read Marianna Spring’s Journey Through Conspiracyland, or if not one for reading, listen to the podcast!)

There’s also exhaustion. Screen-dependence and doomscrolling shred attention spans. The algorithm feeds on negative content, pushing it out.

That’s only part of why this half of the COVID decade has given rise to this sociologically and politically turbulent moment.

The world feels so heavy right now... Maybe that’s what I’m really afraid of: how much heavier it could still get.