Memories of pandemic digital life reveal technology’s double-edged grip on our needs

Three years after the World Health Organization declared an end to the global health emergency, the COVID-19 pandemic is increasingly being remembered not as a single event but as a dense web of experiences, many of them mediated by screens. A new study published in Current Psychology by Joanna Witowska of The Maria Grzegorzewska University in Warsaw and colleagues across four European institutions examines how people in six European countries now recall the role of digital technology during the pandemic, and what those memories reveal about the satisfaction of three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence and relatedness. Drawing on 148 semi-structured interviews conducted in the United Kingdom, Poland, Czechia, Germany, Switzerland and Spain, the researchers found that digital tools were remembered both as lifelines and as burdens, with their effects hinging on circumstances far beyond the technology itself.

The study forms part of the CHANSE-funded TIMED project, which explored digitalisation and time perception across Europe. Between December 2022 and May 2023, six national teams each conducted 50 interviews lasting on average 51 minutes, in person, by telephone or online. Participants ranged from 18 to 91 years old and included students, retirees, unemployed people and workers from diverse sectors. Crucially, the interview schedule did not ask directly about pandemic digital experiences; instead, participants spontaneously brought up COVID-19 in 148 of the 300 interviews. The researchers argue that this unprompted quality is valuable, because what people volunteer about the past signals which experiences were novel, meaningful or emotionally charged enough to be encoded and recalled years later.

The theoretical backbone of the analysis is Self-Determination Theory, the influential framework developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, which holds that well-being depends on the fulfilment of three needs. Autonomy is the sense of acting from one’s own volition rather than under external control. Competence is the feeling of mastery and effectiveness. Relatedness is the need to feel connected and to belong. Because the pandemic collapsed work, family, leisure and social life into a single domestic space, as communication scholar Christian Fuchs put it, activities usually performed in different roles at different times and places converged into one unstructured home-bound space-time, threatening all three needs simultaneously. Digital technology was the obvious candidate to compensate, but whether it did so proved deeply conditional.

The first major theme the researchers labelled conditional autonomy. For some participants, particularly those with abundant free time after furlough or reduced outdoor options, digital entertainment and app-supported exercise helped them fill and shape their days meaningfully. One British probation officer described how a paid fitness app with hundreds of exercise videos became vital for maintaining routines during lockdown. Remote work also offered temporal flexibility, allowing people to choose when to work rather than adhering to fixed office hours, but this benefit clustered among those who already had time to spare. For time-poor participants with caregiving responsibilities, teleworking often blurred the boundary between work and family, pushing paid labour into evenings and nights. A Czech union expert described working from home with a small child as hell, mentally and physically exhausting, and criticised the individualistic assumption that work-life balance could simply be achieved through personal effort.

Space mattered as much as time. Participants who had private rooms and adequate equipment recalled remote work as comfortable and even empowering, with some interpreting their employer’s sudden acceptance of home offices as a sign of trust. Others, sharing cramped quarters or a single computer, found digitalisation an obstacle rather than a liberation. A Spanish psychologist recalled clients unable to speak freely in therapy sessions for fear of being overheard by family members. Some participants also reframed home working sceptically, viewing it as a means for organisations to cut operating costs or extract higher productivity, with one noting that employees grew accustomed to five Zoom meetings a day, a pace that became an implicit standard even after hybrid working returned. Autonomy, in these accounts, was not a property of the technology but an outcome of its interaction with living space, equipment, caregiving loads and organisational power.

Competence showed the same conditional pattern. On one side, participants remembered struggling to keep pace with digital demands: parents overwhelmed by their children’s school platforms, students unable to concentrate through four-hour stretches of video lessons, employees frustrated by flawed public digital infrastructure. One retired Spanish accountant recounted how a faulty QR code system at the state employment service ultimately cost her financial aid, an experience she attributed not to personal failing but to her country’s inadequate digital infrastructure. On the other side, some recalled growing through digital accomplishments, such as a British camera operator whose industry rigged remote-controlled camera heads so film crews could work safely, or workers whose productivity rose once commuting disappeared. The researchers found that competence frustration typically arose when digital demands exceeded existing personal, social or cognitive capabilities, particularly where organisations failed to provide support, realistic expectations or adequate infrastructure.

Relatedness produced perhaps the most emotionally resonant findings. Digital tools were remembered as a lifeline, in the words of one British participant, preserving birthdays, festivities and daily contact when physical gatherings were impossible. Hospitals bought tablets so patients could stay in touch with loved ones, and video calling, once an exotic exception reserved for friends abroad, became an ordinary part of private life. New forms of participation also emerged: group chats that had never existed before, Facebook communities offering companionship, and late-night livestreamed concerts where viewers typed into chats in real time. One kitchen porter described watching her favourite metal bands perform at one in the morning, broadcast from American living rooms, as amazing precisely because the chat allowed genuine interaction despite isolation.

Yet the same memories carried an undercurrent of loss. Participants repeatedly described digitally mediated contact as functional but insufficient, lacking the intimacy, spontaneity and embodied presence of face-to-face encounters. Some reported emotional fatigue and deliberately limited their screen time; others noticed friendships fading when they existed only through Messenger or Teams. In professional and educational settings, the option to switch cameras off fostered anonymity and diffused responsibility, making relationships transactional. A Czech IT worker observed that in hybrid meetings the people in the room talked while those connected online, 98 per cent of them, stayed silent, and that casual kitchen and canteen small talk, along with verbal skills, was eroding. Once restrictions lifted, many participants deliberately retreated from digital social spaces, confirming that technology had been a necessary substitute rather than a preferred mode of connection.

The authors argue that these findings move beyond the vague conclusion that technology has mixed effects, echoing Melvin Kranzberg’s first law that technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral. By identifying the specific socio-material conditions, time availability, spatial arrangements, infrastructural adequacy, organisational power relations and caregiving responsibilities, that determined whether digital tools supported or frustrated need satisfaction, the study offers a framework for anticipating how digital life might shape well-being in future crises. The researchers caution that their convenience sample, skewed toward university-educated participants, cannot represent entire populations, and that memories are reconstructive rather than verbatim records. Even so, they conclude that digital well-being should be treated not merely as a matter of individual self-discipline but as a structural and collective issue, demanding equitable infrastructure, realistic organisational expectations and need-supportive digital policies, both during health emergencies and in ordinary digital life beyond them.

Subject of Research: Retrospective accounts of how digital technology use during the COVID-19 pandemic affected satisfaction of the basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness.

Article Title: Connected and confined: memories of digital experiences in relation to autonomy, competence, and relatedness during the COVID-19 pandemic

Article References: Witowska, J., Goncikowska, K., Schoetensack, C., & Černohorská, V. (2026). Connected and confined: memories of digital experiences in relation to autonomy, competence, and relatedness during the COVID-19 pandemic. Current Psychology, 45(18), Article 1514. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-09895-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-09895-9

Keywords: digital technology, COVID-19 pandemic, autobiographical memory, self-determination theory, autonomy, competence, relatedness, remote work, cyberpsychology, digital well-being, thematic analysis, social connection