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

UNLABELLED: The COVID-19 pandemic drove rapid digital transformation and disrupted the ways people could meet their basic psychological needs of autonomy, relatedness and competence. This study explored how people across six European countries (the UK, Poland, Czechia, Germany, Switzerland and Spain) recalled the role of digital technology (DT) in fulfilling these needs. 148 semi-structured interviews were conducted after the pandemic and were analysed using thematic analysis. The analysis showed that DTs were recalled as both supporting and frustrating the satisfaction of all three psychological needs depending on broader material, institutional, social, personal and attitudinal conditions. Accordingly, DTs were associated with conditional autonomy and competence: In participants' accounts, they were linked to experiences of both enhanced and diminished spatial and temporal empowerment and were tied to increased and reduced feelings of competence depending on factors such as time availability, living space, personal views of homeworking, organisational adaptation to digitalisation or external requirements relating to DT use. DT was also recalled in association with relatedness-enhancing experiences of social enrichment and relatedness-frustrating perceptions of disconnection and disengagement as a function of factors such as access to digital tools or cultural and social events, personal experiences such as emotional fatigue and digital norms. These findings contribute to our understanding of how peri-pandemic digital experiences are reconstructed today and point to the persistence of memories that reflect context-dependent interpretations of how digital life shaped need satisfaction. Such memories suggest how psychological well-being during health crises and beyond may be jointly co-constructed by technology and society. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-09895-9.