The 'precursor to a dystopia' is already here outside my window. A tram swooshes past practising runs down the new line, due for opening in June. From my front door, I can walk, within five minutes, to three different supermarkets, bumping into neighbours on the way.

There’s a post office, a butcher, a bank, a hairdresser, coffeeshops and even an independent bookstore. There is a multiplicity of very confusing cycle tracks which I don’t use since most things are in easy strolling distance. These days I use my car so little, I’ve started to wonder if we should just ditch it and save ourselves some cash.

Yes, it seems I am unlucky enough to live in the dystopian nightmare of what already is a 20-minute neighbourhood. It’s like the Truman Show meets Sunshine on Leith here but with very nice coffee.

You have, no doubt, heard of these 20-minute neighbourhoods. Most recently they got an extra boost of publicity because the Scottish Government launched its consultation on the plan to create areas in which "key amenities" are within walking distance - triggering declarations that it was a "precursor to dystopian climate lockdowns”. 

The idea of the 15-minute city, urban professor Carlos Moreno’s idea of a human-centric neighbourhood in which all one needs is within easy reach, has already spread across the world and been developed, famously, in Paris.

But in Scotland, rather than 15 minutes, The Government decided to stretch that out to 20. Perhaps they thought Scots were slow walkers. Or perhaps this is because they want us to walk more. A maximum there-and-back of 30 minutes is really not enough in a country where the disease burden (heart disease, cancer, neurological conditions etc) is forecast to increase by 21 per cent. We need the full forty.

READ MORE: War on cars' making you fume? Must be a case of 'car brain' 

It’s hard to think why, exactly, this is dystopian, except, of course, some people do believe it’s just the start of an evil masterplan, designed to contain us without cars before the barriers are put down and we are plunged into so-called "climate lockdown".

Other dystopia precursors would include low-traffic neighbourhoods, low emissions zones, or the ‘liveable neighbourhoods’ planned for Glasgow.

“Hunger Games comes into being - forbidden to leave your zone,” wrote one horrified Tweeter in response to the consultation.

Others talked of communism and the attack on personal freedoms.

Personally, I am not scared yet. As someone who takes the climate crisis seriously, I’d rather the 20-minute dystopia than some other options like, say, The Day After Tomorrow or The Road.

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But I can understand that people might feel some gripes about the policy. After all, anyone living outside our cities and towns, or even in amenities-free suburbs, is probably writing this off as an initiative designed not for them but the urban elite, who, like me, have probably already got their coffee shops anyway. And, of course, some people with mobility issues are rightly worried - and their concerns should be addressed.

Also, people hate consultations. I often think there must be a problem with how the Scottish Government is executing them because they seem to only ever trigger a frenzy of outrage and leave people as if they have been entirely unconsulted. Or perhaps it’s that any consultation is itself almost as dystopian as a 20-minute neighbourhood – Kafkaesque in its bureaucracy.

But I wonder if there’s something else going on. Talking to a friend with some insight into the Scottish government, I was interested to hear her observations on why almost every current policy and plan is falling apart and deeply unpopular. Firstly, she said,  the Government generally had a history of consulting extensively on policy and legislation, but because of Covid, there was a sense that things had got behind and therefore some things were being rushed.

READ MORE: Scotland's low emission zones: Which cars will be banned?

READ MORE: Scottish Government launches 20-minute neighbourhood consultation

Secondly, she said that because of Covid, people were exhausted by change. Most people just want everything to stay as it is for a long while, as we all recover.

The 20-minute neighbourhood, meanwhile, is tainted by the pandemic. Some people – admittedly mainly right-wing, conspiracy theorists – can’t look at it and not think back to the days when lurched us into a world of hybrid working in which we were trapped in what at times felt like a no-minute roaming space.

But at the same time, I find it hard to believe that people don’t want to live in the kind of places that this initiative is all about. Do they get profound joy out of being stuck in a traffic jam? Have they some horror of  “key services” that are within easy reach? Do they really not believe in the possibility of a more liveable world?

Or is it just that, still reeling from Covid’s shock, they don’t want anything new?

They'd like (and who doesn't feel this from time to time?) the world, and all its threats and changes, to stop. But it can’t.