how has the world changed during this pandemic essay
Answers
The COVID-19 pandemic has completely changed our lives. Take something as fundamental as our experiences of space: our mobility has become severely restricted – reduced to jogs or walks a few kilometres around our homes. Perhaps less obviously, the lockdown has also affected our experiences of time.
As an anthropologist of time, I investigate how human beings relate to time, particularly during crises. The current crisis, like many others, could be seen to deprive us of our “temporal agency” – the ability to structure, manage and manipulate our experience of time. For example, many of us will have already lost track of time, wondering which day of the week it is. It feels a bit as if time has come to a standstill.
The most important feature of our experiences of time during crisis is what anthropologist Jane Guyer termed “enforced presentism”: a feeling of being stuck in the present, combined with the inability to plan ahead. We currently don’t know when we can see our loved ones again, or when we can go on holiday. More severely, many of us don’t know when we’ll go back to work – or indeed if we have a job to go back to. In the midst of this crisis, it is hard to imagine a future that looks different than the present.
Tricking time
So how do we cope? I argue that this crisis has prompted us to be more creative with our relations to time. Most of us are even “tricking time” to some extent, as Roxana Moroşanu and I termed it in a recent paper. We speed up and slow down, bend and restructure time in many different ways.
“Corona time” in fact consists of many different times, such as the “time of lockdown”, “quarantine time” or “home office time”. We have learnt to inhabit these new presents. These lessons are deeply personal and differ in each household. Still, they speak of an experience shared worldwide.
Reclaiming the future
This applies to our current situation, too. Now is the time to think ahead about how life should look like in the post-COVID-19 future – we need to trick time further than for our personal households. Although a vaccine or proper treatment for COVID-19 is still not in sight, we have to try to shake the feeling of being trapped in the present. We now need to engage with the emerging politics of time, which will determine our near future.
Because the corona crisis has allowed us to experience a very different time, it will be interesting to see whether parts of this new normality, such as home offices and reduced mobility, will remain. But even if it is just an involuntary pause from capitalist times, we should reconsider neoliberalism’s temporal regimes of growth, decline and acceleration that have shaped life on Earth.
Our experiences of corona time has given us a training in temporal thought and flexibility. Humanity will weather this crisis, but there are others ahead. Perhaps then, it will be comforting to know that we can, and must, trick time and plan for the future – even when we feel stuck in the present.