Write an essay on the topic "Covid-19 has changed my perception of life"
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Answer:
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.