ILLUSTRATIONS BY Heorhiy Fedotov (top) & Rolffimages (bottom) / dreamstime
How long has the pandemic lasted?
Does it seem like the summer of lockdown, masking, and the civil protests happened years ago? Was it only yesterday you heard that Tom Hanks caught the coronavirus, and the NBA season was canceled? How long has it been since your last haircut? If you’re having trouble pinning it down, you’re not alone. One of the many things covid-19 has upended is our sense of time.
Time is a slippery concept. Civilization’s finest thinkers have applied their brainpower to the problem, but all they were able to do is create a variable to plug into the equations that describe the world. What that variable actually refers to is still anybody’s guess.
Albert Einstein taught us that time is fundamentally inseparable from space. We can’t talk about one without talking about the other. How far is it to Jackson? It’s about an hour, depending on traffic.
Time and space are bound together by light, which sets the cosmic speed limit at 186,000 miles per second. The distance to planets and stars is measured not in miles, but in light minutes, and light years. When NASA’s Perseverance rover landed on Mars, commentators were fond of saying that, by the time Mission Control got confirmation the spacecraft had touched down safely, it had already been on the ground for 12 minutes.
Time perception researchers found that a period is judged longer if it is “intense, complex, and segmented.” Those factors certainly applied to 2020.
But that’s not, strictly speaking, true. Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity tells us there is no great ticking clock keeping track of the universal “now.” Your experience of time’s flow depends on your reference frame. It didn’t just take 12 minutes for Perseverance’s signal to reach us — Earth shared a “now” with our emissary 12 light-minutes away. It was the “now” that moved. As Shakespeare wrote, “Time travels in diverse places, with diverse persons.”
Adding to the temporal confusion is the human brain. Research suggests that, thanks to our circadian rhythms, we’re pretty good at estimating how long a day is, but when it comes to minutes and seconds, we’re all over the place. We organize our memories by intensity of experience. Think about sitting in the dentist’s chair for a painful procedure. Then think about a lazy spring afternoon spent sharing a now with the sun, nine light minutes away. The unpleasantness can stretch on, but the pleasure flies by. It seems like only yesterday the kids were in diapers, but that awful movie lasted eons.
Which brings us to March 2020, which felt like the longest month in recorded history. As Lenin said, “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” When the WHO declared covid-19 a worldwide pandemic on March 11, 2020, it signaled decades’ worth of change in a matter of days. Time perception researchers found that a period is judged longer if it is “intense, complex, and segmented.” Those factors certainly applied to 2020.
All of our usual time markers — from sports seasons and graduations to daily commutes and weekends — disappeared, to be replaced with new, irregular rhythms. Time periods are judged less accurately when people are performing different tasks simultaneously — like working remotely in your dining room while helping your child set up for online learning in their bedroom. Or applying for unemployment through a poorly designed state website while obsessively checking your temperature. Or restocking a grocery shelf while wondering if the maskless person walking toward you will be the one who infects you.
To make things even worse, time periods filled with lots of information for your brain to process seem to move faster than time where there’s not much going on — but also seem to last longer. The pandemic experience has been one of alternating periods of frantic activity (stock up on toilet paper!) and crushing boredom, punctuated by moments of sheer terror (why am I running a fever?) and months of grief and suffering. After all, for far too many Americans, 2020 will be remembered as the year they planned funerals for loved ones.
With our usual distractions gone, we were forced to confront our world in real time. We examined our now and found it wanting. It’s no coincidence that sports, movies, and restaurants disappeared in mid-March, and America had a mass civil uprising in June.
Our poor brains never stood a chance. Christmas 2019 seems a decade ago, but it’s almost like 2020 never happened. Yet we are the lucky ones. More than a half million Americans — and counting — didn’t live to see the pandemic’s end. The rest of us must try to put the world back together, and hope time soon makes sense again. In the future, when they ask us how it felt to live through the apocalypse, we will tell them it went by fast, but seemed to take forever.
