Did Time Really Warp in 2020?
We’ve had to learn that in the pandemic, time means something new
March, the first month of the lockdowns, felt like it lasted an eternity. Then April slipped past like it never happened. June, July, August were punctured with protests and emotional exhaustion as the summer seemed to simply evaporate. Suddenly, it was November, and there was an election again. Week after week, month after month, people gathering at a distance or on myriad video conferencing apps agreed: In 2020, it was impossible to tell what day it was. Time — that dependable, quantifiable metric of life — had become unpredictable.
How could this be?
As Reuters explained in July, variables like repetition, emotion, and memory distortion can mess with our subjective concept of time. Over at Vox a month earlier, philosophy professor Adrian Bardon, PhD, of Wake Forest University offered a similar explanation as to why it felt as though days or weeks were endless, but entire months seemed to zip by. By disrupting our routines, the pandemic skewed our interpretation of time — both as it was happening and how we interpreted it retrospectively, Bardon explained. It also filled us with anxiety. “The combination of negative emotion and inward-directed attention makes your moment-to-moment life seem intolerable and burdensome,” he continued…
