> Intrigued by the pervasive sense of pandemic-induced time distortion, psychologists at first speculated that loss of temporal landmarks was at work: office, gym, pulling on of pants. Words such as “Blursday” crept into the vocabulary, along with “polycrisis” and “permacrisis,” referring to the plethora of perturbances creating instability, pushing time out of sync: war, climate, politics.
I dont know. To me it seems like the obvious answer is a bunch of people who have never been depressed before became depressed during covid.
As a freelancer who always lived like that (but ironically had to work with people throughtout the whole pandemic):
I thought it was kind of curious what toll that livestyle change took on people. Granted I did choose that life voluntarily and it naturally feels different if something is forced on you — but the pandemic was really revealing in many ways.
I was surprised how afraid many people are of being left to themselves in their own flats and what a big topic this was for them. Many people don't seem to have any other interest than meeting other people. On top of they couldn't take it that a governmental body mandated some reasonable rules binding them within a global pandemic of a (back then: unknown) virus. So they priorized their hurt feelings over the literal existence of hundreds of their peers, whom they ironically longed to see. As if they were leeches who miss their hosts.
It also revealed some interesting things about social contracts, about who is really essential for the functioning of a society and how little we value them. A friens of mine is kindergardener, and he came close to quitting, as his illusions of what his job is were utterly shattered, as it became clear that many parents did not care about the safety of their own and other kids or about the staff. People just wanted to get rid of their kids and they hated being alone with them as much as they hated being alone with themselves.
Mow I am of course underlining all the bad actors and not the many heroic, reasonable, strong and caring people who volunteered to help others. But the number of bad actors shocked me.
If anything, the whole episode left me with the feeling that I am a stable adult person with a good moral compass and that many people of whom I had assumed the same are neither.
> A friens of mine is kindergardener, and he came close to quitting, as his illusions of what his job is were utterly shattered, as it became clear that many parents did not care about the safety of their own and other kids or about the staff.
This framing assumes that the teaches had an accurate risk assessment, and the parents didn’t, but in retrospect we have seen that depriving kids of socialization was much more damaging to the kids than covid exposure was. This conclusion was reached by the majority of developed nations, whose schools either didn’t shut down or reopened months before schools in the US.
That was not the motivation the teacher is talking about, and it's more something we can now understand better. During lockdown, parents just wanting to get rid of their kids part-time was the issue.
>>> It also revealed some interesting things about social contracts, about who is really essential for the functioning of a society and how little we value them. A friens of mine is kindergardener, and he came close to quitting, as his illusions of what his job is were utterly shattered, as it became clear that many parents did not care about the safety of their own and other kids or about the staff. People just wanted to get rid of their kids and they hated being alone with them as much as they hated being alone with themselves.
> That was not the motivation the teacher is talking about, and it's more something we can now understand better. During lockdown, parents just wanting to get rid of their kids part-time was the issue.
The framing in this thread is pretty uncharitable. Kids, especially young kids, need a lot of attention. It's a full time job, and most parents weren't in a position to quit their jobs in order to focus on it. As I understand it, pandemic parenting was basically trying to do two full-time jobs at once. Most parents want do do right by their kids, but their capitalist bosses were unlikely to accept a major drop in job performance. Basically, they were stuck between a rock an a hard place.
Our two income household society is setup to so parents absolutely require childcare. It's unfair to change that into a moral failing of parents.
But it also won't change if we just continue on like that. I mean it's just bullshit to get kids, then give them into kindergarten/childcare as soon as they are 6month old or something, this whole concept sucks.
> But it also won't change if we just continue on like that. I mean it's just bullshit to get kids, then give them into kindergarten/childcare as soon as they are 6month old or something, this whole concept sucks.
Except to capitalists. Capitalists love it. They've got twice the workers competing for jobs, can price the same stuff higher because households have more income, and they have a whole new non-discretionary product (daycare) to sell.
Of course, they're not know for thinking long term.
> This framing assumes that the teaches had an accurate risk assessment, and the parents didn’t, but in retrospect we have seen that depriving kids of socialization was much more damaging to the kids than covid exposure was.
A few thoughts in response to that:
1. This is not the assessment of my friend at all. His kindergarden, btw. remained open during the whole pandemic and the parents that made him question his life choices were the once who sent their kids despite clear symptoms. So the children that have been deprived of socialization we are talking about here, are the ones who were ill. Something that happened to literally every generation there ever was.
2. In that moment the risks that were weighed against each other weren't just about the kids. Kids were one of the biggest contributers to the reproductive factor of the virus. So the choice was between moderating that R-factor so it is smaller than 1.0 and have the infection numbers go down or having it above 1.0 and risk saturating the health system (which can only handle so many infected people at once), which would also risk the lives of totally unrelated people who never got infected with Covid at all, but had chronic illnesses or accidents.
So on a level of "humanity VS virus" it was pretty clear that A) reducing the R rate till effective vaccines got distributed is a good strategy and that B) we had to ensure a good balance with the side effects of said reduction measures. At least where I live children have been the hottest discussed topic and every measure that affected them was very carefully (some would even say: too carefully) chosen.
Now we could do the math and calculate how many human lives that would translate too and then pose the question whether the "business as usual for kids" is truly the ethical right choice, given it clearly pumped up up the R factor and all that. On the one track you potentially have kids with psychological problems (back then this was just a guess) and on the other side with near mathematical certainty a pile of corpses, which are all older.
Now this is a hard ethical question and all depends on just how badly you predict those kids are affected, and how high that pile of corpses is going to be — but let's not forget there is always the benefit of hindsight.
Back then it was quite clear what had to be done to beat that virus. The matter of discussion was just whether individuals and organisations were willing and able to do it. Many were able, but not willing.
The chance of a child seeing anyone under 60 die of covid was incredibly small, because the vast majority of covid deaths were concentrated in people aged 80 and above; the median age of covid deaths is around 80. In contrast, 100% of children had their learning affected by school closures.
Most of those deaths only had 2-3 years of life remaining anyway; the children are still going to see them die. A child's not going to be particularly traumatized seeing someone old die at age 81 instead of 83; people dying in old age is part of the human condition. People have to be really sheltered to consider someone dying in their 80s a tragedy; for most of humanity's existence even surviving to 80 was considered a great achievement worthy of celebration.
> If anything, the whole episode left me with the feeling that I am a stable adult person with a good moral compass and that many people of whom I had assumed the same are neither.
To me, one of the most shocking results of the pandemic was learning how many people I considered friends, good people, who I respected, ended up being those bad actors. Truly sad, and eye opening.
It seems like you follow a utilitarian morality system, treating morality as some big calculation, and are unable to conceive that not everybody does. Many people, especially in America, follow deontological moral systems, in which some things are inherently wrong. E.g. people who believe in a fundamental right to freedom of movement or bodily autonomy (or the right to bear arms) do not accept it's morally just to violate those rights in the name of some emergency.
This hardly seems like a deontology vs utilitarianism thing. You can justify both those positions and their opposites under both systems.
E.g. i'm pretty sure every traditional rule system recognizes "inter arma enim silent leges" to some extent or another. I suspect those who claim they don't at all aren't really following a rule system so much as making things up as they go and doing whatever is convinent.
Do those people also believe in abolishing prisons, or arming murderers? We can find circumstances under which they'll make exceptions to their rules in the name of utility. I'm not convinced about this deontological vs. utilitarian binary you suggest.
Even if someone believes that it is inherently wrong for the government to enforce some moral behavior, that still doesn't absolve them of the moral requirement to perform that moral behavior themselves.
That is to say: it would be different if someone said "I think it's wrong for the government to force people to quarantine; however, I'm going to quarantine anyways because it is the right thing to do."
I totally can understand that not everybody has the good of humanity, their country, their friends or even their own family in mind. I would have to be either ignorant or naive to see this any different.
You can read my post as a complaint about precisely that lack of utilitarian spirit and if you were to have a longer discussion with me I am convinced that you would see that I have rational reasons for why I think we all would fare better if didn't act under the illusion that we're all independent islands that have no overlap with others and our environment.
Now you can also overshoot into the other direction and submit everything to the whole, which can produce great horrors, but so do moste mental frameworks if they are deiven to the extreme (e.g. like individualism in the US).
At the end of the day everyone follows a utilitarian moral system... If your moral system gets you killed because of an impedance mismatch with reality.
That is a lot and while I agree somewhat it is lacking empathy, I think.
I'm an introvert, I remember craving friendly interaction 6-months in and then being worried about my extrovert friends. If I am feeling crazy about the lack of human interaction, I KNEW some friends that must be having a hard time. I made it a point to call those people to catch up.
I do agree about the weird "hero/essential workers", the same "salt of the earth" BS that has been spouted for decades. Essential people that we want to pay like crap to keep our society running. They should all stop, be willing to die, until they are paid enough to buy a crappy home. Essential means they have big negotiating power, organize/unionize and stick the screws to society. Think like a CEO.
Also saw all the crazy bad actors, the insane takes on social media (on both sides- though more so on one side), the insanity, the lack of nuance, the shit throwing...I lost a lot of respect for humanity.
As a person that was working in biotech in an R&D department at the time, something in my brain broke. Could not care anymore about making the world better, helping people live longer, contributing to coffers of multi-millionaires bc I was "making the world better". Just done with it.
There's no global moral compass, otherwise you would jump off a bridge, just a local one, as far as I'm concerned.
> That is a lot and while I agree somewhat it is lacking empathy, I think.
Don't get me wrong here, I am a very (sometimes overly) empathic person, I am the guy people run to for advice when they want to know how to talk to other people, because I can put myself into other people's shoes.
But that doesn't necessarily mean I like what I see when I put myself into thoes shoes. So if my post sounds unempathic, it does so because it is the pure distilled cycism of someone who really has it up to here with a certain unempathic, egomanic type of person — call it a enritled, vocal, screaming minority if you will.
I understand how horrible the whole thing felt to them. To a certain degree I even subscribe to Schopenhauer's notion of: "A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants", so I am not even sure they can be blamed that they felt that way.
But because I understand a feeling doesn't mean I have to approve with the actions and words they derived from those feelings. That doesn't mean that in my view we gave those people way to much area on the stage of the pandemic as opposed to all the pressing social issues that actually emerged.
It seems like its important to you to act correctly at every moment of every day and remove obstacles which may impede this perfection. I think the problem that others may see is that we have competing interests and even behaving in concert can yield dangerous non-linear outcomes in society. You seem very very confident in your views but that does not make them correct.
The problem is with people behaving like children. I mean it was/is a fucking pandemic, and people where acting like wearing a mask would be the end of the world, or that trying a lockdown and don't leave your bloody home after 8p.m. for a few weeks will get you a totalitarian regime. What the actual fuck? Really, just say, "Ok let's try it for a few weeks, if it's not working and the government doen't have good arguments to extend it, then I see what I can do about it.".
But all this childish behaviour that still goes on in this world is really something else. With climate change slamming the doors currently people will soon see that the pandemic was just the start, then they can stand outside screaming at the weather how unfair everything is.
> I was surprised how afraid many people are of being left to themselves in their own flats and what a big topic this was for them. Many people don't seem to have any other interest than meeting other people.
You were surprised by that? Humans are extremely social animals, you know. Borderline eusocial, even. Social isolation is a major risk factor for a variety of psychological issues. I'm sure those people do have interests other than meeting people, but in the same way a person deprived of food has an unwavering focus on eating, a person who is all alone can be expected to have a keen interest on socializing.
I agree with you that the measures that were taken to try to mitigate the pandemic were very reasonable, in fact I think that masks and vaccines should be pushed a lot harder. But it shouldn't come as a surprise that people are fearful and uncomfortable about being required to isolate themselves from the social sphere. A pragmatic strategy for countering the pandemic should take that as an expectation and must have some way to account for it. The unemployment benefits and stimulus checks we got early on were a really good step in that direction imo: it really helps alleviate people's fear and discomfort if their financial anxieties are reduced.
Also it seems like once people had all this revealed to them, the anti-social behavior didn't revert. I share with some of those people a dramatic mistrust and inherent irreverence, perhaps even blind hatred for authorities who are telling me to do anything. That makes me inclined to do the opposite I am told in any given situation. I wore a mask and limited contact for the same reason I signal before changing lanes, or place garbage in receptacles designed for it. I agree with the reasoning behind these rules and they simply seem polite. The politeness is what I think actually changes for people. They got stressed and decided to only consider their own needs drawing the circle of us/them tighter about them, and they haven't loosened it since.
All that said, consensus from news sources biased left and right, from nations where masks and vaccines were championed by opposite political sides, seems to be that we did a whole generation a great disservice by making young child education virtual for any length of time at all. Many nations reopened bars before kindergarten because think of the children. When we could have all drank water and let our children and their teachers lay the foundation for our future in the best way possible.
> from nations where masks and vaccines were championed by opposite political sides
I think it's so strange how political masks and vaccines became. I'm not sure many people remember, but there was a brief period (February or March 2020?) where wearing masks was frowned on in the Bay Area — if I recall correctly, I think it was initially widely claimed that masks were not helpful against Covid and that a run on masks would take away supply from medical workers who use them as part of their daily work. I already had a box of N99 masks that I bought for the wildfires, so I wore one out anyway and got dirty looks. A short while later, everyone in the Bay Area was wearing them, and I no longer got those looks. But then I moved to the southeast and got dirty looks again for wearing a mask, because the politics of that region were different.
This was due in part to the Surgeon General, who tweeted (forcefully) that masks didn't prevent the spread of COVID and anyway you shouldn't wear them to conserve them for the health workers who needed them to prevent the spread of COVID. The original tweet has been taken down (I wonder why?) but you can see it here: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/02/surgeon-general-...
There was a good npr special on how the well meant deception that masks didn't work, and later that it wasn't a pandemic yet and we could still stop it, decreased trust in a way that ultimately backfired. I'd also add that they have been exaggerating the severity of most flu years (there have been some truly bad flu years) to get vaccinations up, which lead people to compare covid to those exaggerated numbers. Treating citizens like children that must be managed and given limited access to truth will lead to more and more truth management being necessary due to both mistrust and no practice at handling truth responsibly.
But it wasn't just the mask statement. The whole narrative of minimizing the severity of the virus vs stop breathing and stay inside, swapped parties early on in the US. Almost like they said "nah I'm shirts this time and you are skins look at the polls". And much later fox news silently swapped again to support vaccines. It was said the latter was to have Murdoch's properties in the US and UK have a common story, but it could have been lobbying, or just management shifts. In the US antivax has either been right wing faith healing stuff or more commonly left leaning woo medicine stuff. In several countries it was the left against vaccines and masks the whole time. I think it may come down to which party is more individualistic and which is more cooperative in which countries. In the US the right has recently been more individual, but that wasn't always the case, and it isn't the case elsewhere.
Politicizing tiny issues is straight out of the News Corp. playbook, and I'm sure they took it from somewhere else. Make a mountain out of a molehill and instill fear into people to create a divide. It's getting exhausting trying to keep up with the supposed existential threats to our liberty that they bring up: masking during a pandemic of an airborne disease, CRT, the 3 trans kids in highschool sports, etc.
It's not just high-school sports, and it's an awful message to send girls at such an early age: that they just have to accept male incursion where it's not wanted, and that not only will no-one in authority care, they'll even enable it and punish those who complain. Society owes women and girls better than this.
I live in Oxford, UK, and there was plenty of mask wearing here. I did't notice dirty looks, but one time someone actually lunged for my face in the street to pull my mask off and I had to defend myslf. Another time someone in a restaurant asked in a challenging manner why I was wearing a mask.
Personally I found them comforting to wear. Recently I'm seeing a slight uptick in other people wearing masks locally (yes in September 2023), and I find that comforting too. It shows people care a little. Having caught Covid earlier this year (May 2023) the only time I travelled into London, then gave it to my family before we realised, I'm not eager to do that repeatedly, as the risk of Long Covid is said to be a new roll of the dice for all of us each time.
Considering the lockdowns were completely ineffective at reducing mortality ( https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hec.4737?ut... ), it was absolutely a bone-headed measure by authorities and they deserve the loss of trust. Especially given that lockdowns went against what was previously considered best-practices in epidemic management.
What the USA did was obviously going to be ineffective. "Stay At Home Suggestions" that were routinely ignored, business "closures" that were unenforced, mask "mandates" that you could ignore by simply being belligerent with a shopkeeper. There's no way to know whether actually staying at home and keeping distance from people would have worked, because nowhere was it tried.
This fear was exploited by many media outlets and politicians. It's important to remember who these people were, vote them out/disregard them as honest.
Not seeing this in any of the comments but may have missed it: To me the obvious answer here is increased screen time across the board, precipitated by the pandemic. It's easy to see why this would lead to a perceived faster flow of time; do you form memories of your screen time? Personally I have next to no distinct memories of consuming content on the internet, especially of doom scrolling. Also interestingly, as far as I can tell we never dream about consuming content, or our devices really. If we are going into a trance like state consuming content for a larger proportion of our lives, the time when we actually are cognizant / conscious / forming memories will feel less voluminous overall, thus making perceived time feel faster. The more I think about it, the more this seems like one of the most important issues facing humanity currently... AI doomers should probably be very worried about this in the near term.
I think you're onto something. I recall that you do not form memories with things that you don't bond with. Hence why there are very few accounts of dreaming on cellphones. Time also isn't perceivable when we can't see the gradual change in physical properties. It's like a suburban life where you are at home, then you travel in a metal block, to then arrive at another room. But you're not doing the in between stuff.
Unfortunately, digital dreams are real. That's how I decided to quit social media cold turkey, actually; I was dreamscrolling my FB homepage every other night.
...of course, this tale may be conveying more about me than about our time. But it was too weird an experience to leave unshared.
Our brains filter out repetitive events, so if every day follows the same routine you are going to remember less of those than if something happened on those days -- like going on holiday, or the start of the pandemic.
When you look back, you will remember those key events, but everything else will be a blur. This happens a lot as you grow older, but the pandemic is a shared collective version of this, so may be a young adult's first experience of this phenomena.
There's also an interesting thought experiment I came up with for this. Spend an hour each on the following tasks:
1. sitting on a chair watching a clock;
2. reading a book you like.
In the first task you would say that time was slow as you are aware of it passing. In the second task you would say that time flew past as you are not consciously aware of the time passing, being engrossed in the book (or other activity where you are not actively monitoring time in some way). Time passed by the same, its just the perception of it that differs.
Highly unlikely. It has more to do with what we focus our attention on, rather than anything in physics.
It's like Einstein's[1] explanation of the relativity of time - "When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours” - which actually has nothing to do with the relativity of time, since the entities are not moving with respect to each other.
I was thinking more about this:
> The observer effect is the phenomenon in which the act of observation alters the behaviour of the particles being observed.
Then in terms of entities not moving with respect to each other - isn't that only valid for dimensions we can observe? What if perceiving time at different pace means we are moving in a different dimension differently?
I believe so - I wrote a series of explorations of those ideas, starting with the theory that flow state is what happens when we don't create facts by orienting in time. Always happy to plug it since these ideas are at the edge of my intellectual capacity and discussing them with smart people helps them become clearer.
Time does not exist. It is simply an abstraction to describe the relative movement of matter. Every way we measure "time" involves the movement of matter: sun dial, pendulum, spring & gears in a mechanical watch, vibrations of electrons in an electronic watch.
When you say that an hour has elapsed, it simply means the earth has rotated 15°. When you go 60 mph, you have moved 60 miles while the earth has rotated 15°.
The past is the way things were before they moved. Our memory is an image of the way things were arranged before. Time is a creation of the mind.
Matter does not exist. It is simply an abstraction to describe the relative progress of time. Every way we measure "matter" involves the progress of time: microscope, telescope, ruler, calipers, vibrations of photons hitting the eye.
When you say that the earth has rotated 15°, it simply means an hour has elapsed. When you move 60 miles while the earth rotates 15°, you have gone 60 mph.
The past is the way things were before they moved. Our memory is an image of the way things were arranged before. Matter is a creation of the mind.
EARTH HAS 4 CORNER
SIMULTANEOUS 4-DAY
TIME CUBE
WITHIN SINGLE ROTATION.
4 CORNER DAYS PROVES 1
DAY 1 GOD IS TAUGHT EVIL.
IGNORANCE OF TIMECUBE4
SIMPLE MATH IS RETARDATION
AND EVIL EDUCATION DAMNATION.
CUBELESS AMERICANS DESERVE -
AND SHALL BE EXTERMINATED.
I'd recommend Rovelli's The Order of Time for a good, non-specialist introduction to the concept of time. A friend of mine lent it to me and I learnt so many things reading it.
Movement is simply matter going from point A to B. "Fast" or "slow" means, how far did our reference object (ex. Earth) move relative to the movement of another object.
It may turn out that the time-space manifold is not only locally
curved (as a view on gravity), but that the laws of physics - in
concert - change across space-time. But any observer "looking out", as
it were, from a single point using the instruments, telescopes and
clocks to hand, would see no change.
Therefore questions about whether the laws of physics are universal or
local seem unfalsifiable and on a par with whether or not God exists.
I dont know. To me it seems like the obvious answer is a bunch of people who have never been depressed before became depressed during covid.