This pandemic means that we are no longer living on a timeline. It’s more of a timeout

“The days are bleeding together and I no longer know what the passage of time is,” a friend in Melbourne messages me. She’s five weeks into her city’s second strict Covid lockdown, but what even is a week any more? Her days, as she describes them, are mostly work, a monotony broken up only by exercise, cooking, reading, sleeping, eating, as well as an activity she simply calls “balcony” – one that all locked-down apartment dwellers intuitively understand. “It just feels interminable,” she writes. “And the only thing that changes on the weekends is I don’t (always) get up and sit at my desk.” When describing this strange year, we reach for cliches like “unprecedented times” or “the weirdest timeline” – expressions that partly capture living through a plague, the shutdown of our cities, the rapid adoption of new habits like passing army checkpoints on state borders or actually using QR codes. But we’re also living in a moment where time itself, or at least our perception of it, is being configured anew. In places under hard lockdown, the days, naturally, can feel endless and indistinct. A survey of 1,000 Americans in April found half felt that time had slowed [...]

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