In March, I ended up stuck in the southern Mexican coastal village of Zipolite on account of the pandemic – an abrupt change of pace from the past 17 years, which I had spent darting schizophrenically between countries. There was no official lockdown or curfew in Zipolite, but checkpoints were installed on either side of the village to restrict access and departures.
In a split second, then, my daily routine changed from one of being constantly on the road to one of lying in a hammock watching ants parade across my stomach and thinking of all the things I could be doing were I not lying in a hammock.
While the individual days passed excruciatingly slowly, the months flew by. The end of the year has now spontaneously arrived, and I can’t fathom how it is that I am still in Zipolite.
Indeed, for many across the globe, a coronavirus time warp has taken hold. As a New York Times article notes: “Google has registered a surge of searches for the day of the week”. The Washington Post remarks: “Every day is Blursday”.
Over at Wired magazine, Duke University cognitive neuroscientist Kevin LaBar explains that the human brain “likes novelty … It squirts dopamine every time there’s something novel that’s happening, and dopamine helps set the initiation of the timing of these events.”
Hence the warping of time perception when there is not much going on. Trauma and anxiety also alter the perception of time, as does uncertainty about the future.
In my own privileged case of quarantine lite – in which I have not had to deal with added stressors like unemployment, lack of food, or domestic discord – the time warp has featured an element of “coronastalgia”, if you will. Bizarrely, I have found myself missing the very situation that I have yet to emerge from confinement to one village.
But while my brain has apparently decided to view the present as past from some projected future vantage point, others are experiencing a “feeling of being stuck in the present”, as Felix Ringel, an anthropologist of time at Durham University, writes in the Conversation.
Ringel observes that, for many, the sensation of “stuckness” is nothing new thanks to the “acceleration of time” produced by neoliberal capitalism, which has “put humanity into crisis mode for several decades already” by disappearing welfare states and job security and generally relegating the masses to infinite precariousness.
To be sure, there was plenty of uncertainty about the future before the onset of the pandemic – and not just in terms of capitalism-driven planetary self-destruction.
Capitalism itself is traumatic for the non-elite majority of the world’s population, upon whose perpetual immiseration the whole system depends. And chronological limbo has long been the norm for many refugees from imperial wars and neoliberal destruction, not to mention climate change and related ills. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.