Since the onset of the pandemic, not only is my short term sense of time distorted (e.g. I’ve sort of lost hold of the boundary between weekdays and weekends), but I’ve also noticed my sense of long term timing is obscured.
It somehow still feels to me like it’s mid-Summer but we’re already halfway through September. It feels like this lockdown has been going on for about three months now but in reality it’s over half a year.
While this has already been the most significant year of my life (not in a good way), I have the feeling that, due to this cognitive distortion, someday soon 2020 will be a giant black hole in our collective memory.
“The running joke is, you know, we used to have Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and now we just have Day, Day, Day, Day, Day,” said Dean Buonomano, a professor of behavioral neuroscience at the University of California at Los Angeles, in May. “We’ve sort of lost our mental landmarks or temporal boundaries for days.”