> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
...of course, this tale may be conveying more about me than about our time. But it was too weird an experience to leave unshared.
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.
Literal compression by neural networks.
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.
[1] Einstein apparently had his secretary give this answer when people asked for an explanation of relativity, because they didn't understand accurate answers (source: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/11/24/hot-stove/#:~:text=....
https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Time-dimensional-holons-expla...
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.
If there were no matter, there would be no time.
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.
If there were no time, there would be no matter.
(sorry)
(sorry not sorry.)
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
At minute 5:52 he describes the light clock, and at 6:36 he computes the ratio between a stationary and a moving clock.
In the first passage, he writes T_s / T_m = D / L.
Shouldn't it be the opposite (i.e. L / D), since D is the distance that a photon travels in the moving clock? Can anyone clarify that, please?
[1] https://www.wired.com/video/watch/theoretical-physicist-expl...