The End of Time: How and why they destroyed your sense of time

Does it feel like time has been stuck for the past two years? Like your memories are hard to define, like the days have coagulated into a shapeless blob? You’re not alone – here’s how it happened.

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” – George Orwell, 1984

Happy new year – or is it?

As we stagger blinking into the light of the new year, you could be forgiven for wondering whether time is actually moving forward at all, whether 2022 might be “2020 too”. Perhaps we’re stuck in a sort of Groundhog Day scenario; rather than lockdowns and vaccines, maybe our only way out of this nightmare lies in someone, somewhere learning the true meaning of love.

On New Year’s Eve, Big Ben’s twelve big bongs were a jolt for many of us watching live. As we nervously waited for the proof that this excruciating year might finally, mercifully die, something strange happened. On the twelfth bong, there was nothing. Silence. Not a single firework. In this yawning nothingness between one year and the next, it felt like we might be trapped in 2021 forever. Cut to a cringeworthy, ideological poem - the type a sixth former might post to YouTube – before, a full two and a half minutes later, the fireworks gratifyingly began. Each whizz and pop a small moment of catharsis for a public trapped helpless for the past year.

A couple of weeks before, hints circulated among the British press that the government might impose a two-week “circuit breaker” lockdown after Christmas. You may remember the last time we had “two weeks to flatten the curve”, because we’re still doing them, about one hundred weeks later. Just when you thought COVID-19 might be over, here comes the omni-chron (all-time) variant. To borrow from George Orwell: history has stopped, and nothing exists except an endless present in which the virus is always a threat.

The government, for its part, has been desperately postponing the future since this whole circus began. They say the lockdowns will be over in just a few more weeks, in the same way a drug dealer will spend three hours saying he’ll be there in twenty minutes. The public, meanwhile, has been eagerly shooting up – one jab, two jabs, three jabs, four – to keep the fear away for just a little bit longer. “It’s fine,” they say, “we can quit the boosters any time we want, we just don’t want to.”

We seem to be in the grip of some mad, all-night bender – like a No 10 Christmas party – that nobody wants to end. Anything to keep away tomorrow’s harsh light of day; and the bill is racking up – cancer deaths, suicides, alcoholism, economic ruin, social unravelling – but who cares? That’s tomorrow’s problem. Just another lockdown will keep the nightmares away. Just another mandate. Just a vaccine passport.

As the government prevented progress from progressing, time seemed to bend in on itself, and things got weird. Pret a Manger released their famous Christmas sandwich in the heat of July: you could walk down a blazing high street and see the sandwich shop decked in tinsel and baubles. You might have been grabbing a bite to eat before watching some of the sporting highlights of 2021 – like EURO 2020 or the 2020 Summer Olympics.

It’s no surprise that a large body of academic research has noted that people’s sense of time has warped over the last two years. For example, one study found that over 80% of people reported a distorted sense of time under lockdown compared to normal; summarising her research, the study’s author wrote an article titled “A Year of Blursdays”; WIRED declared “there are no hours or days in Coronatime” while Axios called it the “COVID time warp”.

Myself - I met a friend for dinner before Christmas. “I haven’t seen you since, oh,” she asked, “When was it? Was it summer? Or last year? I can’t remember. It’s all the same.”

So - what’s going on here?

The first thing to note is that lockdown has deprived people of their connection with the natural world, and from the habits which give their lives structure. A study from all the way back in 1964 – Time Perception During a 2-Week Confinement – found that being placed in a simulated fallout shelter for 304.6 hours unsurprisingly distorted people’s time perception, since they were disconnected from extrinsic cues like night and day. While lockdown hasn’t been that extreme, it has still caused people to be largely sheltered from the rain, wind and snow that define the passing of the seasons, from the crisp chill of a day turning into evening, and from the sounds of birds and the smells of flowers that dance to the natural rhythm of time. In short, every day has consisted of the same controlled, artificial temperature, light, and sound. Time stands still when we can’t feel the setting sun on our skin.

The days and months have similarly blurred together with nothing to define one from the other. Without Christmas to celebrate, how is December any different to July? Working from home every day, and with no social occasions to speak of, how is a Saturday any different to a Tuesday?

Since getting married in September, my wife and I packed up our flat and fled the country. Later, a friend asked, “Has it really been a month since the wedding? It feels like just yesterday.”

For me and my wife, it felt like a lifetime ago. We had been experiencing the world and forming a million different long-term memories. We had seen the old town given up to cats in Kotor; we had worked off our souvlakis by climbing the Acropolis in Athens; we had watched luxury superyachts disembarking in the old fishing town of Cavtat.

Remember - when they lock you in your home to save lives, they are depriving you of your life. Two years have passed in the blink of an eye; blink again, and your entire life could be gone. By escaping the UK and forming memories, my wife and I were like the deep-space explorers from Interstellar; a lifetime on Earth passed in a month for us.

This brings us to the second reason for the COVID time warp: our brains don’t understand time in terms of clocks and calendars, but rather in terms of memorable events, rituals, and rites of passage. Looking back on our lives, we remember social occasions, birthdays, holidays, festivals, funerals, and weddings – all things that had been banned.

Likewise, when the government told you not to celebrate Christmas, they were waging a war on time itself. Father Christmas is a modern reimagining of Father Time, an old, bearded man with an hourglass and scythe. These, too, were the adornments of the Kronus, the Greek god of time; the Roman counterpart, Saturn, was celebrated during Saturnalia, a carnival in late December where people would party and exchange gifts. Christmas is, of course, a celebration of the winter solstice, where the ‘son’ (sun) is born and days start getting longer again. In short, Christmas is an important ritual marking the passage of time: if you don’t experience it, is it any wonder if it feels like time hasn’t passed?

In other words, we understand time through our memories. If we’re not making new ones, we’re not proceeding through time.

This effect has been amplified by the digital transformation taking place. Work meetings, pub quizzes and family meetups were replaced by Zooms; nights out were replaced by Netflix; gym sessions were replaced by YouTube workouts. Under lockdown, screen time more than doubled, according to one study. The reality-based universe was replaced by a screen-based metaverse.

This technology disconnects us from time because, as Nicholas Carr explained in his fantastic book The Shallows, technology induces an impulsive, shallow form of thinking. It keeps us transfixed in the current moment, less able to consolidate our experiences into long-term memories. One study quizzed museum visitors and found those who had been taking pictures were less able to remember the exhibits: they had outsourced their memories to the “brain in the pocket”. Research has even found that the EMF radiation emitted by our devices improves short-term mental workings but inhibits long-term memory processes. Everything about our technological age is fleeting and intangible; there is nothing to hold onto. In short, our submersion into screens may have prevented us from forming the concrete, long-term memories by which we mark the passage of time.

Yet, there could also be something deeper going on here.

Some academics (like Strauss and Howe in their book The Fourth Turning) argue that societies go through a constant cycle of decay and rebirth. Every so often there is a sort-of flood, which sweeps away the old but makes the soil fertile for the new.

And how would we know we’re in a flood? Everything would be fluid. There would be no structure or hierarchy: it would be a constant state of revolution where the building blocks of reality - like marriage, gender, and even time itself - could be completely turned upside down.

The book Everyday Evils contains an illuminating quote:

Chasseguet-Smirgel, in her essay “Perversion and the universal law”, illustrates this perverse aim [to obliterate difference in order to revert to a primal world of chaos – or oneness] through the work of de Sade in which the Sadian hero is compelled to destroy everything in order to create a new reality, a reality essentially of seamless shit (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1985). All form that is distinguishable and differentiated is destroyed, broken down and transformed into its original chaotic mass. Chasseguet-Smirgel writes: “The equality of man with an oyster, the equality of all human beings, the equality of Good and Evil, the equality of life and death… reveals but one basic intention: to reduce the universe to faeces…” (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1985, p. 4).

“A reality of seamless shit” - doesn’t that just about sum it up? In a world where every movie and pop song is the same, where an obese person can be a supermodel and a man can be a woman, why can’t a Tuesday be a Saturday, or a July be a January? A recent article from the Berggruen Institute’s NOEMA publication pondered, “During an era in which social constructs like race, gender and sexuality are being challenged and dismantled, the true nature of clock time has somehow escaped the attention of wider society.”

Except for TED, who let us know in 2017 that time is racist.

The benefit to our leaders of demolishing the old order is that it allows for something new to be built in its place. Communist China’s Red Guards sought to demolish old ideas, culture, habits, and customs so their vaunted Great Leap Forward could take place. This is ostensibly why a symbol of revolution is the sickle and hammer - the sickle to reap, and the hammer to rebuild – while there an esoteric alchemical concept called “Solve et Coagula”, meaning ‘dissolve and assemble’.

Our leaders haven’t been shy about their desires for a transhumanist future and the so-called Great Reset. The World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab, for example, wrote, “The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world.”

Ultimately, our sense of time has been blurred in the last 18 months by a top-down deconstruction of reality, stripping away the milestones by which we define our lives. Some have argued this was an esoteric, alchemical ritual used to usher in a new era of transhumanism.

Whatever the purpose, these measures have stolen your life from you. Have the last two years really been worth living? There is, as the latest Bond film exclaimed, no time to die. The movie ended with a poignant quote:

“The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.”