Schmidt: Coronavirus is the monster that ate time

How times have changed. Maybe it’s not so much the times that have changed but how we have changed during these times. Two years ago, we would never have imagined how the coronavirus pandemic was going to change the way we spend, perceive and talk about time.

Physicists define time as the progression of events from the past to the present into the future. Living through a pandemic, we can reflect on the past and what we did pre-pandemic, bide our time in the present, and look forward to a future when we no longer fear the coronavirus.

Every year, the American Time Use Survey, overseen by the Labor Department, asks thousands of people to track every minute of a single day. It measures the amount of time people spend doing various activities, such as paid work, child care, sleeping, volunteering and socializing.

Most years, data reflects the ways that technology and the economy subtly shift how we spend our days. In 2020, the data highlighted the ways our use of time was abruptly disrupted. Interestingly enough, even the time-use survey’s work was interrupted. Data collection was paused in mid-March 2020 because of the coronavirus outbreak and did not resume until mid-May 2020.

The data from 2020 shows Americans slept more, completed more housework, and spent more time playing games, texting, video chatting, and watching television, movies or videos. People spent more time cooking, except for 15- to 24-year-olds. Not surprisingly, we spent less time grooming. The percentage of employed people working at home nearly doubled, rising to 42 percent during the pandemic in 2020. Average travel time, such as commuting to work or driving to a store, decreased for all demographic groups.

And we spent more time alone. Average alone time increased for all demographic groups, all age groups, and people living in households with and without children or others.

For the most part, children are back in school, and college students are back on campus. The changes that occurred in the workforce seem to be here to stay. According to Gallup polling, 45 percent of full-time U.S. employees worked from home either all (25 percent) or part of the time (20 percent) in Gallup’s September 2021 update of its monthly employment trends, and 76 percent of the remote workers surveyed said their employer will allow people to work remotely going forward, at least partially.

2020 and 2021 have merged

The human brain, with a region responsible for circadian rhythms, is equipped to track time. Time perception, on the other hand, is a subjective experience to each individual. Individual perceptions of time can be affected by outside factors or events. A pandemic can be one of those factors.

Anecdotally, the years 2020 and 2021 have blurred together for me. It is almost as if the two years are a unified block of the present, instead of being two separate calendar years marking time.

There also seems to be an overarching feeling that this pandemic will never end. We are hanging on with hope that this future will be here soon.

The television series “The Walking Dead” is based on the comic book series with the same name created by Robert Kirkman. It is the story of survivors of a zombie apocalypse. Characters changed the way they talked to one another about time and frequently asked one another, “What did you do ‘before’?” In our real-life crisis scenario, how many times have we asked each other, “What were you doing pre-COVID?”

I have also noticed that our vernacular around the pandemic has changed. We have begun to mark the time with the dominant variant. The coronavirus was how we described the initial virus. Then came delta and now omicron. My family is hoping we don’t make it through the Greek alphabet with new variants.

Dolly Parton once said, “Adjusting to the passage of time is a key to success and to life: just being able to roll with the punches.”

Adjusting to the passage of time is a key to success and to life in a global pandemic: just being able to roll with the variants and talk about the before times.

Lynn Schmidt is a St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist.