I highly recommend everyone read this article. I’ve tried so many times to describe a few of these aspects. Especially related to time and memories. A really great read. It’s long but worth it. If you’re not interested in the full length, here’s a still long (but shorter) version paraphrased below. Everything is directly quoted in order from the article.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/12/2020-lost-year/617382/

Even as 2020 took turn after dreadful turn, people carried with them, in their imagination, the year they did not get to have.

What’s especially challenging about postponing or giving up on plans at this moment is that the future is even murkier than normal. “Our present relations to people and things are, in [a] deep way, future-oriented,” wrote the media scholar Nick Couldry and the technologist Bruce Schneier in a piece for CNN.com in September. “Symphonies are written, buildings built, children conceived in the present, but always with a future in mind.” But the uncertainty of the pandemic, they observed, has robbed people of that reference point for their daily activities. Couldry and Schneier refer to this condition as horizonlessness, arguing that it “fundamentally disrupts how we weigh the value of what we are doing right now” and leaves us feeling rudderless.

Most of the time, though, the people I interviewed for this story considered 2020 to have been a pause or a loss. But thinking exclusively in those terms risks obscuring all that’s happened this year.

Waiting is not doing nothing. Farman argues that it is “a valuable tool for understanding our hopes” and an occasion to ask questions like What am I hoping will come after this period of waiting? Will it fulfill me? Should I change anything about how I previously lived my life? He thinks that conducting this sort of internal audit might help people better understand themselves and all the losses they encountered this year. He wants people to become “students of waiting.”

The trouble is that this attitude does not come naturally in a culture that ties people’s worth to their accomplishments and work ethic. “Waiting is the antithesis of productivity,” Farman said. “I think so many of us are frustrated [right now] because the moral imperative of using time wisely just flies in the face of how we’ve been asked to wait in this moment.”

This is one thing that seems to bring a degree of solace to people who have encountered setbacks of all kinds: the recognition that so many others are feeling the exact same disappointment.

The pandemic has also lowered people’s expectations in more mundane ways, making them more appreciative of things they used to take for granted. Now, it doesn’t take much to make a day feel like a special one—even an errand can feel like a thrilling expedition.

For one thing, celebrations can be “chapter breaks” that, in people’s minds, separate one period of time from another, like before and after getting married or before and after starting a new job. “There’s something about a celebration that really helps to mark that narrative moment,” Santos said. “Events in our life feel more like a chapter break when there’s a big event.”

The general shortage of chapter breaks in 2020 has three notable consequences. First, as researchers have demonstrated, moments of transition can prompt people to reappraise their habits, and perhaps adopt new ones. “The lack of [chapter breaks] means we can feel stagnant,” Santos said. “It’s hard, within this long period of COVID time, to start something new.”

Second, a year without celebrations means fewer vivid memories—and looking back on vivid memories is one way people mark the passing of time. Santos said that this “kind of makes time all smush together,” such that a year can seem like an undifferentiated blob.

Third, and maybe most powerfully, missing out on full-fledged birthday parties, baby showers, and so on can feel like cutting pages out of one’s life story. Rites marking important milestones “play a key role in shaping what we call our narrative self, the sense of who we are and how we came to be that person,” Dimitris Xygalatas, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, told me. “For many people, the lack of ceremony is experienced as a feeling of emptiness, as if their very life narrative had a gap in it.”

What’s more, as Xygalatas’s research indicates, the predictability of rituals is soothing. They “help us maintain a sense of structure and control in our lives, and this can allow us to overcome some of the stressors of daily life,” he said. Skipping beloved—and reliable—holiday traditions can leave people feeling additionally unmoored in a year when they could use extra comfort.

Celebrations and holidays can strengthen people’s most meaningful social bonds.

Celebrating virtually can replicate some of this, but is not as immersive and engaging as actually being present.

A final, and probably underrated, downside to forgoing celebrations (or even just moving them online) is something that happens before they occur. “One of the reasons that [preplanned] experiences make us so happy is that we actually get a lot of utility out of the anticipation of them,”

Not having things to look forward to is a kind of social horizonlessness. “To get through COVID, I feel like we all need the thing at the end, [yet] very few of us have this,”

When there isn’t a horizon, perhaps it would help to paint one yourself.

The monotony, as well as the stress, of this year has made time pass in a peculiar way.

Perhaps some of this apparent contradiction derives from the slipperiness of describing the perception of time—an internal sensation that we don’t have a precise language for—but some of it has to do with how people perceive time to pass at different speeds under different conditions.

Basically, when people are bored, time tends to feel to them like it’s elapsing slowly in the moment.

Time also feels slower when people are unhappy, lonely, or stressed—“the opposite of ‘Time flies when you’re having fun,’”

These patterns hold in non-pandemic times, but an additional variable that’s especially relevant now is that time can feel slower if there’s uncertainty about when a period of waiting will end.

Of course, not everyone has been bored or stressed during the pandemic—lots of people have stayed satisfyingly engaged with remote work and/or remained healthy and financially stable. For these people, time might have seemed to pass fairly quickly.

Another element of how people perceive time sheds further light on why 2020 felt so disorienting. When a period of time is dense with memories—when a lot of things happened—it can feel relatively long in retrospect, Laurie Santos told me. But “many of us are stuck between the same four walls, and when nothing interesting is happening, you just don’t form [many] new memories,” she said. And a memory drought feels relatively short when people look back on it.

Together, these two effects—how time feels in the moment and how it feels in retrospect—can create the time-warp sensation many people felt in 2020: As they were living through this year, the monotony made time drag on, but when they look back on it, the shortage of distinct memories makes it seem like it flew by.

This is one way many people will remember 2020: It was interminable to live through, but swift in retrospect. And as more time passes and the memories people do have degrade, maybe it will start to seem even shorter, and emptier.

Hopefully, the future will be more vivid. “I think the fact that we’re not making memories right now means that when you finally get back out again,” Santos said, “time is going to go by really fast because we’re doing fun things, but it’s also going to be etched in our memory books in a really richer way.” After a gray year, we might see the times to come in Technicolor.