Time is not working properly.
It’s not just the “long days, short years” parenthood cliché. Even hours and minutes aren’t working right anymore. They clearly don’t have as many minutes and seconds in them as they did just a few years ago.
Perhaps this is the fault of the pandemic years and the temporal limbo that lockdown dropped so many of us into. I can see how that would shift one’s perception of time, but why wouldn’t that switch back once lockdown ended? In addition, I have evidence that time has been speeding up since at least early 2022, after the stay-at-home orders had all been lifted in the United States, where I live.
When I began teaching in the classroom in fall of 2021, the 1 hour 45 minutes allotted to the class felt like more than enough time to cover all of the material and even some extra fun stuff, like conversations about favorite books or what everyone was looking forward to doing over break. In classes I teach in 2025, 15 minutes passes like 5 minutes used to. There was one class I subbed in 2023 where I thought we had 15 more minutes left when class time was already up. Eagle-eyed students alerted me to my error, and I had to check the class schedule to make sure I was releasing the students at the correct time.
It’s possible that this is due to my being older as it’s widely accepted that perception of time changes as one ages, but even my students comment on how fast time goes, which I would think would be unusual for 6th graders in an after-school math class.
This change is apparent at home, too, where household chores for which I used to set aside one hour now take three hours. I start cleaning after breakfast, and next thing I know, it’s lunchtime. Am I working more slowly? Getting more distracted by texts and headlines? Needing to pee more frequently? All of those are possibly true (and the last one is definitely true), but I still don’t think this accounts for the degree of time compression.
I try to go with the flow and just let this time thing run its course, but sometimes it alarms me.
Just last night, I looked at my watch and saw it was 7:55pm. “About time to get ready for bed,” I thought (because I’m middle-aged, and I need to start getting ready for bed an hour and a half before I try to fall asleep). I went upstairs and did a double-take when I glanced at my watch while putting toothpaste on my toothbrush: It was 9:05pm. I did do a couple of things in between, but they were little things that couldn’t possibly have taken a full hour.
The messed-up time isn’t all bad. Long airplane trips, for example, are less onerous, and a delay in the doctor’s waiting room doesn’t provoke anxiety unless I have something else scheduled afterward. But when I look back at old blog posts and see all of the things I used to accomplish while homeschooling young children, I feel quite unsettled. These days, I can only make dinner if I clear my schedule from 3:00 onward.
I don’t know what’s causing time to go wonky, but I hope that scientists get to the bottom of it soon; I could really use more time to get things done.
Luckily, reading continues. The screwy clocks just mean there’s less time to blog about it.
Here’s what I read in March and April:
March Completed Books:
My favorites from the March bunch:
- Moon of the Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice
- The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister
- Help Wanted by Adele Waldman
April Reads:
My favorites from the April bunch:
- The Home Place by J. Drew Lanham
- The Invisible Hotel by Yeji Y. Ham
- Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams
Currently Reading:
- The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West (still)
- Glyph by Percival Everett
To-Read for May:
In addition to my StoryGraph, you can see my Litsy profile for status updates throughout the month.
Imperfect Happiness 