Time shifts: Place,belonging,and future orientation in pandemic everyday life

Introduction

Speaking of time, does anyone feel like they’ve lost all concept of it? I remember multiple instances last spring of thinking our ‘pandemic normal’ would have subsided by July, then August, then October, then.… While it does seem to [sic] a resolution at hand, how long will it play out? I’m anticipating our next milestone in …? I just don't feel comfortable circling a date on the calendar anymore. I was wrong so often in 2020.

So writes a health care employee in Muncie, Indiana, expressing a common theme in writing about the pandemic—the sense that living through it is altering our experience of time. For this writer, the disruption shows up as a series of deferrals of the return to normal, which would include the ability to plan. The repetitive question marks and ellipses in the excerpt point to blanks in the future where plans and expectations would normally stand. The pandemic has obscured the writer's connection to the future, undermined the sense that time is continuous. Such connections and continuities are key underpinnings of both life writing (a form in which this writer is engaging) and sense of belonging. It is not surprising, then, that this disruption of the future both makes it into this writer's account of everyday life on January 3, 2021, and exerts pressure on the form his account takes, issuing in grammatical and representational gaps; perhaps it produces the elision of a verb from the one optimistic sentence in the quotation (‘While it does seem to a resolution at hand’), slightly obscuring its sense.

Reports of confusion and disorientation about the experience of time in the present and about the ability to plan for the future constitute a major theme in the diaries and other pandemic materials submitted to the Everyday Life in Middletown (EDLM) archive, which forms the basis of this article. This theme accords with research across a range of disciplines that has observed the manner in which the shutdowns and restrictions triggered by the spread of COVID-19 have disrupted people's sense of time (e.g. Langhamer, 2020; Lyon and Coleman, 2021; Ogden, 2020). Our writers report that alterations in routines have scrambled daily rhythms and induced confusion about the short-term passage of time. They also note that uncertainties around work, schooling, travel, and other activities have made planning for the medium-term future (the forthcoming weeks and months) challenging, as Diarist C45's entry captures so well. And they report that pandemic disturbances have impacted their apprehension of the more distant future, a framing that in some cases extends to a lifetime, disrupting, deferring, or reshaping the life narratives that our diarists construct, in fragmentary but telling form, in the work they submit to the archive.

Anthropologists suggest that, in modern societies, the future plays an important role in how people construct the ‘functional present’ (Mead, 1959[1932], cited in May, 2018: 308). Vanessa May has argued that a powerful shared narrative calls upon people to see their daily activities growing from their pasts and contributing to a desired future, a ‘cultural script’ that gets ‘amputated’ when someone drops out of their career track because of illness or disability and, often, when people grow old and retire (May, 2018: 311). Something similar—but presumably shorter-term—is playing out as the pandemic's surges and abatements bring the near- and long-term future in and out of focus. Diaries, the predominant artifacts collected by the EDLM archive, are especially rich arenas for negotiating such contending time frames while creating—or trying to create—the sense of a continuous life. While other types of archival and qualitative research materials—photos, questionnaires, drawings, and so on—will also make their unique contributions to the experiential record of the pandemic, diaries are uniquely appropriate as registers of how people experience temporality. The diary form itself is framed by its dailiness (the terms journal and diary both registering this factor in their etymology), while its conventional connection to interiority, self-expression, and self-formation invites the writer to forge connections among past, present, and future.

That is to say, the diary is an exercise in life writing, and life writing's main function is to construct coherence in the writer's experience across time: to locate and give meaning to changes, to interpret challenges and disruptions as transition and growth. Philippe Lejeune describes the diary as the ‘construction site’ of the positive self-image required for coping in modern society; feminist scholars have treated the diary as a ‘performative, iterative space where the writer can test out versions of identity’, a ‘technology’ that allows for the collection and ordering of ‘facets of an ever-changing self’ (Carter, 2020: 48; Lejeune and Bogaert, 2020: 30; Millim, 2013: 16). In diaries, this process is simultaneously present-centered—written in a continuous present tense and composed under the mark of the day's date—and future-oriented, ‘fusing past memories with future expectations’ (Ben-Amos and Ben-Amos, 2020: 2). EDLM day diaries, of course, are a distinctive kind of diary. Like Mass Observation (MO) directives, they are written explicitly to populate an archive, forming what Lyon and Coleman (2021) call a sort of ‘micro-ethnography’. Still, the conventions and affordances of the diary—a long-standing and powerful genre in Western culture—prompt reflection, self-disclosure, and self-analysis, and a corresponding temporal orientation that links past, present, and future, even if the diary's fragmentary style arrays these in nonlinear form. ² EDLM's pandemic materials thus make visible the interplay among a nuanced set of time frames, showing people grappling with disruption of daily rhythms and the loss of their ability to apprehend the medium-term future, as well as illustrating the ways in which those instabilities can alter a person's sense of their life course and shift their sense of belonging.

EDLM's insistently local character raises the question of place amid these various experiences of pandemic time. EDLM is a collaborative, community-engaged project whose stated mission is to capture everyday life in one specific place: Muncie, Indiana, subject of Robert S. and Helen Lynd's best-selling Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture (1929) and of nearly a century of scholarship sparked by it. Strikingly, Diarist C45's account (quoted above) only obliquely registers the writer's location, hinting faintly at what may be local in his experience of the historical moment. His only reference to locality on this day pertains not to the pandemic experience but to another inescapable, large-scale crisis of the present: ‘Everywhere I walk or drive’, he writes, ‘I see evidence of a few diehards not willing to let the last election go’. But the glancing way in which the writer evokes locality is in itself significant, given that his diary is expressly written for a project publicly defined by its local nature. This near-absence speaks to seemingly inexorable, contemporary creep towards delocalization of politics, media consumption, entertainment, identification, and—at times, it seems—the entire life world.

These immediate questions invite a broader consideration: What is local about the experience of the global pandemic? More broadly still, what is local about everyday life, at a late modern, late-capitalist moment in which news, diversion, identity, and belonging are all available for appropriation and negotiation through social media and internet content? These are among the broad questions that animate the EDLM project and inform this essay. To distill this to our writer above, how has his experience of the disruption of time, or other elements of the pandemic experience, been inflected (or not) by the community in which he lives, as opposed to elements experienced nationally or shaped by larger categories such as class, education, or wealth—differences widely acknowledged to have powerfully shaped people's experience of the pandemic and the severity of effects they felt? ³

This article examines EDLM writers’ representation of the experience of time during the pandemic, tracking the kinds of upsets they report and analyzing the interactions between these disruptions and the local setting as they inflect the autobiographical selves our writers construct in their pandemic writings. It shows how living in Muncie, Indiana—a postindustrial city with its particular combination of historical, demographic, economic, social, and political dynamics—structures the autobiographical stories available to our writers, and how the disruption of time—a major element in autobiographical self-conception—produces new variations and problems for life writing. Even in the midst of a global crisis, and in accounts that evoke locality indirectly and around the edges, we glimpse the manner in which the local structure of feeling, influenced by a pervasive narrative of local decline, frames individual self-fashioning in the context of the pandemic. ⁴

Muncie's economic trajectory forms a foundation for this structure of feeling. Once a thriving Midwestern production center for glass, auto parts, and steel, the city saw a steady drop in manufacturing activity and employment after 1960. Its early 21st-century economy is buoyed incompletely by growth in education and health care, and the community is beset by social and civic problems facing similarly situated communities across the American rust belt. These include population decline, rising addiction rates, deep class and racial divisions, and blighted neighborhoods. Voters in Delaware County, where Muncie is located, favored both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential primaries, placing it among the sorts of communities seeing the surging populism that marks the current stage of global capitalism. As we discuss below, these forces underlie a shared local narrative of community decline and (hoped-for) renewal; this narrative in turn creates the structure of feeling within which attitudes about the individual and the community take shape.

Everyday Life in Middletown: The project

We begin by emphasizing the presence or absence of locality in pandemic experience because it speaks to the raison d’etre of Everyday Life in Middletown and its productive differences from Mass Observation. EDLM is in essence a collaborative, community-generated archive documenting everyday life in Muncie. It both continues and reorients the scholarship sparked by the Lynds’ anthropological examination of the effects of modernization on culture and life in this small, industrial city. Since 2016, we have been collecting accounts of everyday life from volunteer contributors; most of these are written day diaries prepared on dates the project leaders specify in advance, though we have also collected directives and a few other artifacts. These are edited and quickly published on our website, which contains the archive as well as a blog for analysis and commentary, along with some basic data visualization tools. Other activities include public appearances to promote the project, seek new volunteers, and share insights that the archive is making visible. In sum, the project seeks to build and model community connection and dialogue around the concept of everyday life while also creating an archive that current and future researchers can use when studying our community and our era. It thus emphasizes local experience, resisting the delocalization implied in the diary quoted above and fueled by much internet and social media activity, where communities of interest (often mutually hostile) form entirely in virtual space.

EDLM was also inspired by the original MO project, and in its conception has more in common with that late 1930s effort than with contemporary MO projects. Specifically, EDLM's status as an instant archive shares the first Mass Observers’ project for reinvigorating the public sphere. Where MO diagnosed a national media that disseminated ideological and oversimplified descriptions of public opinion, and MO's founders sought to preempt fascist and propagandistic mass deception, EDLM responds to the polarization and hostility evident in contemporary public discourse, envisioning a ‘digital commons’ where volunteer writers connect over the common ground of everyday life. To increase representation and elevate the voices of ordinary people, the early MO pursued a hyperactive publication program in the age of mass print; EDLM mobilizes the ease of digital publication to make its archival materials available shortly after submission, along with rapid commentary and analysis of the materials.

The two projects also share an arts/humanities (rather than a social science) orientation. EDLM is best described as a collaborative writing project with two primary aims, to intervene in the public sphere in a way that builds and models an alternative community and, more prosaically, to build an archive of everyday life for future scholars. In total, the project is best understood as a creative project—one that provides an expressive outlet for its participants (including the project directors) while at the same time documenting the inventiveness inherent in everyday life: the daily improvisations and imaginative acts of perception and communication that, as Raymond Williams insisted, link ‘ordinary’ daily living with art. Williams argues that ‘there are, essentially, no ordinary activities, if by “ordinary” we mean the absence of creative interpretation and effort’ (1961: 54). By prompting our writers to pay heed to the activities and affects of daily living, we are not only registering such creativity but encouraging it, bringing it to consciousness. Our writing about the archive similarly embraces creative methods: blog posts have adapted the experimental ‘hundreds’ methodology of Berlant and Stewart (2019); here we follow Lefebvre (2004: 15–16) and Sheridan, Street, and Bloome (2000) in eschewing empirical claims for ‘telling cases’, which inspire and illustrate theoretical insights. In interpreting individual diaries, you will find us treating them, at times, like literary works—noting fine points of style and structure and the ways these register the pressures of history.

But perhaps EDLM's most valuable difference from MO lies in its geographical specificity, which is distinct from the national focus of all iterations of MO. EDLM's focus on Muncie brings the lenses of everyday life studies to bear on a small city that has acutely felt the transformations and upsets of late capitalism and globalization. The project represents a locale that is manifesting some widely observed national and global dynamics, but it does so through a collaborative practice of singularity—written accounts from individuals, who are prompted only to represent their everyday lives as fully and accurately as possible, thereby creating space for eccentricities of experience that elude or complicate such broad categories as globalization, populism, the postindustrial, and the like. ⁵

While our writers skew towards the left of the political spectrum, their accounts of daily life since 2016 frequently document their grappling with the crises of our historic moment and the specific dynamics of living in a community where highly educated professionals, small-business owners, members of a struggling, hollowed-out working class, and the very poor live in close proximity, often eyeing each other warily amidst routine interactions and in digital spaces. EDLM began by repurposing MO's utopian ideas about social amelioration and healing to a specific community, hoping to create a space where people of differing backgrounds could recognize their commonalities through attentiveness to everyday life. In practice, the project has struggled to make inroads to the most disenfranchised parts of the community; rather, it has created a small community in its own right by prompting an unusually self-aware and reflective group of local people to tune into the ordinary and express their experience of it for immediate publication. While a small number of our writers are working-class, the archive overall is not representative of the city's demographics; the pandemic experience it documents is skewed towards that of professional, nonessential workers whose work routines were more profoundly transformed but who were on the whole safer than people who continued to work outside the home. The artifacts informing this essay thus represent a detailed slice of the community's overall experience. Our method holds with James Hinton's description of his ‘Nine Wartime Lives’ diarists, whom he calls representative only ‘in the radically non-statistical sense that, as exceptionally self-reflective people, they can provide us with access to a cultural world that others inhabited with less self-awareness’ (Hinton, 2011: 17). Since the project's inception, periodic public events and focus groups, as well as email and other online interactions between volunteers and the project staff, have placed a loose gathering of interested people at the center of the project, creating a shifting, provisional community in which EDLM writers also make up a primary audience of the archive.

When the pandemic hit, EDLM's local focus made us particularly attuned to which aspects of our writers’ experience would seem determined or inflected by locality. As we have suggested, Muncie is a community marked by a particular arrayal of the forces of political polarization that have played out so significantly in public and personal responses to the pandemic. We reside in a state with, at the time of this writing, the 10th lowest vaccination rate in the United States. We were equally intrigued by reactions that were powerfully local—such as complaints about state and local officials’ policy responses or the apparent noncompliance of neighbors with health protocols—as we were by ways in which the spread of COVID-19 drove people (sometimes literally) inside, making locality recede from their consciousness of the unfolding pandemic. But the disruptions of time were the most widespread theme to emerge in the materials our collaborators produced during the pandemic, prompting us to look for ways that locality was, and was not, connected to temporal experiences of the pandemic.

Everyday pandemic time

From the pandemic's start, our writers have grappled with its disruptions of time. The theme emerged in routine diaries and in a directive about the pandemic; based on our reading of those materials, we asked participants to answer a second directive focusing specifically on how the pandemic influenced their experience of time. Since 2016, the archive has collected more than 400 written artifacts totaling more than 400,000 words. The data set for this article consists of all of our pandemic-era materials: 70 diaries and 34 responses to two directives, one focusing on the pandemic and everyday life and one on the pandemic and time, along with longitudinal reading of all the materials produced by two diarists since the project's inception.

Two patterns of time disruption predominate in these accounts: a confusion of time durations and the muddying of the medium- and long-term future. Durations were scrambled, with mathematically short periods feeling long, long durations seeming short, and the feeling of duration inconsistent or unpredictable; several writers trace this to the shift to working from home, welcoming the slowed pace even as it plays havoc with their internal clocks and calendars. More unsettling were the effects of the loss of the medium- and long-term futures as orientation points for self-understanding and presentation, as seen in our opening example. We address the first of these in this section and the latter in the next section of this article.

In a phenomenon widely commented on in popular journalism and on social media, time durations during the pandemic seemed scrambled and incommensurate. Something that occurred mere days ago could feel distant; seemingly clear durations (a day, a week, a month, a year) could seem scrambled so that shorter spans seem longer while longer ones pass quickly. ‘Time has been flowing erratically’, wrote one diarist. ‘Some moments go slowly (clock barely moves) while others fly (“it's 11 am already?”)’ (B35, May 12, 2021). This experience is not new—the subjective, emotionally inflected, non-mathematical ways in which we experience duration has been integral to modern subjectivity since standardized, clock time became ubiquitous, and it was mined vigorously by experimental novelists of the early 20th century such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust. Everyone, it seems, knows that the affective charges of past events make themselves felt unpredictably in the present, and that pleasure makes time go quickly while boredom or anticipation draw it out painfully, mixing chronology and making felt durations differ from the orderly ticking of the clock. As Ben Highmore has noted, modernity simultaneously imposed standardized clock time and ‘denaturalized’ time, extending working hours and rendering the seasons irrelevant to much work through artificial lighting and temperature control; but it also created an abiding tension between clock time and subjective time (between ‘public’ and ‘intimate time’, as Highmore phrases it), as workers at all social levels incompletely and impermanently adapt their bodies and attitudes to the demands of work, and as affective states play out their own temporalities against—in or out of sync with—clock time (Highmore, 2010: 88).

All of this is familiar in contemporary life, but the shifting experience of durations and the non-fungible nature of hours and minutes has rarely appeared so frequently in ordinary conversation or media discussion as it has during the pandemic. A diarist generalizes about it this way: ‘The sameness of the days (no one seems to know what day of the week it is), the lack of structure, and disrupted sleep schedules is wearing on some’ (D50, March 23, 2020). Our May 12, 2021, directive on time and the pandemic reveals some precise experiences of this dynamic, including not only shifting felt durations but shifting awareness of both duration and clock time. One volunteer records moments of acute awareness, not only of time but of the pandemic's compression of space-time, as she prepares for and attends meetings or puts in self-disciplined stints of writing and research work using the ‘pomodoro method’ of moderate, timed periods of focused work. ‘Ending one meeting just in time for another, just in time for my regular phone call with my parents. Just in time.… With Zoom there is no travel time in between, one meeting just flows into another.… I finish reading files one minute before the meeting starts.… A timer helps me revise today, 25 min on, 5 min off’ (C46, May 12, 2021). Later, on a leisurely walk, time slows and awareness becomes less acute: ‘We walk along the river for I don't know how long. Time stretches.’ Another writer responds to the directive with a set of partial day diaries, topped by a set of observations gleaned from them, including one about shifting felt durations and time awareness:

I feel quite aware of time most of the time, usually not unpleasantly so.… Mondays, when I rarely have meetings, time seems more manageable and the hours don't get away from me. Much of the rest of the week I feel like I’m rushing from one thing to another or, if I’m not working, I’m wishing time would slow down. (A01, May 12, 2021)

But if these dynamics are integral to modern experience, the pandemic seems to have intensified and increased awareness of them. Hours and days pass quickly while weeks and months drag on, or vice versa. Durations of the recent past seem warped. ‘I don't remember this happening as much before COVID’, writes one contributor. ‘Occasionally days would drag on or long periods of time would go quickly, but mostly it just clicked along like normal. Now it's totally normal for me to look at the clock and be like, “how the hell?”’ (A07, March 23, 2020). In a set of diaries from May 12, 2020, some volunteers write from a moment of acute, shared anxiety and stress, which periodically registers in the form of this temporal warping: ‘Quarantine has been going on for a month and a half, but it feels like it has been happening forever’ (H67, May 12, 2020). One volunteer writes of the early days of shutdown and her sense that, while life changed overnight, governmental and societal action should have happened sooner, an observation that she inscribes as a temporal contradiction: ‘At first it was hard. Really hard. Everything changed so quickly, but also slowly’ (H64, March 23, 2020). Another writes, ‘April 2020 is behind us. It was a long decade’ (D50, May 12, 2020). ‘Where the hell does [time] go?’ writes another. ‘Seriously, I wake up, blink, and it's 4 p.m., blink again and it's bloody May 2’ (A07, May 12, 2021). More archly, another wrote, ‘It's been slow and fast going all at once. As I said back in March, April has been a long month and it's not even April yet’ (A28, March 23, 2020). A number of writers take time to consider the causes and implications of this skewed time sense. One suggests that there is no fundamental change—.the pandemic has simply intensified ‘the way things normally feel, which is that weeks feel long and draining but, in retrospect, weeks and months seem to have passed quickly’ (A01, May 12 2021). Numerous others, though, connect the temporal unsettling to specific changes wrought by the pandemic, including the spatial dislocation of a rapid shift to working from home.

The change to working from home (for those who, like many of our volunteers, were fortunate enough to have that option), constituted a profound shift in time-space relationships in the everyday. It brought a shifting or elimination of routine time markers and features of daily rhythm (the daily commute, walking times between meetings, etc.). In Lefebvre's terms, the pandemic prompted increasing episodes of ‘arrythmia’: periods in which the multiple cycles involved in our lives (bodily, social, diurnal, etc.) are out of sync. When our bodies and our schedules are in sync (a perhaps infrequent condition that we nonetheless strive for, through our day planners and sleep-monitoring apps), we achieve periods of what Lefebvre calls ‘isorhythmia’. Disruptions in rhythm both dispel such concord and call attention to the underlying rhythms that have been lost (Lefebvre, 2004: 78). As one volunteer writes in the pandemic directive, ‘The morning and evening commutes, I now find, used to serve as brackets around the day, containing work and work stress’ (A01, March 23, 2020). The absence of such markers creates a disorienting sameness in the days of some used to working in an office, seeing colleagues, having spontaneous conversations; volunteers remark on ‘the orderless nature of the days’ (A23, March 23, 2020), which, though it can be a positive or a negative (this writer finds herself being more productive at home), contributes to the skewing of subjective experiences of duration. ‘I’m finding it difficult to say a whole lot about today specifically, because so much of the last two months is the same’, one volunteer writes at the height of lockdown, in May 2020 (D50, May 12, 2020). He continues:

I think the stay-at-home order has made everyone who doesn't work an essential job a little stir-crazy. The sameness of the days (no one seems to know what day of the week it is), the lack of structure, and disrupted sleep schedules are wearing on some. Personally, I’m fine with it. (D50, May 12, 2021)

That final qualification speaks to a significant theme we have described elsewhere as ‘pandemic privilege’—a recognition, expressed in a significant number of diaries and directives, that certain disruptions of pandemic life have been positive, typically accompanied by expressions of mixed gratitude and guilt that this good fortune results from a global catastrophe (‘Pandemic Privilege’, 2021). Many aspects of pandemic privilege stem from new space-time arrangements created by working from home and from the resulting decreases in grooming time, commuting, and so on. A retiree summarizes this dynamic aptly:

March 2020–21 slowed my life in ways I will remember with gratitude. With no driving to events and appointments and less time devoted to grooming, housework, and entertaining, the pandemic gave me more personal time that I was free to spend (or not) as I wished. I literally attended some zoom events with a sweater over my nightgown. (G61, March 23, 2021)

Pandemic privilege took myriad forms. One volunteer adopted a new, prized ritual: ‘We spend the first hour of the day sitting in bed, playing with the boys, drinking coffee and enjoying each other … my favorite part of our new routine’ (A07, May 12, 2020). A professor who has spent a decade in a commuter marriage got to live with her partner full-time because she was teaching entirely online. Others, with considerably more time in their homes, took up walking or did it more frequently. ‘A midday walk to clear my head is another luxury for which I am grateful’, writes one (C45, March 23, 2021). Several leaned into gardening and felt their enjoyment increase; one suggested that gardening typified a greater mindfulness that became available at points during the pandemic:

I’m finding, in pandemic quarantine, a renewed focus on small things right around the house. I’m looking at nature more, finding quiet moments, and appreciating them. If not for the horrific reasons why I’m home, this would be beautiful. As it is, it's tinged with complex emotions. (B37, May 12, 2021)

People report having more time with immediate family, with varying benefits and minor stresses. ‘We have spent more time together because no one is rushing home to change and rushing out for meetings and obligations’, one volunteer writes. ‘I don't know if I ever really want to go back to that’ (A28, March 23, 2021). Another, who had been feeling burned out at his public-facing job, likens the switch to working from home to a ‘sabbatical’, as we discuss in more detail below (A23, March 23, 2021). A retiree finally feels she has time to take on the project of editing a book for a friend (H66, May 12, 2020).

Like most aspects of pandemic life, however, the feeling of pandemic privilege was not experienced universally or equally. It is, of course, well known that working-class people and people of color, more likely to be employed in essential work and to live in densely populated neighborhoods and/or in multigenerational households, bore an unequal burden in terms of the virus itself. Among those relatively protected from the virus, middle-class parents of preschool or school-age children, women especially, were more likely to experience pandemic disruption as an intense stressor, even if mixed with feelings of gratitude. For several EDLM writers in such situations—and for others who, for individual reasons, found the disruption of their space/time arrangements a mixed good at best—the stresses of the pandemic could be compounded by a sense that others were benefiting, or with disappointment that ‘shutdown’ did not mean ‘slowdown’. One working mother writes: ‘I had high hopes (dreams, delusions?) of what working-from-home would look like. I thought I would have this great schedule for everyone to follow that included family breakfast/lunch/dinner time, dedicated work/school time, and a nap time for the youngest’ (H64, May 12, 2020). Her reality, which she recounts with arch humor, turns out to be

a free-for all. The preschooler doesn't sleep. The older kids only want to sleep. Suddenly I have more meetings than I ever had. So now I manage the house, three kids, full-time job, and my own college class. Please note the loose meaning of the word manage. My main job is to make sure everyone finishes the day fed and alive. (H64, May 12, 2020)

Another mother points specifically to the disruption of her ordinary space/time caused by everyone working and schooling at home. Having noted that she does ‘get to wear yoga pants or pajamas all day’, she laments that she ‘still needs to wear all the hats’:

I am juggling working from home, a child learning from home, and home life in a world where all the boundaries have vanished. Though they were all happening simultaneously in the course of a ‘normal day’, now in a normal day they all happen in the same space. And I am not doing a particularly good job at any of them. (A28, March 23, 2021; emphasis in original)

Interestingly, she ties these conditions specifically to the confusion of time durations discussed above, describing the experience as ‘slow and fast going all at once’. She speaks powerfully, with poetic flair, to the effect of these changes on her sense of self as it is experienced in everyday life: ‘After the first few weeks of the stay-at-home order, I was sure that I know how a ghost must feel: Stuck in an old house, wearing the same clothes day after day, roaming from room to room.’

Like this writer, who playfully invokes ‘yoga pants’ as a signifier of the pandemic's limited positives, most of our volunteers report experiencing a mix of benefits and costs, comforts and anxieties: one might enjoy, ‘and very much need, the peace’ of the initial slowdown but also dislike the way sleeping later makes the mornings disappear quickly, ‘having it be lunchtime right after you get fully awake’ (A23, March 23, 2020); or be grateful to have one's grown children at home in the pandemic's early months even while acknowledging how ‘having all kinds of other things in the refrigerator, slower internet, and busier household spaces has caused friction’ and wondering how all this will ‘wear over an extended period of time’ (A02, March 23, 2020). And for most writers, the balance of positives and negatives shifted (again, differentially) over the past year, with some writers reporting that they settled into new, manageable routines but others seeing their work lives and daily schedules resume a hectic pace as the months passed. The professor who got to live with her partner, in a September 24, 2020, diary, reported a life enriched by gardening and cooking, made feasible because she simply had more time. ‘Since March, I don't rush. I saunter to my desk and sit down. Because I rush less, move less, drive less, and speak with fewer people, I do other things’ (I69, September 24, 2020). But eight months later, in her pandemic and time directive, she reported the gradual evaporation of this found time:

When the pandemic was still new, there was a certain freedom to let go of rigid schedules, to take a walk in the middle of the day and lower my expectations for what I could do well. Because so many things were outright cancelled, we found more time to do other things. But like the virus, people are adaptable, and because we must still sell our labor to pay the bills, even in these trying times, work simply cannot stop. Classes moved online. Meetings moved online. Conferences moved online. Socializing moved online. I’m busier than ever, beholden to my work schedule, skipping online social time because, by the end of the day, I want to throw my computer out the window. (I69, May 12, 2021)

Like so many of our writers’ accounts, this directive constructs a personal narrative of pandemic experience that is also an analysis, both of the social processes transformed by the pandemic and of the self responding to them. The passage characterizes and makes links between contrasting daily rhythms in distinctive moments of time (an early slowdown, followed by a return to overscheduled, professional life), tracing a narrative arc between them. And it posits associated, affective states and the role of the self in registering them: the passage sensitively marks the loosening of internalized discipline (‘a certain freedom to let go of rigid schedules … and lower my expectations for what I could do well’) followed by a return to the treadmill. It subtly registers the push and pull between the disciplined, agentic self and social rhythms made acutely visible because of their disruption. Note the way the diarist's discipline and will wax and wane in the narration: the passage begins with the ‘certain freedom’ that allows a conscious license to lower expectations; and ends with the intense expression of affective desire, ‘to throw my computer out the window’. But in between, and precisely where the writer observes that ‘people are adaptable’, the writing subject becomes the object of larger forces. Mandatory time commitments—‘work’, ‘classes’, ‘meetings’, ‘conferences’—occupy her sentences’ subject positions and take the action verb ‘moved’. Agency at the end is reduced to the negative action of ‘skipping social time’ and a jokey fantasy of violent acting out. The directive thus marks and constructs the writer's understanding of how she has responded to the pandemic, and the frustrating limits of her agency—an ironic result of human adaptability.

Life time: The ambiguous future in pandemic-era life writing

Life writing characteristically constructs and interweaves micro- and macro-narratives of this sort, making sense of everyday events, transforming individual experiences into generalizations (e.g. the sudden availability of time for walks, the surge in Zoom meetings) and bringing them in touch with ‘life-time’ narratives that make sense of longer time spans (e.g. ‘I have lived separately from my spouse since we finished graduate school’). Peter Alheit (1994) has defined this tension between ‘everyday time’—routine or cyclical time—and ‘life time’—‘a linearly experienced framework in which we seek biographical continuity and coherence’. He further posits a ‘culturally specific asynchrony between these two time frames’ that individuals have to navigate, a process we observe frequently in EDLM writing. If these two personal narrative registers engage in dialogue in such accounts, they also, as we see in I69's diary, emerge in relation to (and tension with) larger, cultural narratives (the notion of a ‘career’, the sense that ‘work simply cannot stop’). But what happens to this linking of everyday events with life-time narratives when one cannot confidently envision the medium-term or long-term future? And how might locality—specifically overarching narratives of local history, or what we might call local or community life-time narratives—shape individual life writing in this setting?

‘There is no foreseeable future’, one volunteer writes. ‘It's one day at a time, then another. A strange world we’ve been thrown into’ (A28, March 23, 2020). Another reports, in March, 2020, ‘doing a little planning for next year, but that is limited by our lack of any real sense of what kind of world we will be living in a few months from now’ (A02, March 23, 2020). In diaries of January 3, 2021—the Sunday of a long weekend kicked off by New Year's Day—a cultural imperative of looking forward and back, of reviewing the year and making (or consciously abstaining from) resolutions for the next year—coexists with an acknowledgment of the impossibility of planning. ‘New year's may be arbitrary days on a lunar calendar, but the measurement of what has been—and what will be—offers hope for a fresh start’, writes one diarist, who processes personal, global, and social change, having ended a relationship and started a new job and graduate program (H66, January 3, 2021). Later, though, she identifies a paradox: the pandemic has simultaneously slowed things down to allow time for planning while rendering plans themselves tenuous.

The other lesson of COVID is that there is no way to plan. But as creatures of habit, of cognition, and those of us who lean toward organization and goals, we do it anyway.

One might approach this muddying of the future with the equanimity visible here, or with the anxiety or resignation we see in this essay's epigraph: ‘I just don't feel comfortable circling a date on the calendar anymore. I was wrong so often in 2020’ (C45, January 3, 2021).

Absent the new year's imperative to reflect and plan, diary writers in May and September 2020 report that the inability to plan creates a focus on the day, sometimes even the moment, at hand. While this, like other disruptions, could be felt as a surprising benefit of the pandemic (recall our writer who notes his increased attention and appreciation of ‘quiet moments’), other writers depict this present focus as something to be endured. ‘I think this whole thing would be easier if we knew the end point, but since we don't, I guess we’ll just keep on keeping on as best we can’, writes one volunteer (A15, March 23, 2020). Another, who saw his work-from-home order extended twice, writes, ‘And who knows from here? It seems that I underestimated the “after” period of the quarantine’ (A23, March 23, 2020). Anxiety about the future, including worry about the effectiveness of public health measures and the general sense of political crisis, also causes some writers to focus on the present: ‘I can't think too far into the future because it looks bleak’, writes one contributor, in the May 2020 pandemic directive. ‘We’re opening too soon, we’re going to have subsequent waves, the economy. See? I’m stopping myself, right here and now’ (A01, May 12, 2020). Later he notes that this dread, which he holds at arm's length by trying to stay focused on daily life, is ‘less about the disease than about the economy, the stock market, what society and daily life will look like when we transition into next and subsequent stages’.

While the pandemic has generally unsettled people's visions of the future, this process itself has been marked by stages and transitions, from acute anxiety and uncertainty in spring 2020 to a tentative return to planning a year later. One contributor, whose entire family became ill with COVID-19 in March 2020, carefully lays out the stages in his temporal experience in his pandemic/time directive. The directive suggests a shifting landscape in which degrees of anxiety and the inability to plan inflect the present moment to differing degrees and with changing affective results. In all stages, until a tenuous return to normal at the end, planning is impossible or minimal.

While he and his wife and two grown daughters were enduring the disease, ‘time was a source of worry … a bit like a doomsday countdown, one that would end either in a bang or a whimper’. Once the worst symptoms subsided, thoughts of the near-term future took the form of ‘a literal ticking off of the days … an unnerving phase where I rarely looked ahead except to anxiously think about the all-clear point’. Next, in the late spring and early summer of 2020, came ‘a weird time when unease gradually lifted but it was difficult to think far ahead. I kept expecting the pandemic to wind down, but it didn't.’ Everyday time, the writer reports, was marked by monotony. Projects he had been planning were cancelled; summer would normally include travel, ‘the source of pleasurable anticipation. But not this year.’ He turned to bingeing TV shows—not typical for him—feeling ‘drawn to escapist entertainment as a tool for passing the time (and escaping monotony)’ (A02, May 12, 2021). In these early stages, the affective charge of everyday time shifts from anxiety to monotony as the future itself changes from an existential threat to a blank.

In a third stage, from late summer through the fall, tentative planning resumes, but ‘even that was complicated by some uncertainty about the scope of my job, partly induced by pandemic-driven budget troubles’. He describes the ensuing winter as ‘slow and bleak’, marked by a ‘heads-down … let's-just-get-through-this mentality’ in which ‘I didn't really think ahead much, except where necessary for work’. He sees himself in current popular media discussions of ‘languishing’, ‘a sense of aimless drift, without much anticipation or optimism’ (Grant, 2021). Then he reaches what he warily and provisionally calls ‘The End’. Fully vaccinated and curious about how strong his immunity is, he feels comfortable going out in public but out of sync with others who are not so confident. ‘It reminds me of how our own sense of where we are in terms of time is partly (but only partly) contingent on what others are experiencing’. In a postscript, he records an inkling of returning to old ways of thinking about and experiencing time, as he plans a hiking trip for May 2021, while juggling a busy work schedule. ‘I don't have that much time to think ahead just now. This marks the return of an old, mild tension in my life, between concentrating on the immediate demands of work and planning social and family activities. That's good, I think.’

This directive response reports with remarkable nuance the writer's experience of the near- to medium-term future and its relation to his experience of everyday time. The writer's view of the medium-term future, and the affects associated with it, shift subtly while, in slightly different ways, the ability to plan remains significantly limited, even into the vaccinated, early opening phase, where the accumulated demands of ordinary life mean the writer doesn't feel he has enough time to plan. Interestingly, though, this directive has almost nothing to say about life time: while understandably lacking discussion of a long-term, personal future, it also says nothing about the writer's past. It also lacks any reference to geographic location (except on the micro-level: the transit between his house proper and the office above his garage, in which he works from home). Effectively, this diary could have been written anywhere. These absences certainly owe something to the directive prompt (which did not contain any location-specific questions) and the fact that we did not identify it as a diary (though many writers’ directives took the form of diaries or partial diaries). Other contributors did invoke life time in the directive, but most do not, suggesting that this attenuation of the immediate future produced, for some of us, a shift in the structures of autobiographical narration.

How might the lack of a long-term view and the lack of local detail in such an account relate to one another? As May has argued, the kind of biographical narration available to individuals—the ease or difficulty with which they can envision a ‘life-time’ framework—influences, and is influenced by, the degree to which they feel connected to their locality. Interpreting the results of an MO directive she helped design, May argues that time plays an important role in one's sense of belonging, defined as ‘a sense of ease with oneself and one's surroundings that is fundamental to our sense of self’ (May, 2018: 306). May is in part responding to anthropologists’ more typical emphasis on place (as opposed to time) in studies of belonging. For May, the sense of belonging and, indeed, the self is crucially built on a process of autobiographical narrative in which ‘we tell stories about who we have been, who we are, and who we hope to be or are afraid of becoming’ (ibid.: 308). The importance of the future to self-identity is perhaps a function of Western modernity, in which master narratives of historical, social, and economic progress overlay a conception of the subject as an individual with agency to influence the future, to pursue upward mobility and other forms of personal betterment. And, amid competition and economic upsets, individuals must be future-oriented in order to sustain themselves. Quoting Binkley, May suggests that Western modernity creates ‘“an individualization of a personal regard for the future” which entails that contemporary western individuals must adopt reflexive awareness and calculative strategies in order to safeguard their own futures’ (ibid.: 308). Yet, in a postindustrial and postmodern setting, such narratives of a self- (or collaboratively) directed, better future (at the personal or community/social level) frequently refuse to issue in happy endings. This dynamic creates what Lauren Berlant has called ‘cruel optimism’, a situation in which people (and, arguably, communities) remain attached to dreams of the future that play an active role in preventing their flourishing (Berlant, 2011). In this context, the pandemic's effect on EDLM writers’ senses of self and the future reveals a range of complex responses to having the temporal narrative disrupted in new and unanticipated ways while living in a community with a tenuous sense of its own future.

Local/personal futures

In Muncie, structural specifics of the local economy, and shared understandings of it, shape individual orientations to the future. We get a sense of how from our first directive, which focused on attitudes towards Muncie. As a town whose two largest employers are a midsized university and a regional hospital, Muncie attracts professionals from around the country and the world, many with an ambiguous sense of belonging to the community. Early career professionals frequently remain on the job market and establish ties slowly or reluctantly; those who stay for decades often retain mixed feelings, holding on to visions of alternate futures or developing feelings about the town that mix affection with a sense of personal compromise or resentment. ‘I wouldn't stay here if I had a better option … but really, at 15 years in, I’m so entrenched in my job and family and personal pursuits and the lives of my children and my spouse are bound up with this place so I feel stuck here’, writes one university teacher (B37, February 12, 2019). Others, however, become community-oriented and vigorously embrace future-directed narratives of civic renewal. ‘There is a whole cohort of cheerleaders and handraisers out there and I would count myself among them’, writes a leader at a nonprofit. ‘There is plenty of work to be done … that IS being done … we’ve come a long way and have a long way to go, but things are happening’ (A28, February 12, 2019; ellipses and italics in original). Woven into this narrative landscape are stories of personal struggle and renewal, including the ubiquitous cultural script of addiction and recovery.

Enduring social divisions powerfully inform this narrative of decline. In this respect, Muncie typifies the many ‘rust belt’ cities and towns scattered across the American Midwest and Northeast that are seeking new niches in a global, knowledge-oriented economy. Communities once anchored by industrial production now face the challenge of adapting to economic landscapes that reward formal education or push people into service work, producing social conflicts that often center on cultural differences. The growth of Ball State University since the 1960s is the key manifestation of that shift locally. Its expansion has intensified a town/gown division that now overlies long-standing social divisions defined by class and race (Edmonds and Geelhoed, 2001; Rotella, 2004).

Muncie's role as ‘Middletown’, the subject of the Lynd's pathbreaking studies of modern American life, as well as the investigation of their many successors, has also influenced its identity. Although the Lynds avoided making the claim that Muncie was a representative place, most of their readers quickly leapt to the conclusion that it was a—perhaps even the—typical American community. Local residents and others familiar with the Middletown tradition keep this assumption alive, despite its limited empirical grounding. Equally durable is a sense, which the Lynds did assert, that ‘Middletown’ was characterized by a cultural lag, with local values and behaviors slow to adjust to new economic and technological realities—in short, the sense that Muncie is provincial. Deindustrialization only deepened this sense of the city as a cultural backwater compared with the country's thriving metropolitan centers (Igo, 2008: 68–102; Lynd and Lynd, 1929).

Many of our writers replay these narratives of Muncie—of decline and sputtering recovery, class conflict, and enduring provincialism—in defining themselves. They diverge in their views of the city and its prospects, but they see the town as divided socially and as having decayed economically. Optimists among them see a turnaround in process, but even their accounts recognize that the loss of industry between the 1960s and the early 2000s created substantial economic and social challenges. Prompted to reflect on Muncie, they diverged on many elements but, as we wrote at the time,

Certain elements repeat insistently: the sense of the city as divided (geographically, economically, racially, socially); the fear that its best days may be behind it (or a steely dismissal of this fear); a perception of the city's government as historically corrupt; an awareness that (for better and for worse) the university and the hospital are economic and cultural drivers of the city's present. (‘Many Muncies’, 2019)

For many writers, this largely negative sense of place provides a reference point as they fashion pieces of autobiographical narrative in their diaries. They posit themselves as outsiders and critics, seeing the flaws that less perceptive locals miss.

Their accounts suggest specific ways in which living in a town saddled with a narrative of decline inflects individuals’ sense of belonging, everyday time, and the future. While these cultural scripts are ubiquitous, individual orientations vary. The pervasiveness of the narrative of decline in our directive on attitudes towards Muncie—whether the individual writer is locally born and bred or a transplant, and whether this framing prompts the writer to alienation or activism—suggests that it is a local structure of feeling. The variations we see in individual accounts help sketch out its larger architecture. As Ben Highmore suggests in a recent reconsideration of Raymond Williams's term, a ‘structure of feeling’ is not a ‘vague formation of manners and attitudes that hangs in the air’ but a

living triangulation between an individual's biography (his or her stock of life experiences, which would include their upbringing, education, and so on), their contemporary social position (which might include their sense of political agency or lack of it), and the larger national and geopolitical forces at work (including international tensions, national political narratives, and so on). (Highmore, 2017: 24)

The EDLM volunteer writings offer an opportunity to trace more localized structures of feeling. As Highmore explains, a structure of feeling does not determine an individual's response to any specific condition (it does not compel someone to embrace a local narrative) so much as it sets the terms within which variations on the theme can occur:

‘Structures of feeling’ is a phrase that points at one and the same time to an overarching orchestration of energies, attitudes, and emotions, and to the fact that ‘we’ may experience this orchestration differently depending on our background and current situation. In other words, groups of people can feel a structure of feeling quite differently … and yet the overarching aspect of a structure of feeling is what articulates this difference. (Highmore, 2017: 24)

In this sense, the narrative of Muncie as a down-on-its-luck rust belt town and/or one that is rebounding from such a decline does not determine any individual's understanding of the town and his/her/their feeling of belonging or non-belonging, but constitutes the parameters (the ‘overarching orchestration’) within which individual responses take form.

Into this existing orchestration, then, the pandemic introduced new complexities that influenced writers’ sense of belonging and the future in varied ways. The pandemic could even mitigate or mask discontent with living in a rust belt town. The same volunteer who expressed a sense of being trapped in Muncie in the directive about the town finds himself, during the pandemic, taking nurturance from his immediate surroundings and from a focus on the present moment; we’ve seen him quoted above, noting his ‘renewed focus on small things right around the house … looking at nature more, finding quiet moments, and appreciating them’ (B37, May 12, 2021). But in many accounts, these immediate surroundings are silently disconnected from the city, which—as we discuss below—recedes as an expressed factor in everyday consciousness as the pandemic both forces people inside and imposes a crisis vastly exceeding local concerns. Accounts emphasize the broader crisis without significant attention to its impact on the community; for some, the pandemic produced greater introspection, a focus on the self and the home, as in B37's probing and insightful accounts.

For him, the pandemic meant a lot of time at home, doing art in his room, prompting strong memories of his introverted boyhood and thus invoking an autobiographical, life-time framework. He references Roland Barthes’s account of seeing a photo of one of the people executed for Lincoln's assassination, and feeling anguish knowing the person was going to die:

But of course, that future moment contained in the photo was 115 years past by the time Barthes was having this feeling. The past and the future come colliding together in a moment of time-spinning astonishment. Much of this past year, including this past week, has felt akin to this moment.… The 15-year-old me is long gone, dead, never to return, even though the man he became is still here and writing this. Yet, what time is in my head or in my body feels fluid and fugitive. Present and absent. I suppose this is one of the great things about being human, but also one that can be painful: our ability to inhabit multiple time periods simultaneously, moment to moment. (B37, May 12, 2021).

This volunteer experiences the incommensurate durations that are integral to modernity (‘Time seems to pass neither quickly nor slowly, yet suddenly it's April’); and he is one for whom the time disruptions of the pandemic have been largely positive (‘Much of this past year plus has been a radical slowing down that in many ways feels good’). And as the extended quote above shows, he is also a skilled and self-reflexive writer who uses his EDLM contributions to construct an autobiographical narrative with a longer timeframe: by forging links between this day's experience and memories of his 15-year-old self, the writer is creating autobiographical knowledge—working in the medium of ‘life-time’ even as he documents transitions in ‘everyday time’. His writing bears out May's sense that time is essential to belonging and Hinton's sense that diaries display the process by which people ‘use available cultural resources to weave meaningful narratives of their personal identities’ (Hinton, 2011: 4).

But it also reveals the paradoxically privatized and nonlocal nature of these reflections; while the writer evinces the ‘sense of ease with oneself and one's surroundings’ that characterizes belonging in the sociological sense, its spatial markers are privatized (embodied in his teenage self's bedroom and his current home office) and not explicitly linked to the community. For him and others, the pandemic seems to have combined with reigning narratives about Muncie to create a personalized and non-geographic psychic space: Muncie all but disappears from the accounts of numerous writers who, in pre-pandemic writing, expressed an acute sense of Muncie's limitations and social pathologies.

Two educated, middle-aged professional men illustrate this positioning: critical of Muncie and diagnostic of its social ills before the start of pandemic, at which point Muncie recedes from the foreground of their accounts, changing the positioning and content of the autobiographical selves they write. Diarist A23, a public-facing employee of a nonprofit service organization, writes this when prompted to describe Muncie: ‘The first three words that spring up are “fractured”, “bitter”, and “exhausted”.’ He finds the city's class divisions ‘absurd’, its poor weighed down by ‘feverently’ held resentments that ‘[shut] them off from any positivity that might come here’, its class of ‘well-meaning civic-minded professionals … just as judgmental as anyone else here’ (A23, February 12, 2019). This understanding is integral to his life-time narrative, which points towards finding and moving to a ‘forever town’ in the south, from which he hails. ‘Anything I do here, any positive work for this community, is done with a sense of my preparation for eventual service to my home. Muncie is a big practice round for me’ (ibid.). Diarist D50, the ‘trailing spouse’ of a university professor, who is himself retired from all but volunteer work because of health problems, constructs himself as a Marxist analyst of the city's woes, indicting capitalism as the root cause of local and national decay. He points to a local history of booms and busts, including when auto industry manufacturers ‘fled the area in droves … taking with them union factory jobs’, and calls out ‘real-estate developers and speculators, who neglected the properties they owned and who fought to keep property taxes so low as to immiserate the public school system’. He finds the town's ‘politicians and petit bourgeoisie’ to be ‘a smug, obtuse, deliberately incurious tribe, on the whole, self-satisfied in their role as the professional and administrative class’ (D50, February 12, 2019). D50's withdrawal from the workforce, however, gives a different structure to his instances of life-time writing. They do not focus on a professional or personal future; rather, though he narrates his arrival in Muncie as the past, his view of the future is national and global. Focused on the historic threats of political collapse and climate catastrophe, he occupies the position of critical observer, writing accounts that are generic hybrids, with autobiographical self-reference considerably overshadowed by analysis.

The role of the pandemic in this process of locally framed self-description works in complicated ways. It reinforced these two diarists’ self-attributed outsider status, especially as less-than-effective local behavioral and policy responses to the pandemic became evident. For D50, the pandemic and the national political crisis intensified his discomfort even as it lessened the salience of place. His entries during the pandemic, as well as his responses to two directives related to that topic, have comparatively little to say about the town. ‘It's difficult for me to say with much certainty what's going on around the city, since we go out so seldom’, he wrote in early January, 2021, as the winter Covid wave peaked (D50, January 3, 2021). D50's focus is driven both inwards and outwards in ways that deemphasize locality: he becomes severely ill, most likely after contracting the coronavirus, while national and global threats frame his viewpoint, informing his daily thoughts and feelings. In a diary of September 24, 2020, he implicitly apologizes to his future readers for paying less attention than normal to pressing national matters. Having recounted a list of what he sees as outrages, including ‘anonymous paramilitary squads pulling protesters off the streets in unmarked vehicles’, he introduces ‘my own urgent hospitalization and near-death, which, while hardly a national emergency, nor even my first close encounter with death, was still a pretty big deal to me’ (D50, September 24, 2020). When the pandemic does prompt observations about social conditions, they tend to be generalized and extra-local. Even his few localized observations about the pandemic are framed within national phenomena that get much more space in his accounts: he expresses ‘a great deal of fear and disgust vis-a-vis the political situation in this country—particularly in this state’ but his complaints quickly take on national terms: ‘The unpleasant behaviors one sees from supporters of the current regime … people who take pride in their tribal identification with it, but are fine with the suffering of (mostly poorer, browner) others’ (D50, September 24, 2020). Lacking a life-time arc determined by a career/professional script, the self that D50 constructs sees a future that is shared and apocalyptic. Once his accounting of everyday personal events is complete, his own narrative largely disappears into this collective future. His pandemic experience steers his consciousness to the poles of the ultra-personal and the national/global: his life-threatening illness uncharacteristically dominates one diary, and his characteristic political criticism almost entirely subsumes the local within the global and national.

In this light, it is interesting that Diarist A23, whose autobiographical narrative is usually grounded in a future-oriented arc of preparation and movement, sees the future recede from the foreground in his writing even as he continues to register his stance towards Muncie, combining continued criticism with some softening towards, even partial identification with, the community. The early pandemic drives him indoors, like many others. Essentially on paid leave from work, his view of the future is reversed: formerly anxious for the future to arrive, he now wants time to slow down, wants the medium-term future, which bodes his return to an in-person job involving lots of interpersonal interaction, to approach less slowly. Later, his mother-in-law dies, severing a tie to the region but also forcing an emphasis on the everyday as he and his partner deal with her death. Displaced in all this are the anxieties structural to his future orientation—such as the fear that his ‘Muncie escape strategy’ is lagging behind. He still sees the signs of social pathology but they are not linked to his future-oriented narrative of escape, and a gradual, partial affiliation with the community grows. In our directive on time and the pandemic, as he looks forward warily to going back to face-to-face work, he anticipates that ‘folks will be so much harder to control when they walk into our building being maskless’:

Many co-workers are dreading it; at least this company is one of the VERY FEW in town to take mask mandates seriously; we will absolutely remove anyone not complying, and many patrons are not used to being watched and controlled like that … often responding with hostility. (A23, May 12, 2021)

While local particulars are at play here, informing his apprehension about the return to face-to-face work, such concerns are more muted and general than A23's earlier representations of Muncie. Just before the pandemic, having read one of his diaries on the EDLM blog and determined that his tone was excessively ‘grumpy’, this writer had resolved upon taking part in ‘something very positive for the city’ (A23, February 20, 2020). This positive turn re-emerges mid-pandemic with a closing resolve to make the most of the next few days before he returns to the office: ‘Time used wisely. Not wasted. Valued. Filled with goodness. I am grateful for the people I know here. I love them.’ To some extent, A23's physical disengagement with the city coexists with a gathering, provisional commitment and an intensified affection for individual fellow citizens, while the ambiguity that has descended over the future and the urgencies of the present displace his narrative of economic and geographical mobility.

While these two diarists record distinct, highly individual experiences and feelings, they are among many of our accounts in which personal futures and the city recede in prominence during the pandemic. Both of these elements—an agentic sense of the future as linked with the past and present, and an understanding of one's relationship to place, ideally described as ‘belonging’—are ordinarily important grist for life writing. But, along with more daily ways that the pandemic disrupted our experience of time, the pandemic obscured the future and, by driving people indoors, shifted their focus away from the community in which they live. These upsets worked (perhaps temporary) changes on a structure of feeling in Muncie—one that, we expect, exists in similar communities with comparable histories, where life narratives of progress, growth, and upward mobility emerge in dialogue with a local narrative of decline and tenuous rebirth. For people who live in such places, one's sense of the past and dreams of the future are intertwined with the history and prospects of the locality, in individual and highly articulated ways but largely contained within a matrix of belonging and unbelonging, affiliation and nonaffiliation, and optimism or pessimism about the local future. The pandemic scrambled these fundamentals, rendering personal and collective (local and national) futures ambiguous while reorienting attention both beyond the local (to national and global threats) and to the ultra-local arena of the home, where daily life is consumed with the vicissitudes of getting by. In that sense our writers’ experience confirms May's sense that time is equally important to place in establishing a workable level of belonging—even if that belonging is partial, extending only to friends, family, and coworkers rather than to the larger community. Indeed, the time disruptions wrought by the pandemic at least temporarily transformed the life stories available to our writers, leaving some, such as A23 and B37, to look to a nearer future grounded in the hyper-local space of the back garden, the intimate sphere of the family, or a few close friendships.

What will be the long-term effects of this disruption? Will the experience of forced disconnection from life narratives of ambition and upward mobility raise lasting skepticism about the quest for the good life, whether that fantasy resides ‘here’ or ‘elsewhere’? Will individuals shift their focus to the local and the everyday and commit to the community, and if so, will it last? Or will the weight of global and national crises continue to delocalize politics and the life world? To what extent will other pre-Covid dynamics reassert themselves? Will the locale’s longer-term role in the construction of life narratives revert to a matrix delimited by boosters and critics—a new normal that would look distinctly like the old normal? Time, with all its complexities, will tell.