Forced to live in the present : older people's temporal experiences of the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Forced to live in the present : older people's temporal experiences of the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press Published version Leinonen, Emilia; Era, Salla Leinonen, E., & Era, S. (2024). Forced to live in the present : older people's temporal experiences of the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ageing and society, Early online. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0144686x2400014x 2024 ARTICLE Forced to live in the present: older people’s temporal experiences of the lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic Emilia Leinonen and Salla Era Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, Centre of Excellence in Research on Ageing and Care, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland Corresponding author: Emilia Leinonen; Email: [email protected] (Accepted 5 February 2024) Abstract This article explores the temporalities experienced by persons aged 70 years and over during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Finland. Although the temporalities of the pandemic have been analysed from multiple perspectives, we contribute to this line of research in two ways. First, we show how deeply the pandemic affected older people’s experiences of temporality. Second, we further develop the concept of forced present to highlight the consequences that the restriction measures had on older persons’situations and perceptions of temporality. More specifically, we asked the following question: How did older people perceive time (past, present and future) during the pandemic? We used thematic analysis to examine a dataset consisting of written letters (N = 77) collected between April and June 2020. The findings showed that social isolation forced older people to live in the present without being able to plan their near future because they had no knowledge of when they would be ‘free’again, which made some participants feel anxious and depressed. Furthermore, we found that the present became intertwined with the personal past as well as with the collective past, as evidenced by participants’descriptions of war, previous pandemics and hardships. This article deepens our understanding of older people’s everyday lives during the pandemic and highlights the problematic nature of social isolation of older people as a safety measure. Overall, this article reveals the particularity of older people’s experiences in unequal pandemic times and the ageism inherent in the restriction measures. Keywords: COVID-19; Finland; forced present; lockdown; older people; temporalities Introduction Daily life involves mundane events and tasks that generally happen at the same time and in the same order. These routines help us make sense of the everyday life around us –that is, to keep it predictable, continuous and safe (Scott, 2009). © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. Ageing & Society (2024), 1–18 doi:10.1017/S0144686X2400014X https://doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X2400014X Published online by Cambridge University Press This continuity was severely disrupted during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly for older people. In Finland, during the first three months of the pandemic, the government recommended that persons over 70 years of age isolate themselves as a safety measure. When this recommendation was issued, no one knew how long the social isolation period would actually last. For instance, in May 2020, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, estimated that social isolation measures could last until the end of 2020 (Beck and Morris, 2020). The Finnish social isolation recommendation was formulated in an obligatory tone, stating that people aged 70 years and over ‘are obliged to refrain from contact with other persons’and should stay ‘in quarantine-like conditions’(Government of Finland, 2020). Furthermore, the government requested ‘people over 70 to avoid close contact and movement outside their homes’(Government of Finland, 2020). This recommendation had multiple consequences: older people were suddenly confined to their immediate surroundings, also in a temporal sense, and had to reconstruct their daily lives in new ways to maintain a safe distance from others. In this article, we are interested in how the pandemic and the social isolation measures affected older people’s temporalities, that is, their perceptions of time and the social organisation of time, and their orientation in the new everyday life. To this end, we examined the meanings and experiences of time during the social isolation period by analysing written letters collected from older people between April and June 2020. Although experiences of temporality during the pandemic have been analysed from multiple perspectives (e.g. Loose et al., 2021; Velasco et al., 2021; Howell, 2022), few studies have explored older people’s views. Research on older people and their temporal experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic has mainly concentrated on coping strategies and future time perspectives. For instance, ‘to have time for something’has been conceptualised as a coping strategy for older people during the COVID-19 crisis: by accepting the current situation, older persons could find security and gain control of their lives if they viewed the restriction measures as temporary, as Verhage et al.(2021) demonstrated in the Dutch context. Chronological age has been shown to be a central factor in perceived time. For example, a study by Rupprecht et al.(2022: 268) on COVID-19 and time perspectives revealed that ‘older age was related to weaker future time opportunity, weaker future time extension, stronger future time constraint and lower death anxiety’. Particularly at the start of the pandemic, those individuals who anticipated the potential damage of the coronavirus disease to be more severe perceived more limited future time perspectives (Rupprecht et al., 2022)–that is, they expected less from the future in terms of the remaining lifetime and opportunities in the upcoming years. In this article, we contribute to this line of research in two ways. First, we empirically show how deeply the pandemic affected older people’s experiences of temporality. Second, we further develop the concept of the forced present (Read and Leathwood, 2018) to highlight the consequences that the restriction measures had on older persons’situations and perceptions of temporality. More specifically, in our study, we asked the following question: How did older people perceive time (past, present and future) during the social isolation period? Our aim was to understand what it meant for older persons to be forced to remain in social isolation, 2 E Leinonen and S Era https://doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X2400014X Published online by Cambridge University Press which, during the early months of the pandemic, seemed unending. In terms of analytical framework, we used Mead’s(1932) nonlinear theory of time to show how the past and the future were reinterpreted and anticipated from the present crisis perspective –that is, from ‘pandemic times’. We argue that social isolation forced older people to live in the present without being able to plan their near futures as they had no knowledge of when they would be ‘free’again. Furthermore, we show how the unending present of the COVID-19 pandemic was also a collective experience, as evidenced by the participants’descriptions of war, previous pandemics and hardships. Overall, this article reveals the particularity of older people’s experiences in pandemic times and the ageism inherent in the restriction measures. From the present to the past and the future In social scientific analyses of time and temporality, postmodern life has been described as fast, accelerating and hectic (e.g. Wajcman, 2008; Rosa, 2013). Scholars have argued that people generally lack time for meaningful things (Parkins, 2004) and suffer from time poverty (Wajcman, 2008); in other words, time has become compressed (Adam, 2007; Wajcman, 2008). In fact, due to its fragmented and short-term nature, modern time has been described as ‘instantaneous time’that accelerates beyond human consciousness (Urry, 2000). In addition to being hectic, the temporal space of the present has come to encompass the future, which has been conceptualised as ‘presentification’(Leccardi, 2005) or the ‘extended present’(Nowotny, 1994); both concepts refer to an extended sense of the present whereby the future is perceived as already ‘here and now’(the future is in the present) or beyond confident imagination (the future time perspective does not exist). As Suckert (2021) put it, the acceleration of the capitalistic time regime has turned the future into a field of dissolution as well as a field that needs to be constantly measured, scheduled and forecasted. However, the pandemic collided with this time regime by halting societies and social life, and revealing the unequal temporal autonomies of different social groups (Suckert, 2021). One such ‘group’that suffered from unequal temporal autonomy during the pandemic was older persons. In Finland, the recommendation to self-isolate concerned more than 870,000 people –that is, over 15 per cent of the Finnish population. The recommendation stemmed from the fact that older persons were more likely to contract a more severe form of the virus. The recommendation was lifted on 20 May 2020, but some agespecific recommendations remained. As older people were still a risk group, they had to maintain contact with others remotely (i.e. by phone) and meet their relatives outside, without any physical contact such as hugging. In addition, visits to nursing homes were prohibited (Finnish Institute of Health and Welfare, 2020; Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, 2020). In addition to the most severe consequences of the pandemic, a survey conducted by the Finnish Pensioner’s Federation with persons aged 60 years and over reported the further effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, 57 per cent of the respondents reported decreased mobility outside the home, 55 per cent stated that they had fewer hobbies than before and 49 per cent had less contact with other people (60+ Barometer, 2021). Ageing & Society 3 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X2400014X Published online by Cambridge University Press It has been argued, however, that older persons in general had more resilience towards the pandemic because they could reflect on the current situation in relation to their past experiences (Perez-Rojo et al.2022). Therefore, to analyse how the past and the future were intertwined with the present in older persons’everyday life perceptions during the pandemic, we followed Mead’s(1932) nonlinear theory of time. According to the nonlinear theory of time, situations are constantly (re)interpreted through interactions with others as well as with memories of the past and expectations for the future (Barken, 2014). Moreover, not only is the present interpreted through past and future, but the past and future are interpreted through the present –in a sense, the past, present and future ‘bleed’into one another. Thus, for Mead, the present is constantly evolving and moving, and the past and the future are formed in and by the present. Mead calls this constant change the ‘specious present’, which signifies an individual’s capacity to interpret and anticipate the future (Mead, 1932; Kubala and Hoření Samec, 2021), meaning that there is no static, single present. Thus, the present represents what is happening and the future everything that could happen (Mead, 1932; Flaherty and Fine, 2001). As people tend to anticipate incoming events, the future is both hypothetical and immediate –that is, defined by uncertainty as well as anticipation (Mead, 1932). Meanwhile, the past is the terrain for the interpretation of ‘facts’(Flaherty and Fine, 2001) because past events gain new meanings in the light of emerging events (Mead, 1932). Maines et al.(1983) identified the following four dimensions in Mead’s theory of the reinterpretative past: symbolic past, social-structural past, objective past and mythical past. Symbolically reconstructed past involves people redefining past events to make them meaningful in the present. Social-structural past refers to the ways in which past events generate probable future events without determining them. Objective past is the established understanding of what existed in the past. Finally, mythical past refers to the symbolic creations of the past that may not be grounded in reality. In this article, in addition to employing the nonlinear theory of time, we use and further develop the concept of the forced present. This concept is related to the aforementioned concepts of the extended present (Nowotny, 1994) and presentification (Leccardi, 2005). In previous research, forced present has been used only, to the best of our knowledge, to describe the precariousness of academic labour in terms of the reduced ability to confidently plan the future, e.g. early career academics can get stuck in the present because the future is uncertain, as work contracts are frequently short term (Read and Leathwood, 2018). The same kind of precariousness could be found in the situation of older people during the pandemic. As Adam (2007) wrote, ‘The future matters.’However, we argue that, for instance, it matters differently for adolescents than for older people, whose time horizon is already limited. For Leccardi (2005), presentification is a privileged strategy of biographical construction among young people because they can foresee only the present or the very near future. For example, in Leccardi’s study, higher education students saw their futures only until graduation, as what came after was beyond confident imagination. However, in terms of older people, particularly the oldest old, this privilege often turns into a kind of forced presenteeism because they, literally, have no time to wait. Furthermore, under social isolation, the 4 E Leinonen and S Era https://doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X2400014X Published online by Cambridge University Press present is not filled to the brim (Nowotny, 1994; Brannen, 2005); instead, the present is full of ‘nothing’–that is, cancelled events, the absence of other people and the social emptiness of everyday life (Scott, 2017; Leinonen, 2022). With the concept of forced present, we want to emphasise the disruptive nature of the social isolation period on older people’s perceptions of the continuity and predictability of their everyday lives. Data and method Our data consisted of written letters from persons aged 70 years and over in Finland. The call for letters was published in early April 2020 and remained open until the end of June 2020. The call was distributed mostly through social media, particularly Facebook, because of the relatively high number of social media users in Finland (in 2020, 46% of the share of persons aged 65–74 years and 16% of the total share of persons aged 75–89 years; Statistics Finland, 2023). This decision, however, limited the number of potential writers. To be more inclusive, we also made a bulletin that was published in four regional newspapers. In the letters we received, a total of 13 participants wrote that they had either seen the newspaper article about the call or had been told about it by family or friends. This means that some of the participants did not use social media at all. The aim of the call was to collect older people’s experiences about the situation and social isolation. By choosing to use letters as a medium to collect the experiences, we were able to reach older persons from different parts of Finland without needing to use, for instance, the snowballing method. Furthermore, there were no research projects going on through which we could have been able to contact potential participants. As Morgan et al.(2023) have stated, the strengths of using written letters as a data collection method are that they provide greater distance and confidentiality between the writer and the researchers since the writers were able to participate anonymously. In addition, compared for instance to interviews, this method gave more power and self-determination to the writers as they were able to correct and change their way of thinking more freely and easily while writing. The method also allowed them to decide how much time they wanted to use for writing. However, compared to interviews, we were not able to ask follow-up questions. The data collection method also meant that the participants were to be able to write, either by hand or by computer. In the call, we asked potential participants to write openly about their situations and possible changes in their surroundings, including their living environments, homes, received services and daily lives. Participants were specifically encouraged to write about how they experienced the restrictions and the recommendation to remain in quarantine-like conditions that the government recommended for persons over 70 years of age. Regarding background, participants were asked to provide information on their gender, age, where and with whom they lived, and family relations. The call for letters was geared to be as open as possible to foster free expression without the risk of writers interpreting the call as a structured questionnaire asking for a short answer to each question. The writers could provide their accounts anonymously, but in case they were willing to participate in a possible follow-up enquiry, they were asked to give their names and contact information. Three Ageing & Society 5 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X2400014X Published online by Cambridge University Press means of sending the letters were established: by regular mail, by secure email or by using an anonymous Webropol survey tool. During the data collection process, we followed the ethical guidelines of the Finnish National Board on Research Integrity (TENK, 2019). Information on data protection, the use of personal data, the rights of the participants and the purpose of the study were posted on the university’s website to ensure that the participants could make an informed decision regarding participation. The policy on data and privacy protection was also available as simplified text on the website. We received 41 letters by email, 20 by mail and 16 by Webropol, which amounted to 77 letters in total. The age of the participants ranged from 70 to 93 years based on those writers who disclosed their age (N = 66). The median age was 73 years and the average age was 75.7 years. Although most writers were in their seventies, there were 13 writers over the age of 80 and three over the age of 90. The participants were mostly women (75% of those who disclosed gender, N = 72). The majority (60%) lived with a spouse, while the rest lived alone. Regarding regions, most of the letters came from Southern Finland, Central Finland, Northern Finland and Lapland. The length of the letters varied, with the shortest being only a few lines and the longest 69 pages. The typical length was approximately one and a half pages, and the whole dataset amounted to 300 Word pages in total. The topics were diverse and included topics such as feelings, hobbies, technology, family members and visits, and the importance of nature, as well as larger themes such as climate change and the labour market. Method We became specifically interested in the descriptions of time in our dataset when we read a letter by an older woman who stated, ‘At least I have time now.’We wondered what it meant to ‘have time’or that ‘time feels empty’, particularly in such unusual circumstances as the pandemic. In our study, we employed the method of thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006,2019). First, we read through the whole dataset in Atlas.ti 22 using a highly open coding strategy: we coded all sections in the letters that described time, temporality, past, future, rhythms and duration with the simple code ‘time’. As a result, we obtained 99 quotations (from 33 different letters, 38 pages in total, single-spaced lines). While rereading the dataset, we started paying attention to descriptions of ‘living in the present’and ‘not knowing when this will end’. Among the letters, a particularly striking comment came from a 93-year-old woman who wrote that ‘time was stolen from us, older persons’. This led us to consider how people over 70 years of age were forced to live in the present because their possibilities of planning their futures suddenly decreased significantly. At the same time, the writers also reflected on and compared their memories about past pandemics, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident and other hardships to the present moment. In a sense, the past and the future were ‘bleeding’into the present. After reading Mead’s(1932)The Philosophy of the Present, we decided to use his nonlinear theory of time as an analytical tool to explore how the perspectives of time changed during the pandemic. As a result, we reorganised our dataset into the following three main themes: forced to live in the present, the present interpreted through the past and uncharted 6 E Leinonen and S Era https://doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X2400014X Published online by Cambridge University Press future. It is important to note, as Mead argued, that the present, the past and the future are not isolated themes; instead, they are intertwined, as will be made evident by our findings, which we present next. Findings Our findings are organised as follows: first we present the theme ‘forced to live in the present’which consists of descriptions of how ‘everything stopped’, how time felt monotonous and how the writers felt that they were imprisoned. The second theme, ‘the present interpreted through the past’, includes descriptions of previous pandemics and wartime, as well as reflections on the collective aspect of the pandemic period. The third theme, ‘uncharted future’, deals with anticipations and projections regarding the future, as well as fears of being forgotten. Forced to live in the present The pandemic stopped the familiar flow of time, which, during ‘normal times’,is filled with events and temporal landmarks, such as upcoming birthday parties, weekends and national holidays. As Velasco et al.(2021: 451) wrote, ‘a temporality without events is a boundless temporality, and this in itself is disorienting’. In the data, some of the participants felt that linear time stopped completely, while others saw time as becoming ‘specious’because there was not as much to do as before (see also Velasco et al., 2021). The quotations exemplify how it felt to be forced to live in the present: It felt like everything stopped. Fear crept into my mind, too. Every day, we watched current affairs programmes, different kinds of reports, experts’views and listened to ministers and people of health. I didn’t have time to do much else than try to listen and understand and in that way be up to date with this corona situation … There were so many questions, and we lived day by day with the unpredictability. We needed to live every day, however. We had to construct our everyday life somehow. (Female, 71 years old) Weekdays and Sundays are more and more entangled in a monotonous life. At times, I have to stop and think which weekday it is. Since we are pensioners, weekdays haven’t meant so much to us before, but there were, however, stages that kept our life in a traditional week rhythm. (Male, 71 years old) The need to stay up to date with the whole situation clearly affected the writers’ experiences of their daily lives. In the first quotation, the writer describes attempting to make sense of the situation by staying up to date to the point where she felt that she did not have time for anything else, being bound to the present moment. The second writer, however, felt more disoriented because there were no specific events that would structure his week. Both quotations highlight the importance of a sense of continuity and predictability in our daily lives. The first writer attempted to maintain continuity by keeping herself up to date with the constantly evolving situation, while for the second writer, the present and the future blended into a monotonous life with little diversity. Ageing & Society 7 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X2400014X Published online by Cambridge University Press For some participants, the experience of being forced to live in the present was even more severe, producing connotations of imprisonment: Being home alone makes life like a life sentence in an open prison. In Finland, life in prison means 12 years, but it’s probable that the corona will not have disappeared by that time. (Anonymous) Life goes on like this, however, but occasionally, it feels distressing. Like being a prisoner in your own home. Not [only] because of that, but because someone else has decided about this kind of quarantine. Nobody asked me anything, even though I see myself as someone who can make decisions about their own life and understand my situation by being careful enough, if needed. (Female, 70 years old) That they say that this all [restrictions] has been done in order to keep us from getting ill is quite a hypocritical reason. I say this because I believe that the real reason is that they fear there’s not enough medical capacity if we get ill. There’sno room for baby boomers in care homes. It’s better to keep us as prisoners in our homes because they believe that especially people over 70 years of age would get more seriously ill if they were infected by the virus. I’mhavingveryunorthodox thoughts. As in, why should I even live anymore. (Female, 75 years old) These connotations of imprisonment are worth further analysis. Previous research has shown that when life is paused because of, for example, incarceration, the perception of time shifts from clock time to social time (e.g. meal times or lock-up time) and personal time (e.g. self-organised time to cope with the sentence by reading books) (Brown, 1998). Similarly, in our study, older people organised their days according to personal time and social time by following current affairs and government news: We quickly realised that the structure of the day was important. In the morning, wake up at half past six, morning coffee and magazines, Yle’s [the Finnish Broadcasting Company’s] morning TV. Then, go for a jog in the morning. Lunch. Household chores (one chore for every day), afternoon coffee, crafts, reading, dinner. The evening was ‘our own time’for both of us so that we wouldn’t quite get on each other’s nerves. (Female, 72 years old) When I wake up, I read the newspapers online and see if something new and interesting has come up. After the newspaper session, it’s time for breakfast. Then, noon is usually filled with reading. As I told you, I follow social life on a daily basis, and part of it is watching the plenary sessions of the parliament. (Male, 71 years old) As the above quotes show, in terms of time, the situation of older persons was difficult also because they had no knowledge of how long their ‘sentences’would last. However, it is important to note that this feeling of being imprisoned depended significantly on how strictly the restrictions were interpreted: some of the participants did not leave their apartments, while others continued living quite normally, or at least as normally as the rest. In a way, some older people imprisoned themselves in their homes, not because of free choice, but because they interpreted the recommendation in such a way that they had to. These descriptions show the precariousness of older people’s situations and how deeply social isolation also affected their identities and places in society. 8 E Leinonen and S Era https://doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X2400014X Published online by Cambridge University Press having a more severe infection –was understandable at the beginning of the pandemic, this does not remove the fact that time was, in a sense, stolen from older people. In Finland, the age-specific restriction measures were largely lifted in June 2020, after which all further restrictions concerned everyone. This highlights the ambivalent nature of restriction measures targeted only to certain age groups. As it has been stated by Vasara et al.(2023), ageist, ableist and paternalistic views on older people have been posed during the pandemic in different countries. On one hand, there has been an emphasis on dependency and vulnerability of older people in pandemic-related policies around the world; on the other hand, older people have been seen as resilient, ever-coping individuals –as representatives of successful ageing and the third age (Higgs and Gilleard, 2014; Naughton et al., 2021; Vasara et al., 2023). Both of these views put older people in the same homogeneous category which easily leads to either over-protection or lack of understanding of vulnerable positions and situations. These contrasting views were also present in our findings as those writers in their seventies were more inclined to resist the restrictions than the writers in their eighties and nineties (Leinonen, 2022). In a sense, for the participants in their seventies, ageism towards them was seen as putting them into the category of ‘oldhood’which in itself is a form of ageism towards people ‘who are really old’. In this article, we do not argue that older people were prevented from exercising their temporal agency completely. In fact, many participants wrote about the new ways in which they restructured their daily lives according to the restrictions, even claiming that they were enjoying their new ways of living (see also e.g. Tiilikainen et al., 2021; Leinonen, 2022). However, we argue that there is a lack of understanding regarding the temporality of the pandemic as a forced present, which affected (and continues to affect) millions of people around the world. Furthermore, we believe that the concept of the forced present can be beneficial for understanding temporal inequalities. For instance, for younger people, in temporal sense, decision-making was in their hands because they could choose how to spend their time –according to recommendations, of course. However, even though they were not binding, the government’s recommendations and restrictions for older persons were stricter. Due to these age-related restrictions, older people could not manage their time in a similar manner as others. It seems that the time of older people is not as important as that of others, despite the fact that it is the only time they have left in their lives. During COVID-19, because of the visiting restrictions, many older people died without their relatives by their side. To force older people to live in the present, and sometimes without contact with their loved ones, meant that the quality of their time was diminished, particularly due to the limited quantity of time they possessed. In the end, the pandemic did not slow down the acceleration of our times –instead, it left many people behind. Overall, it is important to note that the participants of this study are mainly older people who are relatively healthy, able and willing to participate in such a study, and whose lives seemed to be at least relatively active. This means that we cannot claim that the empirical results of this study concern every older person in Finland. The situation of older people in care homes, especially those of the oldest and most frail, was certainly more difficult, as shown, for instance, in the study of Paananen et al.(2021). Thus, we can assume that those people in the most Ageing & Society 15 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X2400014X Published online by Cambridge University Press vulnerable situation could not participate in this study. However, we see that the concept of forced present could also be utilised in analysing their temporal experiences. Further research is certainly needed on the temporalities of ‘oldhood’and the ways time becomes a source of inequality. Acknowledgements. We wish to thank all those persons who decided to write to us and participate in the study. Financial support. 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