Researchers from the University of Bristol and the University of Kent identified three distinct ways that Mass Observation writers’ reset the way they imagined their future during a time of great uncertainty.  

As part of a larger collaborative programme that investigated people’s lived experiences of time during the unfolding Covid-19 pandemic in the UK, 'Feeling, making and imagining time: Everyday temporal experiences in the Covid-19 pandemic', this research analysed 228 submissions to Mass Observation and data from ‘feel tanks’, where small groups explore a specific feeling about time, such as stuckness or acceleration. 

In developing the concept of recalibration to understand the ongoing and multiple adjustments of present-future relations, researchers observed from prompts on rhythms and routines, homelife, media and technology and waiting, that futures were recalibrated either by a fissure, a standby or a reset.

In fissure respondents find it difficult to imagine the future because of the break between the present and future, in standby the present is expanded but there is alertness to the future and in reset futures are modestly and radically recalibrated through imagining life post-pandemic.

Feelings that fit these modes expressed by Mass Observation writers included:

• “My experience of time has radically changed recently. I try not to look forward anymore because disappointment is so hard to bear. I have become slightly agoraphobic about going out.”
  
  
• “The uncertainty and not knowing how long to wait for ‘normality’ will be the hardest part of this for me. It’s difficult to look forward to things in the future because we have no way of knowing whether they’ll happen.”
  
  
• “I developed a new exercise routine and have managed to fit it in around work, now that I’m off furlough. This is an incredibly positive result of Lockdown. I was able to resest my life and resume it in a much healthier direction.”

Professor Rebecca Coleman at Bristol Digital Futures Institute and the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol led the research and said:

“The way we can imagine our future is significant for our social life. During the Covid-19 pandemic when futures became very uncertain this research highlights how people shift, adapt and re-make their feelings about and relations with the future.  This is important to understand in the current climate with many uncertain factors such as the cost of living crisis, climate change and inter-generational wealth distribution.

“The next steps for this research is to focus more specifically on our digital futures with Bristol Digital Futures Institute, looking at the perspectives of minoritized people and communities with the aim of creating more inclusive and diverse processes of digital innovation.

“It’s important to note that the findings in this paper from Mass Observation are not representative of the UK population but as part of the wider project we included young people from diverse genders and race and class backgrounds.