One of the chief features of this global crisis is that we find ourselves in a shifting landscape. The resulting disorientation extends beyond health research and into many domains of our individual and collective lives. We suffer from political disorientation (the need for a radical shift in economic thinking), from social disorientation (the rearrangement of social dynamics based on distancing measures), and from temporal disorientation (the warping of our sense of time during lockdown), to name but a few. This generalised state of disorientation has substantial effects on wellbeing and decision making. In this paper, we review the multiple dimensions of disorientation of the COVID-19 crisis and use state-of-the art research on disorientation to gain insight into the social, psychological and political dynamics of the current pandemic. Just like standard, spatial cases of disorientation, the non-spatial forms of disorientation prevalent in the current crisis consist in the mismatch between our frames of reference and our immediate experience, and they result in anxiety, helplessness and isolation, but also in the possibility of re-orienting. The current crisis provides a unique environment in which to study non-spatial forms of disorientation. In turn, existing knowledge about spatial disorientation can shed light on the shifting landscape of the COVID-19 pandemic.<br /><br />Key messages<br /><ul><li>Growing evidence suggests that the COVID-19 crisis has been disorienting across domains.</li><br /><li>Disorientation is a metacognitive feeling monitoring both spatial and non-spatial tasks.</li><br /><li>Temporal disorientation was fostered by the pandemic’s counterintuitive temporality.</li><br /><li>Disorientation mitigation can facilitate new social and political frames of reference to emerge.</li></ul>

People have experienced many forms of temporal disorientation during the Covid-19 crisis. For this study, we collected a rich corpus of reports on the multifaceted experiences of disorientation during the pandemic. In this paper, we study the resulting corpus using a descriptive approach. We identify six emerging themes: temporal rift; temporal vertigo; impoverished time; tunnel vision; spatial and social scaffolding of time; suspended time. We offer a phenomenological analysis of each of the themes. Based on the phenomenological analysis, we draw a key distinction between episodic and existential forms of temporal disorientation, and we argue that the Covid-19 crisis is best conceptualised as a period of suspended time.

Time dilation was experienced in most countries and across the several years of the Covid-19 crisis: the passage of time was deemed slower than before the pandemic, and the distance to the beginning of the pandemic seemed longer than it really was. An outstanding question is how these two aspects of time judgements relate to other temporal, social and affective disturbances. We developed and validated a 59-item questionnaire to explore these questions. 3306 participants completed the questionnaire in France in May and June 2021. Here, we analyse group differences and find that both slow passage of time and long distance judgements were associated with larger disturbances across all domains under study. These included temporal disruptions—the aptness to project oneself into the future, the sense of a rift between pre-pandemic and pandemic time, the ability to locate oneself in time, the capacity to recall the order of past events—, as well as an overall sense of social disorientation, and trauma-specific disturbances. In contrast, both fast passage of time and short distance judgements were associated with beneficial effects across all of the mentioned domains. Our results indicate that perceived passage of time and temporal distance judgements are key indicators of social and temporal disorientation.