Six years. Covid is six years ago. And yet, when we talk about it, everyone has the same reaction. That frown, that pout, then that sentence that comes back like a refrain:
"It was a century ago."
It is not just a turn of phrase. It is a symptom.
I recently tried to date a post-lockdown event. A dinner with friends, something quite simple. Was it in 2022? In 2023? Impossible to place. Not because it was insignificant. Rather as if the entire period had melted into a temporal magma where everything is there without anyone being able to grab anything.
By dint of talking about it around me, I realised that everyone felt the same thing. Not "some people". Everyone. It worked on me and as always when something is off, it kept me from sleeping.
I pulled the thread.
The scientific literature abundantly documents what it calls the "2020 effect" or "temporal disintegration". More than 65% of Americans surveyed reported, as early as 2020, difficulties distinguishing weekdays from weekends [1]. The days were melting into one another and time seemed both to stretch and to fly by.
A 2024 study measures something even more precise: for the pandemic period, subjects show the lowest values of autobiographical memory. They perceive this period as further away, slower and longer than what the calendar says [2].
Up to here, the classical explanation: lockdown removed the temporal landmarks. When every day is identical to the previous one, the brain does not create mnesic "bookmarks". And without bookmarks, no temporal structure. Without those structures, time compresses retrospectively.
But here is the problem: this explanation holds for 2020-2021. It does not explain why, six years later, the distortion persists.
Something else is going on. Something more insidious.
The problem is not the emptiness. It is the sterile overflow.
Since the end of lockdown, no one is living "less". It is even the opposite. Everyone is living at 200%, in a permanent regime of over-solicitation, saturation, cognitive overload. Social catch-up, professional catch-up, FOMO of lost time. We run, we fill up, we agitate. Except that this agitation produces no memories.
And this is where social media enters the scene. Not as the sole cause, but as the decisive catalyst. Because the digital habits acquired during lockdown did not dissipate when lockdown ended. They have become structural. Global daily screen time peaked in 2021 at 6h58 per day. Since then, it has only dropped by 20 minutes, stabilising around 6h40. That of teenagers has increased by nearly 30% between 2015 and 2021.
Scrolling, which was a palliative during Covid, has become a structural reflex. The brain no longer knows downtime. The days are therefore full of stimulation, but empty of memory.
Scrolling and our memory
Our retrospective perception of time does not rest on an internal clock. It rests on the density of stored memories. Warren Meck, cognitive neuroscientist at Duke University, puts it simply:
time perception is less a question of chronological duration than of density of memorable events [3].
This is what Claudia Hammond calls the Holiday Paradox [4]. On holiday, the brain encodes six to nine experiences per day. In the routine, six to nine per fortnight. A week of travel therefore seems retrospectively longer than three months of office. Not because the calendar lies, but because the brain assesses the time elapsed by counting its memories.
The opposite is also true, and this is where it concerns us directly. Periods without new experiences leave few memories. In retrospect, they seem shorter. There are no "memory speed-bumps" to slow our recall, and the result is a void in the mental chronology.
If social media destroys our ability to form memories, then it directly compresses our perception of lived time. It is a simple equation.
The first mechanism is passive scrolling. Watching a news feed scroll past without interacting only engages superficial visual and emotional circuits, contrary to a conversation, the reading of a book, a walk, which activate multiple brain regions [5].
Frequent use compromises memory through a mechanism of attentional disengagement that interferes with mnesic encoding.
This is what Soares and Storm showed in an experiment in a museum: visitors using Snapchat to document their visit remembered significantly less well than those who simply observed, the brain being mobilised on self-presentation rather than on memorisation [6].
Hours can disappear without leaving any trace. Because before leaving a trace, you have to create that trace…
The second mechanism is the externalisation of memory. When people expect to be able to retrieve information online, they retain less the information itself but remember better where to find it [7]. The internet has become an external transactive memory.
Social media takes this logic further by externalising not only facts, but our autobiographical memory. The "on this day", "one year ago", "your year" reminders end up substituting themselves for the memory itself.
The third mechanism is the most perverse:
scrolling fills the moments of rest when the brain should consolidate its memories.
The brain does not form its memories in real time. It consolidates them during rest periods, thanks to a specific neural network: the Default Mode Network (DMN). It is a set of interconnected brain regions that activate when the brain is at waking rest, during daydreaming, spontaneous thought, introspection. Not while you are vibecoding or prompting or copy/pasting, or when you are on a 996 rhythm to do like in Silicon Valley.
It is precisely what Socrates described as "a conversation the soul holds with itself". That Socratic "two-in-one" I evoked in AI, towards the extinction of inner dialogue? Well, it is also the neural network of mnesic consolidation.
The DMN forms the basic structure for "memory replay", those neural events where recently learned information is replayed to be transformed into a long-term memory [8].
Yang et al. have just confirmed it in 2025 through brain imaging:
only spaced learning, which leaves the brain time between sessions, produces this cortical replay.
Massed learning (doom scrolling) gives the same immediate performance, but the memories collapse after a month [9]. The difference between memories that last and those that fade is the rest time when the brain can consolidate these memories.
The neuropsychologist Kenneth Freundlich sums it up here: when one continually overloads the system, the brain loses its processing power. By overloading the circuits, one loses the essential periods of inactivity and pays the price through a deficit in short-term and long-term memory.
Every time we fill an idle moment with scrolling, whether in the metro, in the queue, in the toilet or before sleeping, we prevent the DMN from activating. We interrupt the replay. We prevent the memory from forming.
Let us also recall, while we are at it: the use of social media after learning increases forgetting more than wakeful rest. This effect persists in the short and long term. It is not even recovered by a night of sleep [10].
Sophie Leroy formalised in 2009 the concept of "attention residue": when one switches from a task A to a task B, part of the attention remains stuck on task A.
The brain has a fundamental need for completion, it does not let go [11]. Gloria Mark measured that it takes on average 23 minutes to recover full concentration after an interruption [12].
In a world where the smartphone is consulted 144 times a day on average, attention never fully reconstitutes itself. Each glance at Instagram between two meetings, each notification, each "just a quick check" interrupts the encoding of the experience in progress. The memory never forms.
Let us recap
First lock: permanent cognitive saturation. People came out of lockdown to resume a life at 200%, adding the digital habits acquired during lockdown. Palliative scrolling has become a structural reflex and the brain has no more downtime.
Second lock: the mnesic sterility of consumed content. Platforms bombard with information without anything being encoded. Passive scrolling delivers high-frequency stimuli. It is mentally expensive, but not memorable.
Covid created a crater in our chronology. And the frenzied post-Covid filling has only filled this crater with sand (hence my cover image), material that does not hold, that creates no solid mnesic structure.
We no longer create memories in the present.
Gorging on the present, starving the past
In The ultimate spoliation?, I described how Big Tech proceeds with a mass intellectual, cognitive, psychological and emotional spoliation. Expertise, creativity, intimacy. What I am describing here is a parallel form of spoliation, perhaps the most difficult to grasp at first:
the spoliation of our biography.
Not our expertise. Not our creativity. Our lived time. The raw material of our temporal identity, what makes it so that when we look back, we see a life and not a fog.
Every hour of scrolling is an hour erased from our subjective life. Not because it was not lived, but because it was never transformed into memory.
The loss of temporal landmark that everyone has felt since Covid is proportional to the loss of memory creation. It is not a metaphor. It is a well-documented neurological mechanism.
We are gorging ourselves on content. Literally. We scroll, we consume, we swallow hours of flow.
It is gorging in the proper sense: we force ingestion well beyond the capacity of digestion. And mnesic consolidation is precisely that: the digestion of experience.
Without it, the lived crosses the brain without depositing itself there. Like when you go to McDonald's but you are hungry again one hour later.
Once this mechanism is realised, the risk is major:
This gorging in the present destroys our future past.
I use this expression deliberately. What we are living today is meant to become, tomorrow, our memories. Our future past. The material from which the story of our life will be made when we look back in five, ten, twenty years. Except that this overloaded, supersaturated present will turn into nothing. It consumes itself on the spot without leaving mnesic residue. It is a single-use, disposable present, which will never be transformed into biography.
As always with these questions we come to the fateful question: what is man without memory? Not the memory of facts, the one Google or Wikipedia can store. The memory of the self. The autobiographical memory.
The one that makes it so that I know who I am because I remember what I have lived.
Paul Ricœur devoted a good part of his work to this question. For him, personal identity is a narrative identity. We are the story we tell ourselves about our own life. Not a collection of traits, not a LinkedIn profile, not a series of Instagram stories. A story, with coherence, a plot, episodes that respond to one another.
Without memories, there is no story. Without a story, there is no identity.
One can in fact observe in patients suffering from Alzheimer's disease what the progressive erasure of autobiographical memory produces: even before no longer recognising others, they no longer recognise themselves. The person dissolves. It is not only the past that disappears, it is the self. What we are collectively doing with digital gorging is a slow, diffuse, voluntary version of the same process. It would be a serious pathology if it were not a way of life.
Arendt, again, wrote in The Human Condition that man distinguishes himself from the animal by his capacity to inscribe his acts in a history, to make of them a transmissible story. It is "action" in Arendt's sense: what deserves to be told because it is inscribed in a duration, a memory, a common world.
What becomes of action when nothing is inscribed any more? When the present consumes itself without trace? We do not fall into forgetting in the classical sense.
We fall into something murkier: a life without temporal thickness. A flat existence, where everything is there and nothing remains. (cf. Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society)
In The era of artificial emptiness, I evoked the slide from Homo Faber to Homo Digitalis and the threat of Homo Nihilis. I can now specify what this nothingness-man would be. It is not a man deprived of work or thought.
It is a man deprived of past, whose present never settles. Who lives without thickness. Who advances without leaving prints. A being without a story, in the most literal sense of the term.
The Holiday Paradox proves that the mechanism is reversible. It is enough to reintroduce novelty, presence and rest for the brain to start encoding dense memories again. A week of travel can weigh more in memory than six months of routine.
The prescription is simple, even if it is difficult to apply in a world deliberately designed to capture every second of our attention: we must accept being bored.
Because boredom is the soil of memories. And memories are what anchor us in time. What makes it so that when we look back, we see a life. Not a flow. Not a fog. Not a "century ago" where there are only six years.
I ended The ultimate spoliation? with this question: "What will be left of us once the spoliation is complete?"
I can now be more precise. If we continue to gorge ourselves on a present that never settles, not even the memory of what we have been will remain.
And a being without memory of itself is no longer called a man. It is called a user.
References
[1] Holman, E. A., et al. (2022). Temporal disintegration during the COVID-19 pandemic. Psychological Trauma, 14(S1), S63-S72.
[2] Castellà, J., & Muro, A. (2024). 2020 feels slow, long, and far away: Time distortion due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 38(2), e4182.
[3] Wittmann, M., et al. (2025). The real reason the last decade of our life seems to fly by. PsyArXiv / Psychology Today.
[4] Hammond, C. (2012). Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception. Canongate Books.
[5] PMC (2020). Social Media Bytes: Daily associations between social media use and everyday memory failures across the adult life span. Journals of Gerontology, 75(3), 540-550.
[6] Soares, J. S., & Storm, B. C. (2018). Forget in a flash: A further investigation of the photo-taking-impairment effect. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 7(1), 154-160.
[7] Sparrow, B., Liu, J., & Wegner, D. M. (2011). Google effects on memory. Science, 333(6043), 776-778.
[8] Battaglia, F. P., et al. (2022). Replay, the default mode network and the cascaded memory systems model. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 23, 628-640.
[9] Yang, Y., et al. (2025). Time-dependent consolidation mechanisms of durable memory in spaced learning. Communications Biology, 8, 535.
[10] Dewar, M., et al. (2020). Effects of wakeful resting versus social media usage after learning on the retention of new memories. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 34(2), 551-558.
[11] Leroy, S. (2009). Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2), 168-181.
[12] Mark, G. (2023). Attention Span. Hanover Square Press.