Sammendrag
The current generation of youths certainly had a different youthhood in comparison to the previous generations of youths. After all, they had to experience a pandemic during their youth. These are bold statements to make, under the assumption that the pandemic had a strong effect on experiences. Since the onset of the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, governments around the world variously put preventive measures in place in order to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Implementing preventive measures that sought to put more distance between individuals meant that (almost) everyone was affected by the pandemic, regardless of whether an individual was infected or not. Although (almost) everyone was affected, the consequences and experiences of the pandemic was not the same. Thus, in order to truly understand how youths might have experienced the pandemic period, gathering youths’ narratives of their own pandemic experiences was essential. Based on the narratives of youths living in Trondheim, Norway regarding their pandemic experiences, I present in this paper an illumination on how time and experiences might be connected. This paper draws on selected perspectives in Childhood Studies and concepts of time and temporalities, and it employs a phenomenological approach to executing the research project. Utilising the time-metaphors of circular-time and linear-time, I attempt to elucidate the emergence of certain senses such as “inconvenienced”, “controlled” or “surreal” alongside shifts in repetitive practices and routines, as well as the diverse senses of time itself in terms of its quality and apparent elasticity. Overall, this paper seeks to illustrate the contributions of experiences of a specific phenomenon to the understandings of everyday experiences and the potential significance of time to subjective experiences.