skaman306/Getty Images Creating a sustainable post-pandemic future will depend on endurance, maintenance, and tenacity. By nature, our ability to persevere through hard times allows us to adapt to new social situations. The coronavirus, or rather the measurements taken against it, changed our perception of time. For many, the attempts to prevent the spread of the virus resulted in a feeling that time had come to a standstill. When the pandemic first hit, this notion of stopped time was at the core of a widespread sense of crisis. For a while, many existed in survival mode, reacting to the demands of the day while unable to plan ahead. However, around the world, humans also began to deploy what in my work as a social anthropologist I call temporal agency — the ability to deliberately restructure, speed up, or slow down the times we are living in.