El cambio en la visión del futuro, en medio de la Covid-19

Résumé

The Future isn’t what it used to be, said Paul Valéry. So he realized a rupture in the social perception of the future, which undoubtedly pointed to the deep changes that society itself was undergoing. We start from the same opinion: the relationship between temporary and social change is always circular; the social changes are projected on the temporary ones and the temporary ones on the social ones. In the present work, we probe the possibility of this change in the social perception of the future in Spain, a change that has as a scenario and, above all, as a possible causal framework the global crisis of early 2020, a product of the COVID-19 pandemic. To this goal, we rely on the results of a survey with a standardized questionnaire applied by telephone to a representative sample of the Spanish population over 18 years of age. The fieldwork was developped in the 2020 spring, when citizens were facing the traumatic experience of the mandatory confinement decreted by the Government in order to fight against the pandemic.