******Actual serious PSA*******
I've spent at least the last five years or so basically home alone, doing nothing and pretty broke. I see some of you struggling with being home and worried about money, so here are some things I've learned.
There are plenty of distractions like TV and reading, video games, social media, etc, but none of them are satisfying if you find yourself in the wrong frame of mind doing them. Don't think of it as something you're forced to do while you'd rather be doing something else. You have to train yourself to live in the moment, even if what you're doing in that moment isn't your first choice. A lot of things are free or cheap, so you don't have to spend money that you don't have.
In that regard, learn to enjoy things you look on as a chore. Cooking is a prime example. We tend to tell ourselves that we don't have time to cook, but now you're going to have lots of time. Cooking is fun and satisfying. Deep clean your place. Don't just run a vacuum over the floor for a minute, clean and organize. Fix the little things you've been putting off or propping up. Go through that closet full of stuff you haven't looked at in years and get rid of what you don't want.
Keep in touch. There are going to be a bunch of people you know in the same boat. Reach out, and connect. You can still be social while social distancing. Join or make a secret group on Facebook, where you and your friends or family can stay in touch and be more open and at ease with each other. When you spend too much time alone, you live in your own head, and that's no place you want to spend too much of your time. Keeping in contact with people keeps you sane. More on that later…
Get some exercise. If you have any home exercise equipment currently acting as a coat rack, start using it. You can do aerobics or yoga in your living room(close the drapes, no one needs to see that!), and there are plenty of exercise routines online to follow along with. Go for a walk or bike ride. You can practice social distancing and still be outside.
Find new hobbies and activities. Take up knitting, learn to sew and patch your old clothes. Try drawing or writing, or learn to play that guitar you bought five years ago and gave up on when you found out about f chords. Organize your old photos and make a scrapbook or album. Learn to meditate. Go online and learn something like a language or photoshop or a million other online courses. There are millions of things to do to pass the time, and improve some areas of your life along the way, and millions of sites to tell you about them and instruct you.
Find some apps and games on your phones. I know that a lot of people don't care about video games and such, but there are so many different kinds of games out there to pass the time. First off, any stuff you used to do in newspapers and magazines and real life is on your phone. Crossword puzzles, Sudoku, jumbles, cryptograms, trivia quizzes, jigsaw puzzles, slot machines, poker and card games, you name it. There are games where you build civilizations, simulate evolution, role playing games, racing games, action games, and versions of a lot of the older arcade and console games that you loved. They don't require much from you, and they really help pass the time.
Make meal plans and stick to them. Eat your perishables first. We all joke about how we buy food, and wind up throwing it away because we just order take out. You might not have that option soon, so start now.
Also, when you're bored, you eat, so be careful not to snack yourself into a coma. Put your snack foods away in a cabinet so you're not seeing them every time you walk into the kitchen. Out of sight, out of mind.
Regarding TV, there are more viewing options than ever out there. If you look, there are probably a bunch of shows and movies you forgot about or just missed. We are living in a golden age of television, where TV shows are better than most theatrical releases. Streaming has lots of free or cheap optims. A lot of people feel guilty about watching too much TV because they think it's wasting time when they should be doing other things, but now you'll have all the time in the world. So watch to your heart's content. Discover new stuff and expand your horizons, indulge in your guilty pleasures, or just watch comfort TV to take your mind off of things. Same thing with music. Take this time to discover bands and music you haven't had time to discover when your life was so busy.
Keep a routine. You can find yourself quickly letting things slide. You find yourself putting off taking showers. You eat at all times of the day or night. Your sleep schedule goes to hell. Figure out a routine, and stick with it, no matter how pointless it seems at times.
As far as money goes, there are going to be lots of relief efforts for people, and public pressure will force things like mortgage payments and rent and utilities to be put on hold. If you get behind in your bills, talk to the companies you owe money to. They will work with you, and you can make arrangements to pay what you can, and it won't affect your credit score. Even if it does, credit scores can be fixed fairly easily once you're doing well again. Don't just ignore it!
You might think that since I wrote this, I must be in great shape, my place must be impeccably clean, and my life in perfect order, but we all know it's not. I can write about the pitfalls you might encounter because I've fallen into just about every one of them along the way. A big part of that is because depression can grab hold of you pretty quickly when you're isolated. Humans are social animals, and that's hard wired into us and not about to change.
When you become even a little bit isolated, you can feel like you have nothing to look forward to, and that there's no point in doing a lot of the things you know you should, because who's going to notice? That's a bad road to go down. There are a lot of different types of depression, and one of the most insidious is just getting worn down and you stop trying. It usually gets you because it's not a chemical thing. It's not something you've ever dealt with or experienced before, so you have no frame of reference. It happens gradually, and you don't see it and you deny it's happening. There's no magic pill or real convenient treatment plan for when you just let your life get away from you. It just becomes your new normal. You can crawl out of it with some herculean effort, but it's much easier to just not let yourself get to that point in the first place. Trust me. You want to guard against it.
Just as bad as depression is the anxiety and neurosis that comes along with isolation. Especially if you're not working and your life loses structure and routine. I mentioned about living in your own head, but that's what can happen as the hours and days start to blur. When you start thinking too much, it can multiply every worry or fear that pops into your mind. You have to guard against it. You need to talk to other people, you need to have distractions, otherwise you can eat yourself up from the inside.
If you're having trouble, reach out to friends and family. Keep in mind that there are a lot of people who aren't very good at offering advice or being comforting, or even just being good listeners. You might have to talk to a few people to figure out who is capable of truly being there for you. Work to be good at it too, because people are going to need you as well. Being judgemental or defensive or dismissive isn't going to help anyone, so try to be understanding and patient.
If we all work together, we'll get through this, so don't give up and don't give in.
Friday, March 20, 2020
Sunday, March 15, 2020
Things To Do During The Coronavirus Crisis
Things you can do to maximize the time we are impacted by the Coronavirus:
Not much food available? The perfect time to go on a diet! As a bonus, if you can't get much toilet paper, go on a low carb diet and load up on meat and cheese. You'll hardly poop at all!
Go to rehab. If you've been putting it off, now is the perfect time. You won't feel like you're missing out on much, and it will be like you're in quarantine with all the funnest people!
Stockpile weapons and prepare yourself for Mad Max times. You'll also need some weird bondage gear and assless chaps, if the movies are to be believed. You'll still probably die ten minutes after you enter the apocalyptic wasteland, just like you did the first time you played Fallout.
Learn how to cook creatively with all the weird things you've bought over the past year after finding some recipe online, but never looked at them again once you put them in your freezer or cabinet. Make a nice quinoa and jackfruit with tahini and coconut flour casserole. Delve into history, and learn how to make soup out of your shoes when the food runs out, like they did in the Great Depression.
Watch The Office or Friends for the 600th time. It will seem like nothing's changed! If things get bad for longer than two weeks, you might actually have to watch all that crap you put in your streaming queue because you felt like you should watch it, even though you'd rather watch My 600 Pound Life.
Take virtual tours of museums online, or online courses. Just kidding! Watch porn until your genitals are raw and blistered.
Quietly reflect on all your bad choices, and vow to get your life in order once the danger is passed and use the second chance you get to live right. Don't worry, you're not actually going to change your life once we emerge from our hovels, constipated and with the aforementioned blistered genitals.
Drink! For the first time in your life, you have a legitimate excuse to stay home and day drink alone. As an added plus, you're already home, so you won't have to drive home drunk from the club!
Curl up in a ball, sob uncontrollably, and wait to die. You probably do that on a fairly regular basis anyway, at least this time it will seem reasonable.
Don't just waste this gift of time we've been given, get creative and use it wisely. You might as well spend the end of days living joylessly and improving yourself so Jesus isn't disgusted with you on Armageddon day, which by most estimates is next Tuesday.
Not much food available? The perfect time to go on a diet! As a bonus, if you can't get much toilet paper, go on a low carb diet and load up on meat and cheese. You'll hardly poop at all!
Go to rehab. If you've been putting it off, now is the perfect time. You won't feel like you're missing out on much, and it will be like you're in quarantine with all the funnest people!
Stockpile weapons and prepare yourself for Mad Max times. You'll also need some weird bondage gear and assless chaps, if the movies are to be believed. You'll still probably die ten minutes after you enter the apocalyptic wasteland, just like you did the first time you played Fallout.
Learn how to cook creatively with all the weird things you've bought over the past year after finding some recipe online, but never looked at them again once you put them in your freezer or cabinet. Make a nice quinoa and jackfruit with tahini and coconut flour casserole. Delve into history, and learn how to make soup out of your shoes when the food runs out, like they did in the Great Depression.
Watch The Office or Friends for the 600th time. It will seem like nothing's changed! If things get bad for longer than two weeks, you might actually have to watch all that crap you put in your streaming queue because you felt like you should watch it, even though you'd rather watch My 600 Pound Life.
Take virtual tours of museums online, or online courses. Just kidding! Watch porn until your genitals are raw and blistered.
Quietly reflect on all your bad choices, and vow to get your life in order once the danger is passed and use the second chance you get to live right. Don't worry, you're not actually going to change your life once we emerge from our hovels, constipated and with the aforementioned blistered genitals.
Drink! For the first time in your life, you have a legitimate excuse to stay home and day drink alone. As an added plus, you're already home, so you won't have to drive home drunk from the club!
Curl up in a ball, sob uncontrollably, and wait to die. You probably do that on a fairly regular basis anyway, at least this time it will seem reasonable.
Don't just waste this gift of time we've been given, get creative and use it wisely. You might as well spend the end of days living joylessly and improving yourself so Jesus isn't disgusted with you on Armageddon day, which by most estimates is next Tuesday.
Thursday, March 5, 2020
When We Lost Our Way
Everything you see in this country was really hard set in the 60's. We never moved past it in terms of the generation gap and who the "us VS them" of the whole us VS them concept is. That defined most of the roles we've settled into, and we've been stalled ever since. Peaceniks and war hawks, blue collar and the elite, rebels and the establishment. It's how the police became the enemy to a huge demographic of people, it's how the middle class formed their images of minorities and the poor, it's how we learned to define the ruling class and serfs, and got sold on siding with wrong one time and time again.
Most people alive then still think in terms of TV shows from the era when they think about what society looks like. You were part of the freedom loving sex and drug culture, or you were a square. You let your freak flag fly, or you conform. You're a little bit country, or a little bit rock and roll.
The point is, it divided us up and labeled us and put us in boxes, and all the time we spent fighting those labels or finding happiness being defined by them allowed the wealthy and elite to change all the rules of the game. There was a whole generation of young people fighting the power. They were protesting, they were pushing boundaries, they were tuning in, turning on, and dropping out. They were the passionate youth, the younger generation that wasn't afraid, that didn't care about the rule book, or the way it should be. They wanted the world, and they wanted it now.
Then something happened. The boomers everyone hates so much today were once the millennials of their time, but they got old. They got frightened. They got tired of fighting. One day, they woke up and looked in the mirror, and they no longer fit the role of radical, they looked like their parents. So they effortlessly slid into that role, and even though they may have retained some of their ideals, they lost their fire and passion and edge. They lost their will to fight and take risks. Risks were for the young. They convinced themselves that they were smart by playing it safe, by not expecting to change the world. They got scared, and they found it easy to adapt and beg for crumbs rather than take risks and try for the things they truly wanted.
So now they are the establishment, but they still convince themselves that they aren't because they have the rednecks and racists and super wealthy to look down on. They have a new enemy, one that was also defined in the 60's. The southern man, with his robes and hood in the back of his closet, full of ignorance and hate and intolerance. They love to mock them and argue with them on social media, to prove that they are still fighting, that they are still rebels. The thing is, you don't change those people by fighting them, you change it by changing the world around them and dragging them along. You change it by making the world better and bringing them along into a better future, where they don't have to punch down to feel like they matter.
We stopped doing all that in earnest in the 60's. We drew up sides, and we've been conforming to them ever since. It doesn't matter what the young and vital people who can actually change the world really want, because we just keep them down enough until they too will reach that age when they are saddled with kids and responsibilities, and are just tired of fighting and find that they are scared of teenagers and their music. Then they will join the other side, and will all feel safer by compromise and acquiescence.
We want young people to be engaged and involved, but only if they do it on our terms. That's not how progress works. That's not how things get better. It's the reason why nothing has changed politically in the last sixty years, and why we've stalled. We are stifling the younger, most vital and idealistic part of society until they are tamed, until they are safe and familiar and agree to do it our way. We are afraid, so we are killing off our best chance to actually achieve the things we once fought for and believed in. We've become the enemy, and we've done it so gradually that we can still convince ourselves that it's not true.
Hunter S Thompson wrote about the dreams and vision those boomers had when they were young, and how it broke and crashed like a wave in the 70's, and then receded back to the ocean. That ocean has been rising ever since, not like a wave with its kinetic and crazy energy, but like the slowly rising sea levels that will wipe us out one day. It has inundated everything, and we are drowning in it, and the older generation is holding the heads of the younger generation underwater, weighing them down and immobilizing them, and telling themselves it's for their own good.
We are afraid. We are paralyzed by it. We are trying to game the system, and tell ourselves it's the smart and safest way to go, but safe never really got us anything.
We have lost our way, and that started in the 60's.
Most people alive then still think in terms of TV shows from the era when they think about what society looks like. You were part of the freedom loving sex and drug culture, or you were a square. You let your freak flag fly, or you conform. You're a little bit country, or a little bit rock and roll.
The point is, it divided us up and labeled us and put us in boxes, and all the time we spent fighting those labels or finding happiness being defined by them allowed the wealthy and elite to change all the rules of the game. There was a whole generation of young people fighting the power. They were protesting, they were pushing boundaries, they were tuning in, turning on, and dropping out. They were the passionate youth, the younger generation that wasn't afraid, that didn't care about the rule book, or the way it should be. They wanted the world, and they wanted it now.
Then something happened. The boomers everyone hates so much today were once the millennials of their time, but they got old. They got frightened. They got tired of fighting. One day, they woke up and looked in the mirror, and they no longer fit the role of radical, they looked like their parents. So they effortlessly slid into that role, and even though they may have retained some of their ideals, they lost their fire and passion and edge. They lost their will to fight and take risks. Risks were for the young. They convinced themselves that they were smart by playing it safe, by not expecting to change the world. They got scared, and they found it easy to adapt and beg for crumbs rather than take risks and try for the things they truly wanted.
So now they are the establishment, but they still convince themselves that they aren't because they have the rednecks and racists and super wealthy to look down on. They have a new enemy, one that was also defined in the 60's. The southern man, with his robes and hood in the back of his closet, full of ignorance and hate and intolerance. They love to mock them and argue with them on social media, to prove that they are still fighting, that they are still rebels. The thing is, you don't change those people by fighting them, you change it by changing the world around them and dragging them along. You change it by making the world better and bringing them along into a better future, where they don't have to punch down to feel like they matter.
We stopped doing all that in earnest in the 60's. We drew up sides, and we've been conforming to them ever since. It doesn't matter what the young and vital people who can actually change the world really want, because we just keep them down enough until they too will reach that age when they are saddled with kids and responsibilities, and are just tired of fighting and find that they are scared of teenagers and their music. Then they will join the other side, and will all feel safer by compromise and acquiescence.
We want young people to be engaged and involved, but only if they do it on our terms. That's not how progress works. That's not how things get better. It's the reason why nothing has changed politically in the last sixty years, and why we've stalled. We are stifling the younger, most vital and idealistic part of society until they are tamed, until they are safe and familiar and agree to do it our way. We are afraid, so we are killing off our best chance to actually achieve the things we once fought for and believed in. We've become the enemy, and we've done it so gradually that we can still convince ourselves that it's not true.
Hunter S Thompson wrote about the dreams and vision those boomers had when they were young, and how it broke and crashed like a wave in the 70's, and then receded back to the ocean. That ocean has been rising ever since, not like a wave with its kinetic and crazy energy, but like the slowly rising sea levels that will wipe us out one day. It has inundated everything, and we are drowning in it, and the older generation is holding the heads of the younger generation underwater, weighing them down and immobilizing them, and telling themselves it's for their own good.
We are afraid. We are paralyzed by it. We are trying to game the system, and tell ourselves it's the smart and safest way to go, but safe never really got us anything.
We have lost our way, and that started in the 60's.
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