Cold Turkey

It's just different. I was listening to a podcast the other day between Bill Simmons and Chuck Klosterman (two writers I enjoy reading) and Klosterman was making the point that this is the first national story that has ever directly impacted his day to day life. The three big national events since I turned 18 were:

1. 9/11
2. Hurricane Katrina
3. 2007/ 2008 Financial Crisis

I am not including elections in the above list, but you could include the 2008 and 2016 elections if you wanted to expand this to 5. Regardless those 5 events changed how I thought about certain things / people and certainly had a major impact on our country....but my day to day life was essentially unchanged. Now I understand that by writing that I am highlighting my good luck and privilege, but it is also the truth. Nothing really compares to this current moment. It's just different.

There are so many differences that it's hard to even know where to start. I keep going back to the feeling like this is just one big "cold turkey" experiment. What would happen if we gave up dining out, traveling, sports, school, working in the office, etc? If you had asked me to give up any one of those things for Lent, I would have immediately balked at the suggestion. And now we are giving all of those things up all at once? It's been quite the life change (my daughter is brushing her American Girl doll one foot away from me as I write this) that brings up more questions than answer. Here are the top 5 questions:

1. When will this end?
2. What will post-corona-virus world look like? 
3. How many people will die? 
4. Will there be an analysis on what we as a country did well and what we could improve upon next time?
5. What are the big things that I am not even thinking about? 

I don't really have a good answer to any of those questions. There is an ongoing debate between continuing to practice social distancing versus reopening the economy. People engaging in this debate seem to be very confident about their argument. I am much less confident. I am extremely worried about both the health aspects of the virus (and thus the need for proper social distancing) and also the economic and mental health issues that come from social distancing. I don't know the right answer for and just hope that leaders (ex. Governors, CEOs, etc) are getting accurate information and are making decisions that appropriately measures risk. (I purposely didn't include our current President, because he seems completely ill equipped to deal with this crisis. Every single day he does or says something that boggles my mind.)

In terms of our family, M and I have gotten into a routine and we have no plans to change that in the near future. I go on a long walk every day while listening to either book or a podcast. We generally watch a movie at night. We try to get the kids to go on a bike ride or a walk. During the week we both work while also trying to entertain / teach L and J. This is tricky. We have 3 meals a day from home...breakfast is normally cereal, lunch is either leftovers or sandwiches and then we try out a meal for dinner. I feel like our cooking has been pretty good and I am pleased with how that is going. As a treat during the weekend we order out (pizza, sushi and tacos). We have seen a few people from 6 feet apart, but really our interactions with people are much, much lower than in the pre-quarantine world. We are acting like we have the virus and basically are just staying at home.

Now how will I think about this in 10 years? That was another interesting perspective in the Simmons / Klosterman podcast. Klosterman brought up that in 10 years we will be getting all these opinion pieces in 10 years about how the quarantine had many benefits since families got spend a lot of quality time together. In some cases we don't even have to wait 10 years to get some articles like this one from The Atlantic: My Family Needed A Reset, Quarantine Gave Us One. I wonder how I will think about this. Will I look back on this fondly? Will this be a pivot point where so many things change? (Examples that have been brought up: universal basic income, more working from home, medicare for all, change in retail / restaurants) Will this be just a minor blip and we as a country and individually as a family revert back to normal? As of now there are just significantly more questions than answers.