Even if I hadn’t already seen it in the news, I would have known that there is a strong prospect for a coronavirus vaccine because it came up at work. Our company has a plan built around this benchmark, and it goes like this:
We will return to work when there is a widely available vaccine for COVID-19. What’s going to happen after that? My guess is that they’re going to try to work the supply chain and get someone to come to our various campuses, just like they do with the flu shot. As employees, we will probably be able to get the vaccine faster from work than we would if we waited in line elsewhere. I have another speculation, which is that many large companies will do the same. It’s likely this would include family and housemates, because it makes more sense to protect the entire household and thus avoid having to quarantine anyone on staff. Right now, nobody is allowed on site at our work without prior authorization. You have to explain why you want to be there. A few months ago it was why you needed to be there. Now, most people are staying home regardless, so those who just find it easier to get things done at the office are commuting in. There are guidelines about how many people can be in a room at the same time, and there’s a scheduling tool to make sure. What might happen, at our company and probably at others, is that getting the vaccine would give someone more access than if they didn’t get it for some reason. At a certain percentage of staff, it wouldn’t matter if a few people could not or would not get their shots. In the beginning, though, while the logistics are still being worked out, the lucky few would be safer, and that is a privilege. I’ve gamed this out, because COVID-19 scares the living hell out of me. I think if I get it a second time, I would probably die. I sometimes imagine the beautiful day when I roll up my sleeve for my injection, and tears come to my eyes. The vaccine means I’ll be able to fly home and spend time with my family. It means I’ll be able to travel the world again. It means I can quit feeling haunted by COVID. I’m going to have a party on that day. I’m going to go home and eat a slice of cake. In the meantime, though, I think it will be a bit of a wait. It would be a bit of a wait even if the vaccine was already approved for mass distribution today. There are still roughly 328 million Americans, and 39 million of us live here in California. (Did you ever realize that - that one out of every 8 or 9 Americans lives here in the Golden State??) My county alone has 10 million people. How long is it going to take to get 10 million vials of a coronavirus vaccine? I can tell you one thing, it was very challenging for me to get a COVID-19 test. Both times, I had to make an appointment after arguing with my doctor. How is the packaging, shipping, and distribution of individual portions of the vaccine going to compare to individual test swabs? There’s a ranking system that is going to have to come into play. The medical field revolves around the concept of triage, that those who are most in need are tended to first, and everyone else has to wait. That’s why my hubby and I had to sit in the ER overnight when he had a severe eye injury - because so many other people were so much worse off. We wait our turn, and while we wait, we focus on how glad we are that we’re not on the short list. First is going to have to be first responders. It’s literally the only thing that makes sense. Next would probably be anyone over a certain age, people with certain pre-existing conditions, and caregivers. My hubby and I don’t fall into any of those categories. We’re just average adults. That’s why I think our best chance to call dibs would be if we can get the shot through work. If the Pfizer vaccine turns out to be viable, there is the slight complication that it might take two doses like 3 weeks apart. The reason all of this matters is that I think exciting news can cause people to get a little happy and sloppy, and that can sometimes lead to crushing disappointments. Like my own. My poor sad heart - I haven’t been with my family in 11 months and there may still be another year to go. As I talk about this, I’m working it out for myself, so that I can set my expectations reasonably. Say, even if the vaccine was already available? And I got my first dose tomorrow? I would still have to wait three weeks to get the second dose. That obviously means that Thanksgiving is... wait for it... off the table. I’m fine with that, and I wish everyone else was too. I wish we could all solemnly nod our heads and agree that we love our families too much to risk everything on one stupid, unnecessary meal. Just do it next year and make it bigger and better! Yeesh! Instead we’re looking at the highest case counts ever, both worldwide and in the US alone. It’s getting much worse. We’re also finding that asymptomatic people can spread COVID-19 for longer than we might have guessed. This is a terrible time for false optimism. What I’d like to see everyone doing at Thanksgiving is staying physically away from one another. We can call and wave to each other on video. We can say our gratitude about the chance of an effective vaccine, and we can also be grateful that so many of our family members are still alive. Let’s keep our eyes on the prize, and let’s keep it that way until next year, shall we? Let’s try to have as many of us as possible live for that day when we roll up our sleeves for our vaccines and then go have some cake. IT’S HAPPENING!
It looks like there’s a vaccine!!! Or might be, in a while! Okay, we have no idea when, but this is a really, really big deal. If we can get a vaccine that’s over 90% effective, it means two things. One? The eventual end of the COVID-19 pandemic! Two? and I haven’t heard anyone else talking about this yet? But it could also mean... the end of the common cold! Which is bananas! But it might happen! My hubby just pointed out the other day that he hasn’t really had anything all year. We were fortunate enough that I didn’t give him coronavirus, so he got to skip that. We both got the flu from spending the night in the ER back in January. Other than that, isn’t it remarkable the way that wearing a mask everywhere also stops the spread of other airborne respiratory illnesses? I am hopeful about a lot of things as a result of this fantastic news.
But that’s all big-picture stuff. I tend to think in the 15-year range. Right now it’s probably more useful to plan over the next... say... 15 months. I’ve been saying for months now that I personally plan on isolating and being home until 2023. By that I have generally meant January of that year, meaning I’m ruling out 2021 and 2022. It’s easier on me emotionally to not get my hopes up. Where do I get my numbers? Spanish Flu epidemic a century ago, plus fastest-known development of a vaccine, which previously was four years. If I’m pleasantly surprised by one of the many benefits of living in the 21st century, then great! I’ll put on my dancing socks. All that being said, I am someone who really likes the anticipation factor of planning a few years ahead. I generally set my goals in the three-year range. Now I have the great fun of starting to shape out plans for post-COVID, and also what sorts of things I’d like to get done while we’re still all stuck at home. There are certain advantages to this current iteration of the world. The most obvious one is that my hubby and I, like a lot of people, don’t have to commute right now. We’re probably sleeping 90 minutes later each morning than we would if we had to drive in (and wear proper professional clothes). We’re probably also eating dinner earlier than we would if we had to commute. Might as well make the most out of it. There is a strong chance that we’ll both be able to continue to work from home the majority of the time. My hubby would probably go in to work in the lab on occasion, maybe once a week, or maybe for days at a stretch but only during certain phases of a project. I would be more likely to go in for events like a quarterly meeting. Other than that, personally I would prefer to work from home in my socks. (Regular or dancing variety? That is for me to know and you to find out). If not, though, I have to calculate that I currently have about two more hours at my disposal each workday than I would post-COVID. What am I going to do with it? Anything? One of my work-related plans, post-COVID, is to rebuild a work wardrobe. I haven’t had to wear office clothes in over ten years. I’d make a day of it: a real haircut! A shopping trip! If I have at least a year to save for it, I could make this a montage-worthy sequence and walk out with bags of outfits, coordinated from stem to stern. Something else that would happen post-COVID is that we’d have a reason to use some of our reservoir of vacation days. My hubby and I have been collecting reward points for quite a while, and they will have built up even more by then. We won’t be the only people with that idea, so we might have to book pretty far in advance, which is another way of saying we would plan quite far ahead and have that much longer to fantasize about our trip. Part of our post-COVID plans, then, will be about where we would want to go, what season, and how long we would want to stay there. When would I see my family? Uh, immediately?? Like, I would book my ticket the day I got my second shot? It’s easy to think about all these things from the luxurious position that we are currently in, with two incomes and nowhere to spend them. It might seem unfair for those who are financially hurting - and it is! - and yet, there is worth in the fantasy of how the economy will pick up after the pandemic ends. How many jobs will be created, how much pent-up consumer demand will be unleashed. We’ve been here before, historically. They still call it the Roaring Twenties. Part of it was the end of World War I, but part of it was certainly the end of the terrifyingly lethal H1N1 pandemic. That thing was so bad, some people bled out of their eyes. Someone would be perfectly fine in the morning, suddenly start coughing, and be dead by the end of the day. Whole families gone over the weekend. When it was finally over, those who survived were almost delirious with delight and the urge to party. Isn’t it interesting that we’re in the Twenties again, and we’re going to live through the end of a pandemic? Doesn’t it seem likely that the economy will rebound in the same way? And then what? What will we do to make it special, having come away with a bit of wisdom and insight? We have time to plan, so let’s plan well. This is not the first time this has happened by any means, but I recently had a conversation with someone who had stuff in a storage unit for ten years.
You already know what I’m going to say about this. What in the Sam Hill could possibly be valuable enough to keep it for ten years without using it?? Stuff sits in storage mostly out of inertia. Out of sight, out of mind. Many people probably feel that it’s worth paying the rent every month simply for the luxury of not having to expend effort to deal with the situation. When is it ever a good time to get a truck, spend half a day clearing out a storage unit, and then figuring out what to do with all that stuff? Since I talk to people about clutter all the time, I do get to hear these stories occasionally. Sometimes, yes, people do get tired of paying money for nothing and they go and clear out their storage units. (Yes, it’s not uncommon for someone to have two separate units, although most people can’t afford three). What do they do with the stuff? Move it into a garage, shed, or “spare” room! It’s almost unheard of for people to get rid of all of it, to just say, You know what? I haven’t missed any of this stuff, I’ma go drop it off. If you do have a storage unit, at least know that you’re not alone. There’s a reason why it’s so easy to find storage units in the US - it’s a multi-billion dollar industry. (I literally just mis-typed that as “in dusty”!) Having a storage unit doesn’t particularly have a cost in terms of mental bandwidth. Probably a lot of people continue to pay that bill and almost never think about what items are actually in there. That’s the whole point. Most people do not like to make decisions. The cost of indecision, here, is a financial one. I did the math with one of my friends, several years ago, and she had spent TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS on her storage unit. I am not kidding. Do you have an extra $10,000? I don’t. This is where we take a moment to talk about the difference between an “asset” and a “liability.” An asset has value and generates value. A liability costs money. It’s hard to come up with something that is truly an asset, because there are so many misconceptions here. A lot of things that seem to be assets are actually liabilities. Understanding the difference can be like flipping a light switch in the perception of one’s household finances. A toolbox. We’ll go with that. If you use tools at your job every day, then those tools are helping earn your paycheck. At a certain point, their cost was fully amortized, maybe even the first week. I cut my husband’s hair today, for the third time ever, and that was when the clippers and scissors I bought paid themselves off. We would have spent more at the barber for three haircuts than what the equipment cost. Now those clippers are an asset that can save us about $100 a year. If we had a storage unit, the clippers would not be in storage, because it would be too annoying to go dig them out every time my man started complaining about his bangs getting too long. If we had a storage unit, we would have two options: One near us at $250 a month, or one across town at $150 a month. I know because I looked into it when we were first planning to move here and debating whether we should really get rid of 80% of our stuff. This means we would have spent either $3000 a year for a unit we could actually get into, or $1800 a year for one that would have required us to either get a car, pay for a rideshare, commute farther to work so we could be near the cheaper storage, or pester other people to give us rides to go get random stuff when we needed it. Or of course pay $1800 a year - the cost of a mighty fine vacation, by the way - just to ignore all that stuff we weren’t using. Now let’s multiply that by five years, and we get: $15,000 OR $9,000 + externalities. Let’s game this out and try to come up with what kinds of possessions it would actually be worth more than $9,000 to store. Business equipment! If we were professional landscapers or event planners, for example, our expensive storage unit could actually help us to earn money. In fact the facility we used for a month when we moved was full of units like that, for professional contractors, painters, landscapers, and others who, like us, would be hard pressed to find a house with a garage out here. We aren’t, though. We don’t own a business. Like most people, what we would have kept in that unit would have been stuff we didn’t have time to deal with during the move, or stuff we felt was Worth Something (TM), and we wouldn’t have realized that five years were going to go by without us making a decision. But storage doesn’t cost that much where we live, you say. Sure, okay, but then what is your exit strategy? Have you sat down and opened the calculator app on your phone and figured out what you have already paid on this liability that is your storage unit? Oh, but it’s not actually my unit, you say. It’s actually So-and-So’s. I know for a fact that other people love to spend their money helping me solve my problems! (Or not, cough) I’m willing to venture that a lot of storage units have stuff belonging to more than one person, and that is part of why nobody has said, I am no longer going to pay this bill. I’ve heard of parents paying for kids’ storage, siblings storing each other’s stuff, and of course people getting stuck with things that belong to an ex, or an old roommate. There are a lot of “watch my dining table for me while I”... have no intention of ever dealing with it. Whose dining table is worth $9,000 anyway? If your parents are storing your stuff - think about whether they’re going to be able to make ends meet on a fixed income. Would you rather they pay for your storage if it meant they have to come live with you when they turn 80? If anyone else is storing your stuff, pull up your socks and go deal with it. If you’re storing someone else’s stuff, this might be a good moment to ask yourself whether this is what is holding you back. You can go over to your unit, look it all over, and take care of your own stuff, then call that person and tell them it’s time to make arrangements with the storage company. Chances are greater than 1% that they will decide it isn’t worth their bother. We did the seemingly impossible. We gave away or sold 80% of our stuff when we decided to take the dream job and move to the beach. Looking back, we made so little at our one-day garage sale that we wish we had simply donated everything and spent that day relaxing. Have we missed any of the stuff we got rid of, like our ladder and our wheelbarrow? Nope. Could we go to Home Depot with the thousands of dollars we saved on not having a storage unit and replace all of it? Yes, and then some! Like most people, what we would have spent on a storage unit over five years would be more than all our furniture and wardrobes combined are worth. Do you have a storage unit? Why? What the heck is in there? Why are you keeping it? When do you think you will actually use it again? Have you decided yet? How much is that indecision costing you? My hubby and I just watched the documentary “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix. Now we’re chatting about it while he makes dinner.
This is probably one of the major reasons why we both managed to quit social media several years ago. We actually talk to each other, often for hours at a time! Face to face! There was a time, probably around the same time for a lot of people, when we both got sucked into the void and started spending hours a day on Facebook. This felt necessary at the time, in the compulsive way that eating chips can. I can recall feeling antsy when I wanted to go check in on a conversation. When it started, we both shared a desktop computer, and sometimes we would want to edge each other out of the way. He quit before I did. I couldn’t remember why, so I turned and asked him, and he reminded me that it was because he was unfriended by his former best friend. Someone he had known since they were five years old, best man at his first wedding. Obviously he was crushed. (I didn’t realize that was why, although I knew the unfriending had happened at the time. I thought he was just getting fed up overall). For me it was more gradual. I started feeling like logging in was an obligation, and then it started to get tedious, and then it started to get annoying, and then finally the very idea of logging in made me start physically breaking out in hives. I couldn’t even force myself. Neither of us have ever really seen the point of Twitter or Instagram, probably because we’re older than the target demographic. We don’t have Snapchat or WhatsApp or... anything else that is too hip for us, although we do know what TikTok is. One of the points raised in “The Social Dilemma” is that social media did some good in the world. It helped people find organ donors, it helped people reconnect with long-lost family members. I can agree with this - Facebook allowed me to track down a couple of old friends, one of whom then came to my wedding. There were a few good laughs and touching moments along the way. At what cost, though? My husband isn’t the only one who lost a true lifelong friendship due to the weird, toxic dynamics of social media. Spellcheck thinks ‘unfriending’ is not a real word to this day, even though we all know exactly what it means. The connection that “The Social Dilemma” makes between social media, political polarization, and civil unrest is very surprising, yet as an historian I know I won’t be able to unsee it. Nothing much good can come of a lot of people sitting alone in their rooms, staring at a heartless glass screen, and trying to decode each other’s thoughts and feelings through text alone. Can anything be done about all of this? That’s where the conversation went between my honey and me. I say yes, probably. The same people who created this manipulation machine know precisely how to manipulate it, having built it, and they may be able to make a few tweaks in how behaviors are incentivized, how platforms are monetized, what boundaries they set on content, and whether they ever start moderating the way that bulletin boards were in the mid-Nineties. Something else we talked about was where the time went, and what we do now with the roughly three hours a day that somehow got swallowed up in the gaping maw of Facebook. My blog, for one. A truly absurd amount of news articles, including my beloved gator news. Toastmasters. Martial arts. My tech newsletter. Playing with our critter(s) and building Noelie’s parrot fort. Cooking. Reading novels. That’s part of what helped me pull the plug - realizing that one year my reading had dropped by about half. Reading less had not made me a better person; it had made me a less recognizable person. I like myself better when I’m reading more books, rather than stewing over some rude conversation between “friends of friends” I’ve never even met in real life. I have, though. Social media IS real life, even though in a lot of ways we think of it as a simulacrum. Maybe it can turn into something - not better - better isn’t really good enough - but something pro-social and positive, something that helps us feel more genuinely connected and that helps us to hold each other in benevolent and affectionate regard. It could be happening right now. My husband and I watched a TV show together, and then we talked about it for an hour, and then I wrote about it, and now you’re reading it. Are you going to find someone and talk about it, too? The most interesting thing about futurism is the stuff that happens that we could never see coming. Not just that we did not see it, but that we could not see it. There were no indications that anything like that would happen, until it did.
We look back to the famous 1899 quote, “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” Did you see Back to the Future Part II? Characters from the Eighties venture to 2015. Since everyone reading this lived through that year, with the possible exception of a baby with advanced literacy skills, we can compare the movie to reality. It was quite right about a few things, though we can giggle at the omnipresent fax machines. What’s missing, though? What are the dogs that didn’t bark?
Anyone who wanted to predict our era and left out those two things would be missing probably the most dominant features of the age. (They were right that we are constantly surrounded by news updates and instant communication, though!) Something else that didn’t show up in the movie was the concept of the gig economy, with businesses like Uber and AirBnB so commonplace now that we hardly ever think back to when they were confusing new innovations. I remember that the first time I heard someone was contracting random people to deliver packages in their personal vehicles, I scoffed at it. That Will Never Work, I intoned. I was wrong. Not only did it work, it works for me on a regular basis and I hardly give it a thought. Leave out the big stuff, and you miss the character and culture of a point in the timeline. It’s the hole that makes the donut, not just any old pastry. What I’ve been trying to do lately is to think more about the hole. What would be something big and weird that might happen? I’ve gotten pretty good at noticing trends and predicting stuff in the 10-15 year range. Of course, in most situations this is a useless skill. You can’t prove it to anyone unless you were smart enough to write it down; you’re still hanging out with them a decade later - and they care; or you just shrug and put your money where your mouth is in the stock market. I nailed it with eye scanning tech and I got it again with pet insurance. I bought TSLA at $42.26. I won’t say I saw the crash of 2008 coming, but I broke even because I chose contra funds in 2007. So what though. I didn’t predict my divorce in 2000 and I didn’t predict that I would get COVID-19 before the shutdown. The holes in the donut. There are other things I didn’t predict. I have a degree in history, but I had no idea that fascism would be on the march again in my lifetime. I also had no idea that conspiracy theories and cults would take off the way they have, that people would gamble their own and their families’ lives to uphold their science denialism. Possibly I started paying attention to it sooner than others, but then again, I’m only aware of most things because I read about them somewhere. That means someone else was looking into it somewhere ahead of me on the arc of change. For me to join them, I have to get better at scanning the fringe and finding my own patterns. I think the most interesting things happen in culture completely outside of global politics, the economy, and in some ways, even technological change. One thing that is interesting about change is that most things stay absolutely the same. As Nassim Taleb points out, if something was around 100 years ago, and it’s still around today, then it will probably still be around in another hundred years. Chairs have been recognizably chairs for a very long time, shoes more so, and knives even more so than that. You can go to a lot of museums and look at some very old lost socks, but also some truly ancient weapons. Most material objects around us will continue to feel familiar. In a lot of cases the specific individual object will be familiar. I can still picture my grandmother’s kitchen, which probably looked almost identical for at least 30 years. Something that changes is the prevalence of a thing, something that maybe pops up as a trend (Crocs, eyebrow piercings) and then gradually becomes more and more common. When I was a child I had never seen a facial tattoo, and now it doesn’t even occur to me to ask about them. Stuff grows familiar (Facebook, scratch-off lottery tickets, blue beverages) and in a way it feels like it’s been here always. Culture moves on its own. It propagates itself. You can’t legislate it into or out of existence. For instance, people have generally decided that it is the correct thing to do to smash a car window if there is a dog trapped inside on a hot day. Likewise, if a terrorist tries anything on an airplane, there are enough people who will rush up and overpower him that this specific gambit is unlikely to work very often any more, if ever. Once an idea gets into popular culture, it is almost impossible to get it back out, and that is how folklore is born. This is what I think about whenever there is an election. A president is only in office for a maximum of eight years, while people like Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg can do what they do for decades, and nobody elected them, and they are wealthier in absolute terms than any president ever has been or probably will be. Someone who could name and possibly recognize those men, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Jack Dorsey, maybe a few other billionaires - someone who could name those people might not be able to name or recognize any five US presidents. We’re living in a time of intense transition, a time when vast populations of humans and animals are on the move, a time of rapid technological and cultural change. It upsets people because we become less good at guessing what is going to happen next. We hate the sense of instability, even when it turns into something wonderful. A lot of crazy economic and political stuff was happening in 1980, the year that science won the two-century battle against smallpox. Is that a year of celebration? Course not. I had to look it up because nobody talks about it. We have our ways of absorbing incredible sights and wonders and shrugging them off, only to turn our attention back to the pettiest of annoyances. Verily, that is how progress is made. The hole in the donut is that a lot of the things that bother us today will be gone in twenty years, and we’ll barely remember that they ever happened, and instead we’ll be irritated by something else. The funny thing is, we’ll be correct, because future generations will inevitably look back on our time today and feel sorry for us. It’s up to us to guess why, and set to work fixing whatever it is that we’re getting wrong. The way I deal with stress is to look ahead five years into the future.
This was challenging when I was sick with COVID-19, because I wasn’t even sure I had five days in my personal future. Even at the time, though, I was positive that the pandemic would be over by then. Maybe things would end badly for me, but it was likely that my friends and family would be doing okay in five years. A lot can happen in five years. It seems like a long time to a kid, but the older you get, the more you start to realize that what adults have always told you is true. Time passes more and more quickly, or at least our subjective, experiential sense of it. I just had a conversation with my boss in which I mentioned possibly going back to school in academic year 2022. That seems like a minute from now, because I know from past experience that the application deadline for that year will come up so quickly that I’ll barely have a year to study for the GRE. It seems entirely likely that it will take five years or more to get my PhD, and that doesn’t even feel like a big deal. At 45, I know that I’ll either be five years older anyway... or I won’t. Might as well plan for what is the most likely future. A lot can happen in five years. I started running as a complete amateur and non-athlete, unable to run around one block in my neighborhood without stopping to walk. Four years later I was chugging along in my first marathon. It never even occurred to me to aim for such a thing when I started. All I wanted to do was to run a two-mile loop, and I thought it would take me all year to train for it. Five years is a long enough span of time that conditions can completely change. I met my ex-husband, moved in with him, married him, and signed the divorce papers in less time than that. I haven’t laid eyes on him in twenty years now. What was once the epic drama of my life is something that I now rarely think about at all. What else has happened within five years? In a five-year span, I dropped five clothing sizes. Within five years, I paid off two credit cards and my Pell grant. In five years, a new baby could be conceived, born, and grown enough to ride a bike with training wheels and write her own name. It took our dog four years to learn to roll over. But by then, he could also do a bunny hop in a circle and play Red Light, Green Light. I keep reminding myself of these things because sometimes, looking backward is soothing. In retrospect it’s often easier to recognize good times of relative peace and tranquility. In the moment, any kind of stress or drama feels major. Looking back makes it clear which were high mountain peaks and which were merely mild rolling hills. Looking forward involves more guesswork. We aren’t always very good at that. The thing about predicting the future is that some things will remain precisely the same - like my parents’ dining room table; I’m pretty sure that will be the same in another five years, just like it was five years ago. Other things will change in a radical way that we never could see coming. Some of these changes from my own lifetime include voicemail, racecar-shaped VHS tape rewinders, refrigerators with ice makers, Wikipedia, Twitter, streaming Netflix, Crocs, the Instant Pot, and a commercial space industry. We won’t be able to predict everything about daily life five years from now, in 2025. We can, though, do a lot to predict our own daily lives, by making decisions about how we will live them. This is why I like the five-year span, because it’s long enough to be ambitious but near enough that Future Me +5 is somewhat recognizable. I can ask myself, what is Future Me 50 going to be like if I do this, that, or this? If I choose to go to bed now or two hours from now, night after night? If I choose to eat more greens or more sweets? If I schedule that dentist appointment, or not? If I save this amount or if I spend it all on random stuff from Amazon? Is Future Me +5 going to fit in these clothes I’ve been saving, or not? Is she going to want to wear them at all? Is that version of me ever going to [clear out the storage unit or keep paying for it] or [pay off that credit card or not] or [finish my degree or not] or reach Inbox Zero or go on the vacation I dreamed about in high school? Most things happen to us when we live in default mode. I recognize this tendency in myself, to hold my phone in my hand and scroll, scroll, scroll. Fortunately, I set my algorithms to include a lot of reptile news, so I probably read more about gator-related events than a lot of people. How many hours of my life, though, am I going to fritter away getting three-minute updates? When we’re distracted in this way, we forget to reset our strategies for all the major things in life. Are we going to keep working at the same job, train for something else, change careers? Are we going to stay at the same address or pack and move? When are we going to retire? Do we have backup plans for when our parents or kids reach a certain age? Are we ever going to finish our passion projects - or start them? It’s a mistake to get sucked too much into current events, passive entertainment, and shopping. What I mean by that is that research shows that it doesn’t make people any happier. It also doesn’t change a single darn thing. It’s up to each of us to find interesting and constructive ways to spend our time. My recommendation is always to look ahead five years and ask, if things keep going along like this, what is likely to happen? Is that what we want for ourselves? Or is it not? And if not, what are we prepared to do about it? It is my considered opinion that there is nothing to be gained by talking about politics. If you talk about politics with someone who agrees with you, all you’ve done is reinforced each other’s opinions. (And if all you’re doing is talking, well then, what good ever came out of that?) If you have the misfortune of talking about politics with someone who disagrees with you, there isn’t much space for anything other than irritation at best, or a ruptured relationship at worst. My personal way of handling this is to remind people that I only discuss pre-Industrial politics. This can be a fun way of making friends, because it quickly surfaces those who are interested in history. Those who don’t want to talk about the politics of the Dark Ages can simply tap out, and we can talk about something else. I have been in many situations in which someone attempted to engage me in a political discussion against my will. Let me state quite clearly for the record that I do not owe anyone a debate on any topic at any time. Nobody is entitled to my opinion. I don’t have to tell people a single thing, not what color is my underwear or what I’d do if I won a million dollars or whether I prefer crunchy or creamy peanut butter. All of those things are my business, and so are my politics. As a corollary of this, I prefer not to know other people’s political beliefs at all. What I found after I quit Facebook was that it is easy to avoid finding out about other people’s politics. All it takes is to meet face to face and organize around a hobby or interest. While I’m pretty sure that my friends in Toastmasters, at the martial arts gym, and at work fall evenly across the spectrum, I can’t be sure about any one particular person. I love this. I’m on hugging basis (or used to be, she said darkly) with a lot of people who would undoubtedly back away with a disgusted look on their faces if we accidentally disclosed where our ideologies fell. Which ones? No idea, and I like it that way. Politics have always been ugly in these United States. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson quit speaking to one another for over a decade. Preston Brooks nearly beat Charles Sumner to death on the floor of the Senate. Mud slinging is actually one of the less objectionable aspects of our shared history. We’ve always been dirty, haven’t we? There are issues that we face today that arose before we even became a nation, and they have never been resolved, such as exactly how powers should be distributed between the states and the federal government. There is no single right answer. We hate ambiguity, though, and we’ll continue to never figure it out until the end of time. Something that is different here than in other countries is that we are suspicious of each other. We have a distaste for each other. We dislike each other’s company. We’re quick to believe in each other’s idiocy, insanity, hypocrisy, or double standards. This makes me unutterably sad. If I could change one thing, this would be it. The only way we can ever make anything different happen is if we find more ways to spend time together in a companionable, neighborly way that is not polarized or politicized. I was talking about this with family the other day. I am fortunate not to know the politics of the majority of my extended family, and please, if you’re reading this, let’s keep it this way? I was sharing why I quit social media, which was because every time I logged in, I would see a flame war erupt between people over the dumbest and most innocuous topics. Sports. Video games. What phone operating system was best. Fonts. I happen to like Comic Sans, and what are you going to do about it? Next you’re going to tell me your feelings about pineapple on pizza, or cilantro, and then we just can’t have a potluck together anymore. What is the ever-loving point? The point I was making with my family was that we all came from a time, even though we are of different generations, when most people had tons of stuff in common. We all watched the same few shows at the same time. We all listened to Top 40 on the radio. We all saw the same movies the same week, when they appeared on network TV, because there were only three channels. It was possible to have a casual conversation with anyone, because we had thousands of points of reference in common. It was boring and hokey, but it was what we had, and it worked. It’s not true anymore. What we’ve gained with the abundance of options that were created, first by cable television and then by the internet and then by smartphones, what we’ve gained in options we have lost in shared references and common ground. Remember how emotional it was to see all the Italians singing off their balconies in the early days of the COVID lockdown? What made me cry about that was that I couldn’t think of any songs all my neighbors were likely to know. I would have leaned out and sung “Don’t Stop Believing,” except that my singing is abysmal. The only thing my neighbors would all have in common was their desire to get me to stop. This is an incredible country. What I love about being an American is our optimism, our inventiveness, our never-say-die commitment to innovation, our crazy food. I also love our rich and strange history, the remarkable project of representative democracy that shocked the world and changed everything for everyone. What I see before us is... a new Space Age. I think the problems that are terrifying and disgusting us all today will be merely a footnote in advanced history books a century from now. I think even five years from now we’ll have moved on. I think it would be good for all of us to start looking forward and imagining solutions, creating a world that we all want to live in together. Let’s talk about what we do want, not what we don’t want - and if you want to talk about politics (with... me??), think again. Those conversations are completely predictable at this point. Let’s make up something new. I’m getting my first performance review at work. This is the first time I’ve gone through a review in over ten years, and I’m feeling about it pretty much like anyone would.
Which is: AAAAHHHHHH!!!!! I took this job because I wanted something to do during the pandemic and I stopped being able to work on my book when my husband started working from home. I was quite certain we would still be fighting this thing through the end of the year, even back in April 2020. It is disappointing to be proved right about that, but what do you do. I was right, this new job has given me plenty to do. I’m so busy all day that I rarely give the pandemic much of a thought at all, unless we’ve gotten an email update about the “return to work” plan. I’ve made friends, and sometimes we chat and crack jokes and laugh. All of this is a huge improvement over where I was emotionally in March, sitting glumly on the couch and staring into the middle distance. It is weird, though, that the review process is getting under my skin so much. There’s the part of me that is cheerfully ready to work away the next couple of years while the world is turned upside down, no problem. This part of me is having a good time hanging out (and of course earning money) while the clock runs down, leaving me only a couple of hours at the end of each day to fret about COVID-19 statistics. Then there’s the part of me that likes puzzles, that enjoys solving problems or noticing things that maybe someone else didn’t. That’s the part of me that likes work for its own sake. Doing something that needs to be done, maybe even doing it more quickly or putting a nice little spin on it. Then there’s the part of me that wants to hide quivering in the closet rather than face my review. What is going on there? It’s not that we need the money; we were already living on half our income. The premise has been that I could earn significantly more if I ever get a book deal. (Or, especially, sell a screenplay). In that sense, if I left, it would not impact our lifestyle materially. Same tiny apartment, same car-free household. It’s not that I have any particular innate desire to do what I’m doing forever. It’s the industry that I like, not necessarily my role within it, although it’s fine and I have no complaints. I appreciate the culture and the mission and I like working with all these brilliant, courteous people. I like helping out in the way that I can, but it’s not like any of my specific tasks are wildly fascinating in their own right. I imagine that if I left, it would be the place and the people I would miss, not the daily details of my role. The only thing that’s hanging on my performance review, then, is my pride. What I’ve done is to make myself vulnerable to criticism in a way that I wasn’t when I worked for myself. I took on the odd client, picked up the occasional freelance gig, and it made sense that these arrangements came and went on a temporary basis. My relationship with external feedback doesn’t always make any sense, and I’m working on that. I remember how terrible I felt, how drained and sad, after I won my election as division director. Objectively I had done well. In point of fact, I had won my position by a large margin. I tried to talk myself into something else; maybe I couldn’t make myself feel proud or excited, but at least I deserved to feel flat or neutral? I couldn’t figure out what was so depressing about the reality of winning. Something about competition is demotivating to me. I don’t like being held up against others, even when the comparison works to my advantage. That proved out again just this weekend, when I was invited to an online party and we played some games. I won a game, and I shrank inside. Why? I’m not even completely sure. I think it’s a mix of feeling like other people will be disappointed because it’s a zero-sum game, and if one person “wins,” then by definition others have not won. That feeling, plus perhaps a sense that another person might be annoyed or feel envy or jealousy about that supposed “win.” All the celebration and anticipation is over at the end of the game. The goal has been reached, and now what? And furthermore, so what? The performance review process doesn’t seem to serve many people all that well. It intimidates everyone and it’s a huge time suck for management. The top performers are probably intrinsically motivated anyway, which is the reason that they do so well - but is the review process a way to somehow collect their focus and energy and figuratively inject it into others? Does this process indeed help people suss out exactly how to improve? Does it actually get the results that it’s meant to get? I’m very lucky that I can talk directly with my boss every day, and he is pretty good about giving clear feedback and asking for exactly what he wants. Every morning, I clock in knowing what I need to get done, and why, and who benefits. In fact, I’ve already read my review, and it was quite nice, and I have no reason to be as anxious about it as I am. I have really thrown myself into this job, seeing it as a form of rescue from the intense boredom and stress of isolating from the pandemic. I’ve learned a lot and I’ve done a few things that make me proud already, in only six months. What I’m trying to figure out is why, objectively, the better I do, the more I freak out about being evaluated on my performance. I doubt I’m alone in this. It’s certainly something I need to get my head around if years go by and I somehow mysteriously find myself facing a promotion. Stranger things could happen. I do like this place. As far as my review, if this sort of thing is in any way reciprocal, my job itself exceeds expectations. |
AuthorI've been working with chronic disorganization, squalor, and hoarding for over 20 years. I'm also a marathon runner who was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and thyroid disease 17 years ago. This website uses marketing and tracking technologies. Opting out of this will opt you out of all cookies, except for those needed to run the website. Note that some products may not work as well without tracking cookies. Opt Out of CookiesArchives
January 2022
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