#2 Comedians in Zoom getting coffee
I’ve been cycling through episodes of Comedians in Cars getting coffee and yelling at my girlfriend when she wants to watch a pretentious indie movie instead. I thought I was watching it because its nice to hear people talk about their craft and also because I’ve no friends. But the truth is that it feels like watching a costume drama from the 60s. Who are these people walking around cities, touching random objects, holding a door handle and sitting less than three feet away from each other? In the mean time I’ve touched my face thrice while writing this and I’m fantasizing about the long drawn death that follows. Those people from January 2020 have to check their privilege.
On the other hand, I’ve got this whole quarantine/cabin fever thing figured out now. All you have to do is reduce it all down to log scales and write down everything you did during the day:
Washed my hands - 6 times
15 push ups
2 mile run
Put the clothes in the dryer
And that’s it, that’s all it takes. It’s not been easier at any point in time to feel productive and blame everything on something else with impunity. Never mind that the virus has been more productive than me and killed more people today than the number of words in this newsletter.
The virus of course does not care about productivity or read a lot of productivity porn. It does not have any trauma or privilege it has to deal with. In a way we’d all like to be as productive as the virus. Which is why I think a lot of people can’t resist metaphors like “fighting the enemy” or “If we give up, they win”. We are not far from the day when a productivity guru uses Covid-19 as an example in a productivity case study.
I guess we feel defeated by something that we cannot comprehend. Not because its complicated but because you can’t really understand its motivations and assign a narrative to it. Most hard things are easier when you assign narrative - the Nazis are bad, the Russians must not get ahead of us in the space race, all Asians must be good at math… all boomers should learn to code. The lack of narrative is killing us, literally.
That said most of us should probably pretend that nothing is wrong and stay on our couches. Its hard not to resist the impulse to “do something about it all” but that is why we have:
1. The stock market - even the senators have given up “doing anything about it” and are in it for the puts man
2. WhatsApp cures - There’s the FDA, but then all the cures for Covid-19 seem to be approved first by my uncles on WhatsApp.