Quarantine Diary – Day 10

Quarantine is nothing new to me. I’ve been working in my pajamas and eating take out and leftovers for 17 years. What’s different about it now is everyone else’s reactions. Well, that and the reality of the situation. I never worked in a situation where I was actually afraid to leave home.

My wife is also working at home, and that’s new. It’s not as bad as you might think. She works downstairs and I work upstairs. She also stays busy most of the day, and we meet for meals. Sometimes we go get take out.

What’s new is that I can’t just crank up the music because she might be on a conference call. I don’t have the house to myself any more, and that takes a little adjustment.

What’s really going through my mind, though is that this might be permanent. Even now, not everybody is taking this seriously, but for those of us who are, it’s becoming obvious that working without a central office is not just a necessity for the moment, but it’s also a possible permanent situation. It’s taken this threat of killing millions of Americans and possibly tens of millions of humans worldwide to get us to make this kind of change. It forces you to reevaluate what’s really important.

“The Economy” as we know it is based on making a lot of useless junk very quickly. In the past (say 100 years ago), we used to make insufficient stuff more slowly, but a bigger percentage of what we made was useful. For example, how many Christmas presents do you have sitting around the house that you’ve never even used? That kind of thing didn’t happen 50 or 100 years ago. But if we stopped making all of those things that we don’t use, want or need, the economy would collapse. Maybe there’s a way to find better balance. Somewhere in between an embarrassment of useless “riches” and the days when everything was hand made. There must be a middle ground.

So what if the economy doesn’t recover. We’d be better off in a lot of ways if we were able to go back to a simpler way of life. Maybe this brutal interruption can help some people see that. Is throwing the crap Amazon brings us into the Pacific Garbage Patch really our future?

Maybe even more than that is the fact that the places this sickness is going to take the biggest toll is going to be the most crowded cities. First it hit people who travel, next it hits people who live crowded together. NY City is the perfect mix of those traits.

We talk a lot about sustainability of our lifestyles from an energy point of view, but there are other aspects of life that can get out of whack. Overcrowding in cities is certainly one of them, and this virus drives that fact home in a painful way, and it is going to get far worse than it is now. It has not been sustainable for a very long time, we’re just now being sent the bill for our avarice.

Remember the first programming class you ever took? My first assignment (in Fortran, if that gives you any idea how long ago that was) was to program a “virus” (which back then didn’t have the same meaning from a programming point of view that it has today) where a spot on a grid infects each point next to it, and each spot stays infected for a certain amount of time before it becomes immune. The spots sweep through the whole grid with nothing to stop them. If you were to introduce gaps in the grid, the virus spreads more slowly or may not infect all the grid points. It’s so simple. You’re a carrier even if you aren’t sick yourself. We could have stopped this, and blaming China or Trump doesn’t bring anyone back. Staying off the crowded beach or a busy park might, though.

What’s going to happen when it reaches places like Mexico City, or India, or when the truth comes out about China?

I live in a smallish city, and so far the impact here has been small compared to what I see on the news. And what we see in the news is small compared to what’s coming. I still see people ignoring the guidelines. The recommendations are getting more and more strict because people are going on spring break, partying it up on the beach, defying the order at church of all places, and even funerals… We could have stopped this long ago if people just stopped moving around, stopped being ignorant and selfish. It sounds hard, but it’s not. If you think this doesn’t apply to you, you’re part of the problem.

So I’m at home. My state is under a “stay at home” order for the next 2 months. 2 MONTHS. I’m used to staying home, but now that I can’t go out, it’s the only thing I want to do. Still, I have friends and family over 70 who I want to still have around when this is all over, so I stay home, and I really hope that the rest of the statistics out there can control themselves and stay home too.

We’ve all seen these inspiring stories of hardship bringing out the best in people, and they are really great stories. But in some people, this is bringing out the worst. It’s hard to believe how many people have died already because of the carelessness of such a small percentage of the population. When they trace this back, it may be fewer than a couple dozen people traveling into the US brought all of this devastation. We are separated from Asia and Europe by water on all sides. People can’t get here by accident.

Nobody knows exactly how this is all going to end, but it’s clear that it’s going to cause a lot of misery before it’s over. Maybe we can take some time to reflect on what’s really important to us as individuals, and maybe this is the kick in the pants we need to really change our actions to reflect our priorities.