I feel comfortable because I don’t need to make up excuses for isolation anymore, now it’s normal. For me it’s convenient, because I can stay home and study without going uptown. I even sometimes think that taking away all distractions and entertainment might have a positive effect on people. Not the virus, virus is a disaster, I mean isolation. Many see it as some sort of forced meditation.
My apartment is like an aquarium, it has floor to celling windows, common for New York. Feels like everyone can see you, but no one can hear you, like you are in a bell jar. This is not my metaphor, it’s the title of a stupid book by Sylvia Plath. I always wondered how did it made it so far. To me, it’s a waste of paper.
At first it was a little strange that restaurants, bars, clubs and etc are closed. Then I remembered that I grew up without going to entertainment venues almost at all. As teenagers we enjoyed communication, and friendship was the most valuable; until the world changed completely.
It was getting out of control. Distractions took over social life, in fact, even replaced it. Socializing became visual, superficial even. It got to the point when it was all about a number of places where you manage to show up in one evening and the quality of photos taken there, plus the number of accounts that will see them. Egocentrism turned a lot of people into zombies, who were cruising from one place another, to just show up.
Paradoxically, in these weird times of isolation, I see that people spend less time posting and scrolling - you would expect the opposite, that everyone would be surfing the internet. I guess people don’t care to see what is going on in other people’s lives, because nothing is going on anymore. Nobody feels that they are missing out, or need to compare themselves to others. Everyone is in a similar position and there is no need to validate anything. Validation of yourself to yourself doesn’t have merit, but communication does. The key component of it is people. People are valuable. And not for validating you, but to communicate, which is ultimately, to share.
Taking a break can have a healing effect. It releases pressure of constatnly catching up, with god knows what. Nothing. Things that don’t matter.