Coping with Quarantine
How do you deal with lockdown? Do you regain consciousness only when the sun forces its way into your room and heats you enough to compel you to seep out of bed like an overripe brie? Do you then blearily reach for your phone to catch up with the latest happenings on Facebook through gummy eyes?
Is this day the same as the last, and the one before that, and the ones before that: an endless re-run of a soap that you disliked the first time you saw it and avoided ever since? Do you make the bed less often, allow the dishes to stack up? Have you forgotten where you put your deodorant?
It’s easy to devolve, to pull a comfy chair in front of the television, to settle down with a bowl of crisps and a gallon of soda, to reach for the remote. There’s nothing on that you really want to watch, and your surfing sends you reeling into re-runs of ‘Here Comes Honey Boo Boo’ or ‘Barney and Friends’ and you continue watching until you reach for the ricin.
There are always games to distract you: CrossFire, or Dungeon Fighter, or Minecraft where you can lose yourself in another word for a while, forget about the economic tsunami that has already begun swelling on the far side of the ocean, ignore the wave that is growing with every mile until the moment that the pandemic is over and you emerge into the light for the first time and it crashes over you and drowns you.
It might seem like the end of the world, but it’s not. Our planet hasn’t seen the likes of this coronavirus pandemic for some time, but it’s not the first pandemic. And it’s not the worst either; not by a long shot. Of course, the world has never been shut down quite like this before, not even during the last century’s global conflicts. But the world has never been this connected before. The influenza epidemic of 1918 killed about 50 million people. But that was a head-cold compared to the plagues that swept through Europe for over five-hundred years.
It is difficult to see through to the other side, but most of us will see it. The world will be a different place. How different, nobody knows yet. It might be worthwhile trying to prepare for it.
Isn’t there something that you’ve always wanted to do, but never managed to find the time for. Work and the pressures of home never allowed you to finish that photography course that you started when Kodachrome was still a thing. If you’ve always wanted to be a better cook, Gordon Ramsay is waiting for you on YouTube and he won’t even swear at you, much. Heston Blumenthal is there too and willing to let you in on some of his secrets.
But, if you have spent a lot of time doing social media — who hasn’t — and have started to believe some of the posts, there are courses that you can take that will teach you how to separate the dung from the diamonds. If you’re less than impressed with the newfound powers of the state, of the new intrusions into your privacy, there are courses that will enlighten you and lead you to new perspectives.
The best places to start are the MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) that are hosted by companies like Futurelearn, Coursera, edX, and Udemy. The good news is that many of them are free.
Here are some suggestions:
If you feel bombarded by conflicting information about the virus and want some help deciphering it, there’s a course on Coursera that might interest you. It’s presented by Yale University (yes you really can take a Yale course — for free). The course is called: Understanding Medical Research: Your Facebook Friend is Wrong!
When you’ve finished that, head off to Lancet, the medical journal. They have a Covid-19 Resource Center where all the papers on coronavirus have been made open access and can be downloaded for free.
If you’re worried about government interfering in your liberties, controlling your data and snooping on you with their tracing apps, Yale (again) presents a course through Coursera called Moral Foundations of Politics, which will help you to decide if your government’s actions are ethical, if they are reasonable, and even if they are legitimate.
That might be a little too deep, and the elections in the US are still months away. Something more immediate might be, Too Much Information: How to Separate the Helpful from the Harmful about Coronavirus, presented by First Draft News.
There are many organizations that are giving away courses that they normally charge for. So, if you do want to start that photography course again, Nikon is offering access to their online lectures for free.
There is an almost infinite number of subjects and courses to choose from. Don’t wait. Tear yourself away from the television and sign up. You might emerge on the other side with new knowledge, a new perspective, or even have completed that one subject that you have been wanting to do since you dropped out of college.
