2020: Reflecting on a Year of Uncertainty

It’s 2020: everyone’s ambitious New Year’s resolutions have been derailed by a pandemic seemingly straight out of a disaster movie. I’m pretty sure no one in December was looking forward to seeing how many Ben&Jerry’s ice creams they could stuff in their face per day before feeling shameful. No.

2020 was meant to be the year of redemption, as every year seems to be when you sign up for that new gym membership in January and delete your Netflix membership for the fifth time.

But alas, we’ve somehow come back to our old selves, the parts of us that we detest, that this is was supposed to be our time to PROVE to our friends and family that we haven’t begun to peak yet... Ok, maybe I’m over-exaggerating with we and am only speaking for myself (I’m speaking to you, guy who’s waking up at 5am everyday to do as many Quarantine Push-Ups as number of days you’ve been in isolation).

What the pandemic awards us is an inordinate amount of leisure time that we never knew we had. Ever realized how much time you’re actually spending on Reddit and Youtube per day? (Hint: Your phone settings will show you this depressing statistic).

Laurie Santos, a professor of Psychology at Yale University, refers to the intermittent moments of free time throughout our day as “confetti” free time. Now, as if out of no where, we’re left with a shit ton of confetti that nobody asked for. Besides, you only need confetti if you’re celebrating. Anyways, I’m getting distracted…

Before the pandemic, a lot of people in the liberal humanistic community (I’m talking about all the life coaches and self-help gurus who infect this website) stressed the importance of time-management skills. Either you take the brutalized Jocko Willink approach and wake up at 4am everyday because you’re a freak, or you plan your day to oblivion in your calendar.

Whatever you do, the goal is to fight your bad habits and take control of your life, or as they say in German, fight your inner pig-dog (do not ask me about the etymology of the German language).

Sometimes, we choose to go down this path willingly, because we feel like the lack of struggle in our life makes us feel guilty. Other times, you’re just dealt a bad hand of cards at some point in your life.

I’m a guy in excellent health with no pre-existing health conditions. But let me tell you about a time that was all interrupted.

About a year ago I was laying in a hospital bed after the third successive surgery in the span of six weeks. I’d never felt so close to death in my entire life, as fate seemingly dealt me a bad hand of cards out of no where.

It seemed unjust to have been confined to the hospital bed at the beginning of the summer, something you begin to look forward to after living through six months of cold bleak winter in Germany.

Nobody goes willingly to the hospital, not even to talk to an attractive nurse if you don’t like using Tinder. All my mindfulness meditation and spirituality practices during the two years prior to my surgery couldn’t prepare me for an experience in the hospital. Yes, this whole quarantine thing right now? Not my first time, partner.

My family came and visited me in the hospital, but had to use PPE to even come in and say hello since I was coming in from a different hospital, and the procedure was to put new patients in quarantine to prevent the spread of foreign pathogens.

Anyways, this isn’t supposed to be a sob story about redemption and how the hospital experience taught me to enjoy everyday as if it were my last. I mapped out these clichés onto my life for a while in an attempt to add color to the monotonous existence of living in the hospital. This is the consequence of growing up with too many stories about how Timmy beat cancer and went on to play in the NFL. Life isn’t a story of redemption.

In fact, life isn’t really a story at all, but the ebb and flow of events that appear in every waking moment of your life. We use emotions to make decisions and give meaning to what we’re going through, but in the end, we have around 80 years on this planet (I just looked it up and that’s the equivalent of 3,363,840,000 heartbeats for anyone who’s interested).

Look at you — you’ve probably spent around 200 heartbeats so far reading this stupid blog post, and I’ve spent many more writing it. There’s no rule for how you should spend your life, and there shouldn’t be. Heck, if you ask an evolutionary theorist, you should probably just have as many kids as possible before clocking out at the end of the day.

So what’s the point?

I thought the hospital experience would make me cherish every day as if it were my last and appreciate life more, and it did, for a little while. But after a few months, I started to question everything I did, not in a depressed way, but with a sense of agnostic insecurity.

They say the opposite of love isn’t hate, but indifference. I thought such an initial close call with death would make me truly love life, but after a while most things seemed indifferent to me.

The same applies to the opposite end of the spectrum. People who win lotteries or experience spurts of good luck end up calibrating after a while with their average level of unsatisfied living. Maybe Mick Jagger was right.

I couldn’t make sense of this feeling of indifference. I’ve travelled throughout five continents, lived extended periods of time in foreign countries, gone on silent meditation retreats, had close calls with death on various occasions, flirted with the idea of giving it all up and becoming a farmer somewhere in Brazil, and now I’m living through a pandemic that’s probably going to be taught in history classes in the future. I’ve got this desire for meaning in my life, or rather, a fear of living a dull life.

I’ve read books that further try to understand what I think a lot of people are experiencing during this nihilistic phenomenon of the 21st century. I’ve even discussed an interesting thought experiment with my friends as to whether someone from the past who’s fate was handed to them, say the son of a farmer who inherits the filial duty of the family, is happier than someone today who has an abundance of choices in front of them.

And then I heard something that totally resonated with me: a greater variety of choice does not correspond to a greater freedom of choice. In a decadent society where freedom is determined by the number of career opportunities or lifestyle choices open to the individual, we are left in a perpetual state of FOMO (fear of missing out), believing what could have been if we went to graduate school, or taken up a different career path, or adopted a different lifestyle approach.

I’ve had some of the most vibrant and incredible experiences over the past 3 years, while simultaneously trying to give meaning and clarity in the fear of otherwise facing inexorable boredom. When I think back on these amazing events, I’m brought back to the dull drumbeat of monotony. Let’s face it. The pandemic reminds us of all we have when everything is taken away from us: our loved ones and the conversation we have with ourselves every waking minute.

Even more so, the pandemic reminds us that a crisis is occurring in every one of us. My desire to travel, experience the most in life, is subject to change with different life experiences. FOMO will never go away.

Every waking moment you’re in constant conversation with yourself, even though you may not be aware of. As I lay in the hospital bed a year ago, the conversation revolved around losing hope and dying alone. I think about all of the unfortunate COVID-19 patients who are currently restricted to communicating with their loved ones via Skype as they are doomed to this solitary fate.

Living in a big city seemed so appealing to me a few years ago, given my desire to be an international flaneur. But living in a city during a pandemic exposes the fragile insecurities of all living in superficial comfort among millions of diverse neighbors. It’s a hollow existence.

There’s another theory to this: Dunbar’s number postulates that there is a finite cognitive limit to the number of social relationships you can form in your community, so living in a city just becomes a matter of access to resources if the number of people who surround you becomes obsolete.

This should be apparent to anyone now more than ever. I think everyone’s realized by now that Zoom Cocktails don’t really satisfy anyone’s social needs.

I know so many people who are afraid of drastic change, like switching careers or moving to a new city, because of the veil of insecurity. Maybe the answer is just having less choices? Nobody chose to spend most of their days at home, so let’s make 2020 the year of casual reduction.

All of those superficial friendships and Amazon orders aren’t making you happy, so get rid of them. Even the Netflix account. Get rid of it all.

If there’s one thing this pandemic has taught me, I would summarize it in one ironic, yet simple statement: Don’t be lazy.

You’re not in a hospital bed, you’re not dying from any disease, push yourself past the point of discomfort willingly, or choose a situation that will do so for you. In a decadent society like ours, this has become even harder, as much of the economy is predicated on retailers telling us we will remain unhappy unless we buy what they’re selling us.

People act perplexed when they hear about others waking up at 4am to go work out, but what’s your excuse for not doing so? Go do it tomorrow. Actually, go do it right now.

Stop speculating, stop looking for meaning, and just do something. Start small with no goal in mind. 2020 is the time to start somewhere.