Prisoners of Our Own Device

“These are dark and unprecedented times,” read all of my emails over the past 3 weeks. And I now sign off my phone calls and meetings with a “stay home, stay safe”, though I know that there’s no way anyone can NOT stay home; after all the police are making sure of that!

I for one have been tracking the spread of the virus since it was merely a curiosity in China. That was 7 weeks ago, though it feels like donkeys years. In a sense, I saw this lockdown coming, and so also the ensuing chaos. I made a choice to stay put, fighting the instinctive urge to run home where my parents were. In that sense, I don’t deserve to feel surprised by the turn of events. Nothing changed for me - except for some minor inconveniences in the form of increased chores of cooking and cleaning, and perhaps none of that weekend loitering around town.

But I must admit that I have felt overwhelmed more than once in these 6 weeks of isolation. The closest a friend could put in words is to call it “a situation that makes one acutely aware of a void one never knew existed.” The trouble however, is that when one doesn’t know what’s missing, one can in no way find it. 

Along 3 weeks into the isolation, one morning as I was talking to my pet plant, something struck me- this is the first real global crisis where millennials - my generation- are the adults responsible for sorting out the mess. We, the memers, the gamers, the social media addicts, the neo-liberals (or neo-Nazis, depending on where one stands), the digital addicts, the white collar tech-workers. Also, the softies resulting from nearly 4 decades of (largely) no wars, famines, plagues or genocides. Now along came a pandemic and evidently, the elders are as clueless as we are. What’s worse, they froze like deer in headlights when they should’ve been preparing.

What ensued is a roller coaster ride of cerca trova, often feeling clueless, tremendously uncertain and downright scared of some risqué and questionable choices. The apartment I’ve now began to call ‘Walden’ in my cheery moments, felt like a fuckin solitary-confinement on other days.

That brought me around to thinking about the idea of freedom and what makes us all feel constrained, confined and claustrophobic in our own homes, with our own people and with everything we need coming to our doors. The prison, I figured, is in our minds. Or like the Eagles put it, “we are all just prisoners here, of our own device...”

This crisis is far from over. And we’re far from returning to the “good ol’ days”. Neither is it the last one we’d face in our lifetimes. Yet, I know we’d come through on the other side - a little beaten and battered, eons later, but alive nonetheless. And we’ll carpe the damn diem once again...

Viva la vida!

M

20-April-20