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Midlife Crisis in a Pandemic

Erin and I are big fans of the Netflix series “The Crown.” The other night we watched an episode called “Moondust” and it hit me where I currently live.

The episode is set during the Apollo 11 mission to the moon and shows Prince Philip (played by Tobias Menzies) grimly obsessed. The scale of human achievement has him in awe — and re-evaluating his life.

Mood Music:

The Duke of Edinburgh — as portrayed in this dramatization, anyway — is tortured throughout the series over the career he surrendered to be consort to Queen Elizabeth. He’s an adventurer who often must cast passions aside to carry out his royal function. Watching astronauts Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin pull off one of mankind’s ultimate achievements ignites a profound midlife crisis in him and he dives deep into his mind for meaning.

Prince Philip (played by Tobias Menzies)

Spoiler alert: Prince Philip ultimately realizes one of his greatest problems isn’t a lack of adventure and moonshot-level achievement but of faith.

I can’t say I’m having a midlife crisis in the conventional sense. I’m grateful for the career I’ve built and have had plenty of adventure along the way. Aging doesn’t bother me. As I push 50, I often marvel that I’ve gotten this far, given past health problems.

But like pretty much anyone reading this, I’m going on two months of pandemic lockdown and often feel like an aging dinosaur whose life is passing him by. There’s no rationale for it. Yet as I spend most days at home, I feel caged, grateful as I am to be with my family — kind of like Philip locked up in his palace.

During this time, as good as my career has been, I fixate a lot on missteps along the way, what I’ve failed to accomplish so far and where I’m headed. I’m reflecting on the man I am overall — how well or not so well I’ve practiced my faith, how I’ve conducted myself as a parent and spouse (not always so well) and what my kindness level toward others has been (not very high).

This is not a self-flaying exercise. It’s simply where I am right now. I intend to use the lessons to better myself, something we all need to do sometimes.

I turn 50 in three months, and the self-critique was probably going to happen anyway. Current circumstances forced the introspection early.

In “Moondust” Philip finds his way through the crisis.

I’ll keep pushing myself toward a more positive evolution.

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Big Conclusions from Incomplete Data Are Folly

As the COVID-19 crisis escalated in mid-March, Minnesota Public Radio News Chief Meteorologist Paul Huttner wrote an article comparing everyone’s efforts to predict who would get sick and die to forecasting a storm with a broken weather forecast model.

Mood Music:

Describing the gaping hole in U.S. testing efforts, he wrote:

It’s like one of our weather satellites is down, and we can’t get a clear picture of what the storm looks like from above. We just can’t see the whole storm.

It was an apt analogy then and remains so. Yet we continue to grind our gears over a busted radar and barometer.

Nearly six weeks later, testing is still a massive failure in this country. We still lack the accurate picture needed to build forecasts and make plans to re-open society.

We see an endless array of charts, maps and other data presentations and thousands of articles across the internet that dissect it all in search of clues on how the virus affects the young vs. middle-aged vs. old. There are death statistics for all 50 U.S. states, for Italy, for Spain, and on and on. All this new data, daily.

And without massive testing and contact tracing, sifting through it all and making conclusions are an exercise in futility.

That doesn’t mean the data we have is useless. Every data point offers a lesson that we can use to make smarter decisions — and we have.

But trying to make the big-picture conclusions using data that doesn’t have a solid foundation beneath it? It’s starting to seem like a waste of time and resources.

Truth is, testing and contact tracing will never be where they need to be. There’s not enough personnel, supplies or logistical agility for the former, and the latter is rife with technical glitches. Not to mention the potential for government misuse.

So we’ll never have the broad, solid foundation to put all the other data into the proper context. We’re never going to know the exact number of people around the world sickened with COVID-19. We’ll never know the true death rate.

Perhaps we should make peace with what we don’t know and start figuring out how we can keep the largest number of people as healthy and safe as possible while re-opening businesses, schools and recreation.

Last weekend I read an interesting Wall Street Journal piece by Avik Roy, president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity and co-author of the foundation’s “A New Strategy for Bringing People Back to Work During Covid-19.” In the essay, Roy notes that we have specific goals we’re trying to make before we go “back to normal,” things like near-universal testing and an approved vaccine. “But,” he writes:

This conventional wisdom has a critical flaw. We’ve taken for granted that our ingenuity can solve almost any problem. But what if, in this case, it can’t? What if we can’t scale up coronavirus testing as quickly as we need to? What if it takes us six or 12 months, instead of three, to identify an effective treatment for Covid-19? What if those who recover from the disease fail to gain immunity and are therefore susceptible to getting reinfected? And what if it takes us years to develop a vaccine?

Such questions can raise fears in us, but these are truth-based fears. We can see, Roy points out, how unrealistically optimistic our goals are. It’s far more likely that we won’t make all our goals. And if we don’t, what then? “Do we prolong the economic shutdown for six months or longer? Do we impose a series of on-and-off stay-at-home orders that could go on for years?”

Roy doesn’t have the answers for how we move forward, but he does offer a starting point I agree with:

Instead of thinking up creative ways to force people to stay home, we should think hard every day about how to bring more people back to work.

Our current analysis paralysis — fixated around data sets that are limited without knowing the bigger picture of who exactly has had the virus, recovered or died from it — is unsustainable.

There’s a way forward. But it’s going to involve us taking a few leaps of faith along the way and tossing aside the broken forecasting tools.

Drawing of people at a conference table. The white man at the head of the table says, "Let's solve this problem by using the big data non of us have the slightest idea what to do with." Copyright marketoonist.com
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Should You Worry About Another Great Depression?

Early in this crisis, a friend made pronouncements some of us called out as fearmongering. One thing he kept saying was that the virus would cause an economic depression.

My friend has been proven right about a lot of things concerning COVID-19 these last few months. Could he be right about this, too?

The word “recession” is uncomfortable. The word “depression” can be downright terrifying, especially when “great” appears before it.

Mood Music:

I’ve been thinking a lot about all the periods of economic distress I’ve lived through, particularly those of my adult working years.

There was the early 1990s recession that led to Bill Clinton’s election as president. I was in college, so it didn’t affect me as much. The recession that followed the dot-com bust and 9-11 terrorist attacks in the early 2000s was the first where I worried about layoffs. Then came 2008 and the Great Recession. I worried about my job then, as well. I was lucky and stayed employed through both downturns.

Am I worried about job security this time around? I’ll put it this way: I never take job security as a guarantee — in good economic times or bad.

I am confident that my industry is in a good position to weather the storm. With the pandemic sending so many people into work-from-home situations and state-sponsored hackers out to exploit the chaos, information security is more important than ever. Still, it would be foolish for any industry to consider itself immune.

Indeed, some of my industry peers are worried, particularly younger folks who were still in school during the last recession. This is the first time they’re worried about being laid off. And this may turn out to be the worst downturn America has seen since the 1930s.

With these worries, I’m hearing from friends experiencing anxiety and depression. Despite my own optimism about getting through this downturn, I’m feeling it, too.

This downturn started through an unprecedented sequence of events. But the underlying economy was strong, unlike past downturns where underlying economic fissures expanded and ruptured.

Also unlike previous downturns, though, society abruptly applied the breaks, deeming social distancing necessary to manage COVID-19. Was that the right course? Time will tell.

A rapid post-pandemic recovery is wishful thinking for several reasons. Yet we won’t necessarily experience the protracted economic paralysis of the Great Depression. We’re in a different time and place. That’s cold comfort to the millions who have already lost their jobs, however.

Though I’ve been lucky at avoiding layoffs up to this point, more than a few colleagues and friends did lose their jobs in the most recent recessions. All went on to new opportunities and have achieved new levels of success. They networked, expanded their skill sets and persisted as new opportunities arose.

It’s an unsettled time. While we have past crises to guide us through, we can’t know exactly how things will go. They’ll probably get worse before they get better, because that’s how life generally goes.

But things will get better. Life generally goes like that, as well.

Keep the faith, and take things one day at a time, work your asses off and always — always — develop backup plans.

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Truth-Based Fears: Helping Us Adapt

This blog has dealt extensively with fear, specifically how I’ve let it disrupt my life in the past — ruining what should have been moments of joy and causing moments of embarrassing behavior.

Mood Music:

The topic has returned to the forefront amid COVID-19. There’s the personal impact of fearing the unknown, and the societal fear where we hand government too much power in hopes of being safe.

It’s a tricky subject to write about because, like anxiety and depression, fear has many different facets. I’ve focused mostly on the bad and perhaps not enough on its usefulness in helping us adapt and meet challenges. I’m gaining a better perspective lately, especially when trying to apply things like the OODA Loop to daily routines.

I’ve been re-reading John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, and it has helped clarify where fear helps and hurts amid the current pandemic.

He writes about two kinds of fear:

  • The kind built on mistrust and distortion, where people make tragic choices because federal, state and local officials refuse to be straight with them about the extent of the contagion’s spread
  • The kind based on truth, which scare people at first but quickly give them the wisdom to adapt

In order for an authority to maintain the public’s trust, it can’t avoid some scary truths. Barry writes:

The final lesson of 1918, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that those who occupy positions of authority must lessen the panic that can alienate all within a society. Society cannot function if it is every man for himself. Those in authority must retain the public’s trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one. You don’t manage the truth. You tell the truth.

—John Barry, The Great Influenza

How leaders tell that truth matters, though. They can’t talk solely in abstractions and euphemisms. “A leader must make whatever horror exists concrete,” says Barry. “Only then will people be able to break it apart.”

Barry expanded on that second point in a recent interview, saying:

Authorities need to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable — especially when it’s uncomfortable. This is important for two reasons. First, it lessens fear. People are always more afraid of the unknown. When people don’t think they’re getting a straight message they feel uncertain. In a horror movie, it’s always scariest before the monster appears. Once the fear becomes concrete we can deal with it. We can deal with reality. Second, if you want people to comply with your recommendations — and compliance is crucial to success — they have to believe you and trust you. If they doubt you they will ignore you.

I’d like to think I’ve abandoned the unproductive, panic-inducing fear that’s based on the unknown and put the truth-based fear to good use.

My approach is admittedly fatalistic on the surface: I’m just assuming we’ll be in this fight for a long time. I take nothing for granted — my job, my health, my ability to avoid episodes of depression. Losing ground in these areas is all within the realm of possibility.

By accepting that things are and will remain bad for some time and that anything can happen, I can adapt and focus on what’s in front of me — and what’s in front of me is pretty good.

In the face of the current crisis, we are already seeing humanity’s ability to adapt: we’re keeping business and learning going remotely, repurposing plant operations to churn out medical gear and moving from lost hospitality jobs to those that are in demand — grocery stores and medical facilities, for example.

To adapt is to survive and thrive. But we can’t adapt unless we face our truth-based fears first.

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When Kindness and Reason Break Through Facebook’s Wall of Vitriol

Firestorm in the shape of a fist and the middle finger
Firestorm in the shape of a fist and the middle finger

Most days, scanning Facebook reminds me of a picture I found online a few years ago — a mushroom cloud giving the finger.

Sure, there’s plenty of love and amusement to see on the Book of Face. But when it comes to political discourse, particularly in the U.S., people go nuclear with their beliefs.

They verbally vaporize anyone in their path who thinks differently. They drop labels like “fascist” and “liberal.” When challenged on their positions, they respond with “fuck you” while questioning the intellect of whoever’s comment rubbed them wrong.

Conservatives do it. Liberals do it. Centrists do it. And everyone gets shanked from it.

Mood Music:

When you see that shit often enough, it’s easy to miss the better parts of humanity on social media. You see so much hate, rage and self-righteousness that it poisons you.

The other day, several of those middle-finger mushroom clouds came from good people who believe the current strategy of social distancing and economic lock-down is the only sensible approach. The target of their outrage?

A guy worried that those measures are a threat to personal liberty and economic stability.

Irritated, I went on Facebook and scrawled this:

Some of those 78 comments were the predictable rehash of fixed opinions.

Another exchange — between the guy I was writing about and a nurse whose kids went to elementary school with mine — gave me something to be grateful for:

A reminder that in the Facebook viper pit, kindness, reason and understanding do exist if you pay attention.

I know these individuals fairly well and there are political positions they would not agree on. But in this exchange, that didn’t matter.

They connected over things that go beyond economic, political and spiritual ideology: the shared experience of losing loved ones and doing a job in dangerous conditions.

While they traded kind words, others in the thread discussed the challenges at hand and truly seemed to be seeking common ground.

Maybe — just maybe — we can get past petty differences and tackle the bigger problems.

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COVID-19 Gratitude: Live Online Performances

One thing I’m grateful for amid this pandemic: musicians and bands doing free performances from their remote locations. Check out my favorites so far.

Dave Grohl: “My Hero”

The Rolling Stones: “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”

Samantha Fish: Facebook Live Fridays:

https://www.facebook.com/samanthafishmusic/videos/574754296727437/

Joan Jett and the Blackhearts: “I Hate Myself for Loving You”

https://youtu.be/_O6w418sL6U

Paul Stanley talks “Love Gun” & More:

Sully Erna: “Hometown Sessions:

Eddie Vedder: “River Cross”

Billie Joe Armstrong: “Wake Me Up When September Ends”

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Grinding Beans for Anger Management

This past week brought the anger/rage/tantrum portion of this pandemic program to my mental doorstep. The dumbest, most inconsequential things sent me into sharp bouts of anger and rage — things that might annoy me in normal times but would never send my temper boiling over.

Mood Music:

I’m usually very slow to lose my temper. I always strive for the cool-headed approach. But these days, my usually long fuse is burning its way to the nub.

Example: The song above played on a loop in my head Sunday morning when I ventured out for groceries.

I wore the mask and gloves, doing my part to limit risk. A lot of people around me were doing their groceries without taking the same steps. I called them names from behind the mask. I wanted to ram a guy in the canned vegetable aisle for going the wrong way. Arrows on the floor now direct the flow of traffic to help keep the social distancing, and this guy and two others seemed to be ignoring it.

In the cereal/coffee aisle, I realized something: I was going the wrong way.

The grocery store was the clearest example of my jagged temperament of late, but it’s been there in other moments, when people would talk over each other in Zoom meetings, when a takeout order was missing an item, when a computer monitor arrived two days late without the right adapter.

Luckily, I’ve found a new tool to help me manage it. Erin got me a manual coffee bean grinder for Easter. When I feel anger getting the better of me, I pace around the house clutching it in my hands, cranking it as fast as I can, turning beans into powder.

Who knew this thing could work like a punching bag?

Saturday I cranked it for a good hour, grinding up half a bag of beans. The coffee brand, appropriately, is Battle Grounds.

To anyone I’ve blown up at in recent days: I’m sorry.

To those I’ve gotten judgmental toward: I know I’m a hypocrite.

Hopefully, I’m hitting the peak of the anger curve and am about to head back down to some level of normal (for me) temperament.

Meantime, I’m super grateful for this simple bean grinder.

Maybe for balance, I should pick up the guitar I’ve struggled to play in recent months. (Yes, you should. — Ed.)

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Trolling in the COVID-19 Era

Many of my friends and I troll each other a lot online. Those who doesn’t know us might think we’re mean-spirited old geezers. But really, it’s how we show affection and even respect. It’s how we know we’re buddies.

Mood Music:

Today’s Mood Music is for my pal Dave Marcus, who is vain and no doubt thinks this post is about him. Also, Faster Pussycat will annoy him. (Too bad Def Leppard never covered the song.)

In this era of lockdowns and political dysfunction, a lot of people are easily offended. That was true before the pandemic, too, but with life as upended as it currently is, people have reached new levels of prickliness.

This post isn’t about how people should behave. Who am I to tell anyone what to think or how to feel? It is, however, about how I personally choose to carry on with people whether I agree with them or not.

My friends fall into the following three categories:

  • Group A thinks all the mask wearing, school closing and economic lockdown is a government plot to enslave us.
  • Group B thinks Group A is a bunch of right-wing thugs willing to let people die to preserve their economic comforts.
  • Group C tries to urge calm and point to sunnier days ahead, sometimes ignoring realities staring them in the face.

I’ve jumped between the three groups since the pandemic began. I don’t think current safety measures are a plot to steal our freedom, though I do worry about government amassing levels of new power we won’t be able to claw back.

I don’t think all of those who oppose social distancing and lockdowns have their head in the sand. Some have prepared for many kinds of emergencies as a matter of course.

I agree with those who believe that if we freeze the economy for too long, there won’t be much of an economy left when it’s all over.

I mostly fall into the C group. I always go looking for the bright side, sometimes to a fault. No apologies here — we need hope to battle through the tough stuff.

I’m going to continue to share articles I believe are from reliable sources and have details we can use to plot our way forward. Some of those will be scary articles about China and bio warfare (never thought I’d share from The EpochTimes, but I trust the writer). Some will paint pictures of economic depression, because we have to be realistic about what we face and plan accordingly. Many will show the better side of humanity during this emergency, because we need reminders that humanity is capable of good.

Some of my friends will affix the laughing emoji to the comments and drop memes and gifs suggesting that I’m overreacting. Others will use the comments section to question my sanity, conclusions or whatever else comes to mind.

I see people on Facebook who hate being questioned or disagreed with. They respond with words like “asshole,” “liberal,” “fascist,” “communist” or just react with the standard “fuck you.” That’s unfortunate, but I wish them well.

To those in my orbit who want to troll: Have at it. You may be idiots, but you’re my idiots.

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Gripped by COVID-19 Fear? Look to Cancer Survivors’ Coping Tools

"The Scream" by Edvard Munch

I’ve spent a lot of time here chronicling efforts to keep fear from rendering myself and others inert. This morning, an article in The New York Times captured it from the vantage point of people living with cancer.

There’s much to unpack in this narrative by Susan Gubar, distinguished emerita professor of English at Indiana University who has battled ovarian cancer since 2008.

Her storytelling and personal reflections are not to be missed. Read it all. But for the sake of some quick takeaways, I’ve distilled it into the bullets below.

Mood Music:

Gubar sets the stage by describing things cancer patients have to worry about daily in a world teeming with contagions and how steps that are standard operating procedure for them are the very things that still seem weird for the rest of us who now must do these things:

Having survived months or years of living intimately with the mortal threat of cancer, the members of my cancer support group — who now connect via email — manage to carry on while keeping as calm as possible during the current health crisis. Not fully resistant to bouts of contagious terror, we nevertheless find coping mechanisms.

We know that fear can be debilitating, but it can also be self-preserving. The chronic patients in my support group cultivate vigilant fear: They use their trepidation to do everything they can to extend their survival without being capsized into despair, hysteria or paralysis. One of us picks up her shopping wearing Nitrile gloves, just as she did when in chemotherapy. Upon returning home, she swabs what she has bought with a disinfecting wipe.

Gubar describes the usefulness of fear as the trigger to make people take the necessary safety precautions while acknowledging that fear unchecked will grind people to rubble. To combat that and maintain a degree of mental health, she describes some of what cancer patients have put in their toolboxes.

The ultimate value is that these tools help distract people from their fears, even if only for a little while. Routines and challenges allow them something they can exert control over. These are not new by any stretch, but the the solace they bring illustrates their continued value. They include:

  • Breathing or stretching
  • An intriguing task to accomplish
  • Baking/cooking
  • Nature walks
  • Knitting
  • Volunteering for a cause or organization: food banks, for example
  • Practicing a musical instrument
  • Painting

There are many more I could add to the list, and it’s important to acknowledge that if fear has pushed someone into depression, the motivation to do any of these things can ebb.

But when confronted with disease and other threats, it’s good to have these lists lying around.

Wishing you all peace and strength, amid cancer, COVID-19 and everything else that threatens our well-being.

Painting by Jon Han based on Edvard Munch's "The Scream"
Image by Jon Han

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We Can’t Allow Pandemic Fear to Erode Liberty

Fear makes us do horrible things. It can drive us to ruinous financial decisions and plunge us into addictive behavior. It can make us alienate those we love. And it can drive us to accept government actions that kill our liberties.

Mood Music:

The Patriot Act passed at the height of our hysteria over 9-11. At the time, a lot of us thought we were seeing terrorists holding vials of smallpox and suitcase nukes at every street corner. We were so freaked out over the next potential attack that we gave government the keys to do anything it wanted if it would just keep us safe.

Back then, I was perfectly willing to accept expansion of government power if it meant my friends and loved ones wouldn’t be blown to bits. As government power expanded unchecked, I came to see the folly in my thinking.

Fast-forward to the current pandemic. The federal government and states are imposing lockdowns and social distancing because, we’re told, we must flatten the curve of COVID-19 infections and protect loved ones. I believe that’s true and am doing my part. But I see things that will come back to haunt us — things we must be hyperaware of now because, if we’re not, the government’s reach could grow to totalitarian levels, regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans are in charge.

As we grow increasingly restless and desperate for some return to normal — if that’s even possible — we must view the following as red flags:

Apple and Google are working to add technology to their smartphone platforms to alert users when they have come into contact with a person with Covid-19.

From the article:

People must opt in to the system, but it has the potential to monitor about a third of the world’s population.

The technology, known as contact-tracing, is designed to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus by telling users they should quarantine or isolate themselves after contact with an infected individual.

I don’t think contact tracing is a bad idea in itself. Part of why we’re all holed up right now is that testing in the U.S. is way behind where it should be, leaving us with no accurate measurement to see exactly how and where the virus is spreading. If we had that data, we could enact more moderate, commonsense measures to protect the most vulnerable and keep the rest of society functioning. Contact tracing can be a useful measurement.

But if those apps are left running, the government’s ability to see and control our daily lives might become limitless.

Once we enable an app on our devices, it’s very easy to forget it’s there and running.

Meanwhile:

The government is considering immunity cards for people who have recovered from COVID-19.

From the article:

Immunity certificates are already being implemented by researchers in Germany and have been floated by the United Kingdom and Italy, the most recent epicenter of the global outbreak in Europe.

In parts of China, citizens are required to display colored codes on their smartphones indicating their contagion risk. The controversial surveillance measure facilitated earlier this week the end of the lockdown of Wuhan, the city in China’s central province of Hubei where the novel coronavirus first emerged.

I’ll admit that my reaction to this idea might be extreme. On the surface it sounds reasonable: This is another tool that could allow free movement. But it’s a paper-thin surface. It fills my head with visions of Star Wars storm troopers patrolling streets with blaster rifles in hand, randomly demanding passersby show their papers.

A more extreme vision — one I hate to use but can’t dismiss — is that of Jews walking around with stars and other badges during the Nazi era. Suggesting that we’ll reach that point feels like tin-hat theory, but the likelihood is not zero.

I spent years working to overcome the fearfulness that can be a byproduct of OCD, anxiety and depression. Most of the time I do fine, sometimes I fail. Admittedly, in this environment it can be easy to succumb. When a friend first shared the contact-tracing app article on Facebook , my reaction was to comment that it was great news. Not long after that, the second thoughts emerged.

These are scary times indeed. But we must keep our heads screwed on straight and remember what it means to be American. If we give up our rights out of fear, we cease to become the land of the free and become something else.

We shouldn’t push back on the technological tools that can help us get a better handle on the virus. But we must be very, very careful.