The OCD Diaries

June 20, 2021June 22, 2021

Measuring Anxiety and Depression Through Color and Stages

As I work to keep my mind and body in check during the pandemic, two older tools have proven useful: the Anxiety Rainbow and the Five Stages of Depression. The idea is that by measuring what you’re going through, you can take steps to manage those feelings and stay in the game.*

This isn’t a scientific breakdown, of course. It’s simply how I’ve learned to process what I feel.

Mood Music:

The Five Colors of the Anxiety Rainbow

To get a better handle on anxiety, I try to label the different kinds of anxiousness based on the first five colors of Newton’s primary color system:

Red. This is the worst of the worst, the type of anxiety that makes you feel like you’re at death’s door. I used to suffer from this one all the time: a cold sweat breaking out on my forehead, my heart pounding so violently that I thought it would break bones, my feet tingling and a constant feeling of having to throw up. Fear is the trigger for this one, the kind of fear that made me not want to go places, take risks or live life in general.
Remedies: For me, Prozac has been a very effective weapon against red anxiety, as has my faith and, more recently, meditation.
Orange. Fear plays a big role in this anxiety as well, but unlike red, orange is usually rooted in something stressful that is really happening in your life. You could be fighting a serious medical issue and worrying about losing the fight. You could be having financial trouble that results in routine stress but the anxiety magnifies it to monstrous proportions.
Remedies: Medication has helped here, too, as has reconstituting my exercise regimen.
Yellow. This anxiety is usually triggered by a lot of sustained stress at work or home. Maybe your marriage has hit a rough patch or your job is riding on the success or failure of a huge project. To get through it, your body pumps more adrenaline than you need, and you get the overwhelmed feeling that keeps you from seeing the order of work items and their level of completion. The news business is a perfect place to experience this because you face daily deadlines and a tongue lashing from your bosses if a competitor gets a big story instead of you. I don’t experience that today, but when I worked for newspapers, yellow anxiety was always with me.
Remedies: Therapy, medicine, a heart-to-heart talk with the boss and, if necessary, a job or even a career change have all helped me. I made the career change in 2004. The medicine and therapy followed.
Green. This anxiety appears when the less-frequent stresses spark up. I recall one day six years ago when I was already ramped up after spending an evening at the hospital holding vigil while my father faced emergency surgery that ultimately didn’t happen. The plumber was coming to install a new dishwasher and to pound my mind into submission, I went on a chore spree. Then my cell phone died for good, and I had to spend the afternoon replacing it. The latter two events are problems we’re lucky to have, since the alternative is being too broke to afford these things. But it sent the day on a trajectory I hadn’t anticipated.
Remedies: The only cure for this one is to reach the end of the day and go to bed.
Blue. This is a small, sustained level of anxiety so slight that you usually don’t see it for what it is. It’s generally a byproduct of depression. In my case, blue anxiety shows itself in the winter, when a lack of daylight sends me into blue moods.
Remedies: Activity helps me the most with blue anxiety. Writing helps a lot, as does work.

5 Stages of Depression: Like Grief, But Different

There are plenty of articles out there about the so-called five stages of grief. Based on my experiences in that department, I find the writings mostly accurate and valuable.

I also found that these stages convert nicely to describe the course of my depressions.

Denial and isolation. Things start to go wrong, but you’re not immediately aware of them. Your short-term memory starts to slip, you become disorganized, and you protest when those who love and know you best suggest you may be heading for an episode. You respond by clamming up and ignoring friends when they ask you to have coffee. You spend a lot more time on the couch.
Anger. After too many days in denial, you start to realize you’re slipping into depression. This makes you angry, and you start taking it out on those around you. Your self-worth begins to sink, and you start to feel like you can’t do anything right. This leads to more anger, self-loathing, and self-pity.
Bargaining. During grief, this is the stage where a person repeatedly goes over the what-ifs: what if the loved one had gotten medical attention sooner, what if you’d recognized the problem for what is was, and so on. With depression, the bargaining works a bit differently: You play the blame game with the world around you. You’re depressed because of work. You’re depressed because of a disagreeable family member. If the depression is really bad, you blame anyone and anything but the disease within your own brain.
Melancholy. With grief, the fourth stage is depression. Within depression itself, the fourth stage is melancholy, at least in my experience. A deep sadness and hopelessness take hold in your gut after too many successive days of feeling like shit. It becomes hard to do most basic daily tasks.
Acceptance. After a while, you realize you have a few choices. The most extreme choice is suicide. I’ve never seriously considered it, but I know people who have and, sadly, gone through with it. Another choice is to start doing things to emerge from the depression. For me, that involves talking to people and writing to get the feelings off my chest. The other step is to re-embrace coping tools. It’s not like flipping a switch; it’s more like rebooting a computer. It takes time to start using your coping tools effectively again and more time for them to make a difference. But acceptance is a start.

With COVID-19, I’m at acceptance now and I’m grateful for it.

* While I’ve written about these tools before, they’re often used together so I’ve aggregated them into one post.

September 29, 2020September 28, 2020

Mental Shore Leave: A Remedy for Uncertain Times

Low energy. A lack of creativity that partly explains why I haven’t written in over a month. A deepening sense of dread. I’ve spent weeks trying to put a name or definition to the feelings and fatigue.

I know the cause, and I know that I’m no special case. A lot of people are experiencing the same things, and the whys are many: We’ve had to hold our mental functionality together amid an unending pandemic, a breakdown of public discourse, civil unrest and now a looming presidential election where an unclear result and constitutional crisis are all but certain.

I’ve finally found the proper label, courtesy of Dr. Aisha Ahmad. More importantly, she has put forth a remedy to help us move forward.

Mood Music:

Dr. Ahmad, associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto, wrote a recent Twitter thread about the six-month wall she has experienced when working for prolonged periods in disaster zones and how, when you hit that wall, it seems like the darkness is permanent, that things will never get better.

The desire to “make it stop” and “get away” is “intense” and our impulse is to try and ram through the period of uncertainty, trying to be as creative, disciplined and hopeful as we may be the rest of the time. She has learned to stop doing that, to give in to the lack of creativity and drive and take a “mental shore leave.”

Series of tweets from @ProfAishaAhmad: "Also, don't be afraid that your happiness & creativity are gone for the rest of this marathon. Not true. I assure you that it will soon break & you will hit a new stride. But today, roll with it. Clear away less challenging projects. Read a novel. Download that meditation app. /7"; "Frankly, even though we cannot physically leave this disaster zone, try to give yourself a mental or figurative "shore leave". Short mental escapes can offer respite and distance from the everyday struggle. Take more mental "leave" until you clear the wall. /8"; "In my experience, this 6 month wall both arrives and dissipates like clockwork. So I don't fight it anymore. I don't beat myself up over it. I just know that it will happen & trust that the dip will pass. In the meantime, I try to support my mental & emotional health. /9"; "Take heart. We have navigated a harrowing global disaster for 6 months, with resourcefulness & courage. We have already found new ways to live, love, and be happy under these rough conditions. A miracle & a marvel. This is hard proof that we have what it takes to keep going. /10"

I’m certainly experiencing this wall. I find it harder to write (this is my first post in a month), and it’s getting harder to get out of bed in the morning. I’m finding it close to impossible to be patient with the unending social media screeds from the left and right political extremes.

I’ve had massive cravings for escape — watching YouTube clips from Star Trek, Babylon 5 and The West Wing. I’m reading more comic strips than news articles. And I doze off in my leather recliner a lot.

I thought these were signs of weakness, of caving and buckling under the weight of life in 2020.

But the more I consider Dr. Ahmad’s words, the more I think those activities might be a sign of strength — that I’m indeed capable of finding new waves of energy, creativity and resolve by simply letting the wall crash over me, resting in the rubble and then getting up and brushing off the dust.

We can expect many more months of chaos. Dr. Ahmad’s suggestion of taking mental shore leave is a tool to survive it. The key is to take mental shore leave without abdicating one’s responsibilities. We still have to get up for work. We still have to take care of our families. Obligations won’t go away while we pull ourselves together. So how do we maintain some semblance of balance? Here’s my plan.

Keep working, imperfection and all

I’m fortunate to remain employed, doing a job that matters. It’s a job that was already busy before the pandemic. Since then, the work has been more intense and, to be honest, I thrive in those conditions. In recent weeks, I find that I’m not as full of ideas and drive as I usually am. But getting up every morning and keeping all my initiatives on track gives me some mental stability. I may not be at my most creative, filling a whiteboard with thoughts and ideas in multiple colors as I’m known to do. But I can still keep all the balls in the air and keep the machine moving. And so I shall.

Ignore social media — to a point

Few things are more toxic to mental well-being these days than Facebook and Twitter. People are fixed in their world views and quick to tear down those with an opposing opinion. I’ve tried to spend my time on these platforms being a voice of reason, trying to steer people toward common ground. It increasingly seems like a pointless exercise. Yet I use social media for a lot of my work, so I can’t skip it altogether. Instead, I skip over political posts more often. My sharing is increasingly music-related, bits of rock ‘n’ roll history and video clips, and humor.

Stick with the neighbors

A silver lining of this pandemic is that we’ve gotten more quality time with the neighbors in our townhouse complex. We take joy in the pets running around the yard, our gardens and the beautiful weather we’ve been having. I’m pretty sure there’s a wide range of political views among us, but we don’t talk much about it. The antics of the pets are a lot more interesting and a lot more fun. (Especially when you stuff them full of treats! –Ed.)

Take more naps

As I mentioned earlier, I’m dozing off a lot these days after dinner and sometimes before. For me, there’s no better escape than sleep. It gives me the mental shore leave needed to keep going the rest of the time.

Remember what has gone right

There’s been so much tragedy in 2020 that it’s easy to forget that things have happened that show that we humans have the capacity to endure. As Dr. Ahmad noted in her Twitter thread, people have adapted, learning to do groceries, go to work and even find ways to be happy during the pandemic.

The pandemic will be with us for months to come, but there are signs that we can absolutely live our lives and co-exist with COVID-19. As bad as the economic downturn has been, a lot of businesses have found ways to adapt and latch on to unexpected opportunities.

Surely, we can continue to do so amid political chaos that will not abate anytime soon.

I’m a big fan of this quote, often attributed to Winston Churchill: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” I’ve certainly tried to do so.

But even Churchill understood that it was OK to stop within bouts of depression — which he called his Black Dog — and let go.

July 28, 2020July 27, 2020

A Tribute — and a Warning

Bob Scharn standing with statue of Captain Jack Sparrow

This is a tribute to a great man. It’s also about COVID-19 hitting close to home.

Bob Scharn was a giver.

He gave unlimited love to his wife and son and unlimited time as leader of my children’s Boy Scout troop.

He gave everything he had to everyone. The troop kids were his kids. Those kids have all grown into impressive young men. My older son is an Eagle Scout today thanks in no small part to Bob’s encouragement and guidance.

He was kind and patient to the core. I never once saw him raise his voice or lose his cool when the Scouts became a handful.

He also laughed at all my jokes, appreciating that obnoxiously bad ones were a right of passage for dads everywhere.

You could talk to him about anything. He could talk politics without letting his passions get the better of him. When he talked about Marvel movies and comics, his passions were clear from his endless supply of facts and figures. But whenever he shared anything, he was humble.

Come to think of it, I’m not sure I’ve ever known a more humble guy. That’s no overstatement.

Three weeks ago, Bob entered the hospital with COVID-19. His wife and son had come down with it as well but were able to recover at home. His was a more serious case. In the three weeks since, his wife and son have provided daily updates. Some days Bob held his own and it even looked like his lungs were clearing up.

Then things got worse. He needed a ventilator and dialysis.

Finally, last night, his son delivered the heartbreaking news that Bob’s body couldn’t take it any longer. He is now part of that bitter statistic — another American death in a pandemic that continues to spiral beyond control.

Bob has the eternal thanks of my family, and our hearts go out to his wife, Colleen, and son, Matthew.

Both are strong and will endure. Matthew will no doubt make his father proud many times over.

I know others who have fought COVID-19. Fortunately, they have recovered. Bob’s death is a punch to the gut.

A warning for all of you: Be careful. Limit your contact with people. Stay out of crowds. And for God’s sake, wear a mask.

If your family wants to have a gathering and someone is worried that doing so is too great a risk, don’t discount their concern.

By all accounts, the Scharns had been careful to avoid this.

To those tempted to use this post as license to spout conspiracy theories about how this isn’t really a pandemic but a government ploy to lord over the masses and change the outcome of an election, I have two words for you.

But I won’t say them here.

Bob wouldn’t have. He was better than that.

June 30, 2020June 29, 2020

On Masks and Virtue Signaling

Want the economy to re-open? Hate government-mandated lockdowns? Think wearing a mask and avoiding crowds is another example of totalitarianism?

As I watch the polarized clash of feelings on social media, my observation is that people across the political divide generally agree on the first two items. The third is how we get the first and lift the second. Yet here we are, fighting about it.

Mood Music:

Amid the shouting are right-leaning friends hurling an insult they love using when they want to land a crusher: Speak up for something you believe in — like wearing a mask — and the response goes something like this: “Nice virtue signaling.”

On the surface, that phrase doesn’t seem so bad to me. You have a virtue and you are expressing it. People on the left and right do it. What’s wrong with that? When someone doesn’t practice what they preach, that’s different, but since we never completely know what someone is doing with their lives offline, where do we get off painting someone as a hypocrite, let alone an entire group of people?

You think people wearing masks are virtue signaling and telling everyone else what to do. You think wearing a mask somehow infringes on your freedoms and is another example of the state trying to control the masses.

You opine that governors and public health officials should not make mask-requirement decrees without action from state legislatures. Yet state and federal laws give governors and the president the right to do so in a health crisis. COVID-19 qualifies.

You think the government has been wrong and/or dishonest about the pandemic, painting it as more of an emergency than it truly is? There’s no evidence of that, but the government has been lying to us about many things for a long time, so I don’t blame you for thinking that.

The last few months are a perfect illustration of that, with a never-ending stream of conflicting, inconsistent guidance as we struggle to learn more about this new disease. When you can’t keep your guidance consistent, people aren’t going to believe you.

I agree about and appreciate the physical difficulty some have wearing masks. That’s where I think limiting your exposure to other people comes in. And for the record, if I’m outside taking my morning walk, I don’t wear a mask. I’m the only one out there. It’s a different story when you’re coming into close contact with other people.

But it baffles me that you complain about the tyranny of lockdowns and reject a remedy that can control infection rates and let us carry on with our lives.

We can’t stay locked down without economic devastation, a mental health crisis, or a later surge in deaths because doctors aren’t doing cancer screening and other early-detection treatments.

We’re also not going to get rid of COVID-19 anytime soon, so we have to learn to live with it in our midst.

Wearing a mask and avoiding packed crowds won’t drop transmissions to zero, but it helps significantly. The proof is in states that have been at various stages of re-opening for weeks and still have infection rates under control. My state is one of them. More of daily life has resumed, many people wear masks and our infection/death rates continue dropping.

Looking at the current surge of COVID-19 happening in the south and west, it’s clear that a big part of the problem is that people are ignoring guidelines, going to crowded bars and not putting on a mask.

Some say they shouldn’t have to wear one because they have antibodies and “can’t catch” COVID-19. Immunity isn’t certain, nor how long any immunity lasts. And wearing a mask isn’t about you: it’s about protecting others. If immunity wears off or you don’t become immune in the first place, not wearing a mask endangers others.

If you think these thoughts make me a leftist, virtue-signaling sheep, fine. I make choices for myself and do so after considering how my actions effect those around me.

Some of you keep telling me to “reject the narrative.”

I do.

Your narrative.

May 28, 2020May 30, 2020

Good Things Are Happening (Updated)

With all the turmoil going on in the world — a pandemic, polarized politics — it’s important to remember that every day, even amid the bad, good things are happening. Here’s the current slice of that from where I sit.

We’ve entered a new phase of space exploration

NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley blasted into space Saturday in the first launch from U.S. soil since the space shuttle program ended nine years ago. Unlike past launches when NASA ran the show, this time a private company, SpaceX, is in charge of mission control. The company, founded by Elon Musk, built the Falcon 9 rocket and the capsule, Crew Dragon.

The curve is flattened

We still have a long way to go in this pandemic and it’s widely expected that we’ll see a second wave in cases — and deaths — later in the year. But for now, there are clear indications that the COVID-19 virus is slowing down, showing that we can gain the upper hand. (How best to keep that upper hand will be a fierce debate for some time to come, but the optimist in me feels more confident that we’re going to get better at learning to control spread without keeping everything shut down.) This New York Times chart tells the story:

We’re rediscovering old pleasures

One example I’m excited about: the return of drive-in movies, something I remember doing as a kid in the 1970s.

Business owners struggling with the shutdowns are increasingly repurposing their properties for this old pastime. Outdoor cinema venues are popping up all over the country.

Retirees are beating isolation by hosting a radio station

Radio Recliner is an online pirate radio station hosted exclusively by elderly DJs from assisted living communities across America. It was started in April by marketing firm Luckie to entertain lonely seniors and keep their spirits up.

The Good News Network notes that Luckie only planned to air daily 60-minute shows for a month, but the project has taken on a life of its own. Radio Recliner now has a team of 18 senior DJs.

When bad things happen in the world, good things happen, too — always. The pandemic is just another example of that. We can take solace in knowing that in the midst of such uncertainty, humans continue to shoot for the starts and achieve acts of innovation large and small.

May 26, 2020May 26, 2020

Conspiracy Theories Aren’t About Good vs. Evil

I recently wrote about how COVID-19 has sparked a deluge of conspiracy theories, most notably those at the center of the “Plandemic” documentary making the rounds. But as I think of my own OCD-driven behaviors over the years, I find that it’s not entirely fair to dismiss these people as cranks and villains.

Mood Music:

I came across a Vox article that drives home the point. In “I Was a Conspiracy Theorist, Too,” Dannagal G. Young, associate professor of communication and political science at the University of Delaware, describes the crazed internet rabbit hole she traveled down as she desperately sought answers for why her husband was diagnosed with a brain tumor. As she jumped from one potential answer to the next, she wrote:

Each time I landed on a possible culprit, my anger reenergized me. Instead of making me feel hopeless, it gave me a target and suggested there might be some action I could take. If it were from his work or from an old factory site, maybe I could file a lawsuit. Maybe I could launch an investigation or trigger some media exposé. If I could just find the right person or thing to blame, I could get some justice. Or vengeance. Or … maybe just a sense of control.

Take something like the COVID-19 pandemic and its lockdowns, with multitudes stuck at home looking for answers on how we got here and where it all might end, and you get radioactive yet fertile ground for conspiracy theorists. Lots of depressed, increasingly paranoid people with the internet at their fingertips. Lots of rabbit holes to explore.

There’s plenty of gasoline to stoke the flames. The government response has been full of contradictory advice. At the beginning of the pandemic you had the surgeon general tweeting about how masks won’t help. Then states started mandating that people wear them in public. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, tells Congress one week that it would be a huge mistake to end lockdowns now, only to be quoted a week later saying continued lockdowns would cause “irreparable damage.”

Then there’s the fact that the virus began in China. Given the Chinese government’s sinister actions over the years, it’s easy to wonder if it either created Coronavirus in a lab or accidentally let it leak from a lab where it was being studied.

Isolate people, knock their normal lives off their axis, and this is what happens.

The resulting emotions remind me of what it was like when I was first diagnosed with OCD but hadn’t yet brought it under control. I was paranoid all the time, seeing conspiracy everywhere. In those cases, the paranoia usually manifested itself as the perpetual belief that people at work were conspiring against me, or, at the very least, were constantly talking about me behind my back.

In the pandemic, with my OCD under better control, I’m not given to conspiracy theories. Not that my management of the disorder has been perfect. The compulsive actions that go with it have continuously surfaced, and I’ve had to play whack-a-mole with them. Compulsiveness makes you do a lot of stupid things, and I’ve certainly questioned my sanity and self-control in these last months.

The world is full of fear and uncertainty right now. People want answers and have gotten mixed messages. Economic uncertainty, health concerns, lack of contact with friends and loved ones — all ingredients for conspiracy theories. It’s not a matter of good versus evil or even smart versus stupid. It’s simply what happens in a global environment like this.

We’re all in varying degrees of pain and our collective sanity is fragile. We need to do better looking out for one another.

May 19, 2020May 19, 2020

The Villains Aren’t Who You Think They Are

“Don’t assume villainy where it is merely different goals.
Andy Ellis, CSO, Akamai

The conference presentation of a friend and former boss has been on my mind as I’ve watch people argue about how we should conduct ourselves during a pandemic.

Mood Music:

Andy Ellis is CSO at Akamai, where I probably leaned more about the technical nuts and bolts of security in three years than I had in the previous decade of writing about it as a tech journalist. His presentation, “Humans Are Awesome/Terrible at Risk Management” covers how people make decisions concerning risk.

He uses the OODA loop decision-making model developed by U.S. Air Force Col. John Boyd to explain why humans are “awesome” at risk management.

The model frames decision-making as a repeating cycle of observing what’s happening, orienting (filtering what’s happening through past experiences and values), deciding what to do next and acting on that decision.

I’ve tried to apply the OODA loop to my personal and professional actions of late and have mapped out the experience in a recent post.

Humans are horrible at risk management! How are we even still around?And yet, we are still around. Humans are awesome at risk management; we’re now the dominant species on the planet.
Andy Ellis

Andy cites humanity’s advantages in making rapid, generally correct risk choices, even when those choices seem baffling to others. To understand the other person’s decisions, he suggests:

Unpacking how risk choices that appear unreasonable from the outside may not be.
Learning how to identify the hidden factors in someone’s risk choice that most influence it.
Finding out how to help guide people to risk choices that you find more favorable.

I’ve been trying to follow those suggestions as I navigate the seemingly endless arguments on social media about how to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.

On myriad Facebook threads, people share articles and make statements that fall into one of two camps:

That in a health emergency like this, the best decision is to stay home and minimize the virus’ spread — thus saving lives
That the current lockdowns are tyranny: massive, fear-driven overreactions that have allowed authorities to exert unprecedented control over the masses

My own views are somewhere in the middle. I believed the lockdowns necessary at the beginning to slow the spread long enough to give hospitals time to bulk up on supplies and workers to take care of everyone who is sick. I also believed it necessary to buy us time to ramp up testing so we’d have a better picture of who was infected and who wasn’t.

Three months in, we’ve slowed the spread in places but don’t appear much better off. We don’t have nearly enough data points to know what we’re dealing with. I’ve begun to question the wisdom of staying locked down, thinking instead that we must figure out a way to re-open carefully and learn to live in a pandemic without staying seized up.

Along the way I’ve found myself exasperated by how people in the two camps above have vilified each other. Camp 1 brands Camp 2 as a bunch of selfish right-wing thugs who care more about their economic pursuits than protecting grandma. Camp 2 sees Camp 1 as a bunch of government-controlled sheep who submit to tyranny as easily as past generations submitted to Nazi and Soviet subjugation.

One good friend, from Camp 2, suggested that those who support the lockdowns support tyranny and should renounce their American citizenship. I called him out on that. Another friend in Camp 1 repeatedly attacked people on my wall for being OK with people dying. I rarely unfriend people I disagree with but did so in her case.

Along the way, I keep coming back to what Andy said: “Don’t assume villainy where it is merely different goals.”

It’s good advice.

Most of us have rigorously thought-out reasons for staying home or arguing for a re-opening. We all weigh the risks on criteria colored by our personal experiences. There is no villainy in that.

People will believe what they will believe and act on it. Their intent is good, though sometimes distorted by a lack of reliable data.

In the weeks and months to come, I hope for more common ground.

May 12, 2020May 12, 2020

Less Talk, More Action

People continue to share opinions as scientific fact, shouting down those who question them. Liberal Democrats do it, so do conservative Republicans. Libertarians do it, as do socialists. As I said in my last post: Yelling at each other and pushing conspiracies won’t end COVID-19 any sooner.

Mood Music:

We need to figure out how to re-open society while continuing to protect as many lives as possible. The simplest solution is mass testing and contact tracing. But the nation’s testing capability is horrendously broken. So what can we do?

Contact tracing. This will help us identify more of those who are sick and create an environment where the healthy get out of the house and conduct the business of life while the sick and vulnerable remain sheltered. It will require strong measures to protect privacy. We also need to demand measures to curb the runaway increase in government power that comes with mass surveillance.
Varied levels of continued social distancing. In cities where infection rates surge, people will have to do more social distancing and sheltering in place. When cases grow somewhere, targeted lockdowns will be necessary. In areas where cases are low, restrictions can be eased. States will have different dances between opening places back up, closing them again as needed, and eventually opening again. When we return to the offices, we’ll be wearing masks. On it goes.

When I was younger, I thought the ability to opine meant I was smart. Through time and experience, I’ve learned that talk is cheap. Opinions don’t mean action.

Since the start of the pandemic, I’m done my share of talking. Now I’m thinking harder about how I can take action to help. Here’s what I have so far:

Doubling down within my profession. I’ll use my skills in research-gathering and writing to help information security practitioners keep their organizations’ defenses strong amid all the disruptions of the pandemic. This is a no-brainer. I’ve already been doing it. But I can always work on ways to do it better.
Using this blog. Not to be an armchair pundit, but to share information readers can use to take constructive action and to try and be a voice of reason. There’s a lot of fear, anxiety and depression, and someone must provide perspective. I’m not perfect at that. Far from it. But I’ve had some luck there and will continue to do my best.
Sharing a balanced perspective on social media. With so much disinformation circulating on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere, I’ll continue to share articles I find useful and distill the takeaways to help people make sense of what’s happening.
Helping provide resources to my community. Along with my family, I’ll continue to do my part to ensure basic needs are met. Stepping up contributions to our parish food pantry is the biggest example right now.

A few things I’m considering:

Volunteering some of my time as a contact tracer. Though in my state, this is a paid position, so I’d want to leave those opportunities for folks who are unemployed.
Delivering groceries to those who can’t get out.
Volunteering more directly at the food pantry.
Getting involved in efforts to acquire and distribute masks, gloves and other safety gear for both hospital workers and people who don’t have the luxury of staying home.

By sharing this, I hope to inspire more of you to stop shouting, opinion-flinging and arm flailing. And I welcome your ideas as to how else I can help.

If we sit here doing nothing, our words will mean nothing.

May 8, 2020May 8, 2020

“Plandemic” and the Loss of Perspective

We’ve reached the toughest part of this lockdown yet. Anger and anxiety are so high that some of us no longer trust our friends and see conspiracy around every corner.

Our discourse is like a van full of clowns swerving all over the road, picking up speed and running people down along the way. There’s a sudden, steep decline in the kindness I recently wrote about. Everyone yells. Nobody listens.

Mood Music:

Conspiracy theories have gotten wilder, including the “Plandemic” video that keeps appearing, getting pulled down by social media sites, then re-appearing again.

The 26-minute “Plandemic Movie” is set up as an excerpt/preview of a larger documentary to come. It’s thesis is that COVID-19 was created so Big Pharma could rake in big profits from vaccines. It also claims sheltering in place breaks down our immune systems and masks can make people sicker.

A couple people I respect peddled the video on their Facebook pages yesterday in what amounted to a trolling exercise. Other friends who believe the lockdowns are necessary responded with anger and name-calling. The comment threads on those continue to grow longer and more nonsensical.

This loss of perspective was inevitable. No matter how comfortable we are in our homes, several weeks of staying inside with no end in sight is going to turn us into crazed cats in cages.

I’m feeling it, too. The Facebook name-calling I mentioned above? I can’t remember for sure, but I suspect I’m guilty of contributing to some of it.

That’s the other thing with life these days: You can’t remember things you did from one day to the next, even when you’re sober and taking care of yourself.

I have no answers, but I know this: Yelling at each other and pushing conspiracies won’t get us out of our cages any sooner.

I promise to keep reminding myself that we’re all human and that kindness is crucial in these difficult days.

Hopefully, some of you will do the same.

May 1, 2020May 1, 2020

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.