Thursday, 26 March 2020

I can’t really go to sleep at night, or rather, sleep doesn’t come easily. It’s nothing I can put my finger on: we have food and internet, we are healthy, and we live in an apartment big enough that we’re all managing to stay sane. We’re faring much better than many others during this lockdown. The street outside the apartment is quiet, and we don’t even hear the noise of the superbikes that love racing down it after midnight. I’ve never lived through a crisis potentially this deadly. I think that’s the thing. While I grew up under two global financial crises, those were abstract concepts to me. Even the 2008 meltdown was more of a “yes this was happening” rather than something that affected the lives of people I knew.

Not this thing, though. Not COVID-19. Watching the news gets scary, real quick. Nearly every country in the world is struggling with this virus, this great leveller. We’re on the sidelines of a war with an enemy we can’t see, can’t shoot missiles at, and kills fast. This is probably the equivalent of living during the World War II. We have optimistic know-nothings who say “things will get better soon” and immediately after that we get news from the literal front lines of cases spiking and doubling, and not enough tools to fight them with. There’s a lot of noise, a lot of sadness, a lot of very real deaths.

It takes a while to get to sleep.