Checking In: A New Normal
“What are the skills we can learn or mindsets that we can adopt that foster your own sense of calm and purpose and how do you extend a little bit of gratitude, empathy, and compassion to those around you?”
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Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Feeding Curiosity. This is going to be a shorter one and kind of a special one. Just given the change in the world, we've seen in the last week. I had the idea last week I kept seeing all this information on the coronavirus popping up on my news feeds from sources like Tim Ferriss and Peter Attia. Still, nobody had really started taking it seriously.
A lot of people in my normal sphere of interaction were kind of like, yeah, whatever, like it's just the flu, all of this stuff. And as I kept seeing more and more people reacting with downplaying and not really taking it seriously. I was like; there's something wrong here. I just started doing my due diligence and collected information as I normally do. I saw this thing start to happen where people started, not overreacting per se, but panicking in a way that is different than we normally see. And again, this is unprecedented at any time in history, right? We haven't seen anything like this personally. I'm working from home now, and that's very new.
I'm lucky that I can work from home because I know many people who can't work if their place is closed or limiting the amount of people I'm thinking of bars and restaurants. The other part of this, too, is that there's a lot of people on the front lines, the nurses that are and healthcare professionals across the board that are risking being infected to do their job. Where now the best thing we can do is stay at home. But let me get back to kind of why I want to talk about this. I kind of summarize the guidelines last week as to what's the best things we can do are—staying up to date to the information. And I still believe that we should stay away from mainstream news media on the news, like televised news for the most part.
I feel like that just induces panic across the board because it never has anything good to say. And especially to now that the social distancing thing is, it's kind of the new norm. And really, that's why I want to do this or highlight this audio. I really want to harp on the questioning of what we can do, right?
It feels like the day to day life that we all have carried it is slowed to a different pace. Our regular routines and how we went about life prior to this has drastically changed. So with that understanding, we have an opportunity here and what I saw over the weekend with everybody running to the store and buying things like toilet paper and consumables and disinfectant and all of that. What it looks like to me is the ability for people to assert control over a situation they have no control over. It is by fear, and everyone I was around kept saying, I don't understand why people are doing it.
And it's not that you don't understand, is that you're not pushed to a point where your survival is completely and utterly at stake. And so its the survival mechanism of the human brain. That gets flipped into a panic mode that says, I need to do something that's going to facilitate my survival.
So with that, we're at a point where we can pattern interrupt that level of survival mode. Over the last week, I've been trying to figure out how best to connect to people and help and provide. Service to those around me, even though I am stuck self-quarantine ruminating on what could happen or what will happen serves us no purpose currently. But what we can do is figure out what we can do for people around us and how to embed yourself in a routine that makes you dissolve stress or stress to leave as best as possible. Keep up with your wellness routines. Work out at home, get out into the sunlight, get outside as much as you can if possible. Eat healthier food. Go to sleep earlier, like to focusing on things that are going to make your life better, and then trying to embed them in a way that's going to continue once all of this stuff begins to calm down.
Beyond that, in a more short term perspective. I have been thinking about how to reach out to communities. So what I've been doing is reaching out to past guests on this podcast and sending them a quick note, Hey, just checking in. I really want to know and make sure that people around me are just coping and to say, Hey, we are all in this together, no matter where you are in the world, which is wild times too, even to have to do something like that.
It's about connecting with people and making sure that we're there for each other. Because if we connect, that survival mechanism goes away. The survival mechanism in us tells us, what do I need? When the reality is, what do they need? Well, what do we need? How do we get through this? We get through this. Not I get through this. At this point, I'm trying to provide hope for people around us to either give them mental frameworks or tools or optimism for resilience and hope that they can come through this. In a way that they're stronger after making it through because, in reality, most of us aren't going to fall to this disease probably. But what will happen is how much struggle this will place on the economy, and we've already seen massive downturns and things like that. I would not pay attention to the stock market at all because that's going to increase your anxiety even more through all of this.
But I would say is what are skills we can learn or mindsets that we can adopt that foster your own sense of calm and purpose and how do you extend a little bit of gratitude, empathy, and compassion to those around you? And I know in many ways this might be difficult. Maybe you're living with people who are not the easiest people to live with. Or you're just going a little stir crazy, but I urge each one of you to reach out to your friends. Set up some sort of calls or viewing parties, something to connect with people. One thing I did is I use a service called discord, which is an online webchat, service either via text or voice chat. Me and my friends use it when we play video games, but I have shared it with my extended group of friends that we use Facebook regularly to communicate in hopes that they'll join in. And then that way we can have more voice communication with a larger group of people. Beyond that working, I don't think it will be the same ever again. The world is going to have to adapt to this remote working capabilities unlike ever before. So a lot of jobs will go remote that had resistance for reasons, you know, that were honestly probably not really good reasons, but just because you know, this is the way it was done. This is forces the world to change.
Overall, I'm trying to point myself in a direction to say, okay, this is where the world looks to be heading. How do I make it a little bit better? Today I'm aiming to do a little good so that tomorrow we can build off of that. That's why I start with a single message every day or a single email to a friend or a loved one that you maybe don't keep in contact super regularly. Just say, Hey, checking in. And so I think I don't know. That might be where I should end this one. Checking in with all of you who listened to Feeding Curiosity, how are you doing? Please send me a message either on Instagram, LinkedIn, you know, the Feeding Curiosity, Facebook page, wherever. I know this is a stressful time, everybody, and we can get through it, but please don't hesitate to reach out or to reach out to anyone else who may or may not need it. It goes a long way, and we need each other. Talk to you soon, everyone.
Today on the podcast, we are joined by Joe Jackowski. Joe is a Marine Corps veteran and current graduate student at Vanderbilt University in the Cognitive Psychology in Context program. His primary interest is meaning in life, which broadly extends to problems in ethics, A.I., and culture.
In this episode, we sit down to discuss his first long-form article on his new sub stack, Apotheosis: A Philosophy for Influencers