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Covid-19 Sentry

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Contents

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From Preprints

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From Clinical Trials

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From PubMed

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From Patent Search

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Daily-Dose

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Contents

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From New Yorker

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From Vox

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+The Hard Tomorrow is about seeing dark times ahead and choosing to live. +

+

+The Hard Tomorrow, cartoonist Eleanor Davis’s 2019 graphic novel, is set in 2022. Some parts of it seem unlikely to be true by next year. (Mark Zuckerberg is president, for instance.) Other parts seem more plausible: In the book’s version of 2022, megaphones have been outlawed at protests, part of the government’s crackdown on dissidents and activists. And other parts seem certain — in 2022, there are still plenty of reasons to hold protests. +

+

+The Hard Tomorrow is the story of Hannah, a 30-something woman who lives in the woods with her partner, Johnny. They are deeply in love. He is (slowly) building a house for them and the baby they’re trying to conceive, but for now, they’re living out of a combination of their cars and a camper on the property next to the house’s foundations. Johnny spends his day plotting their garden and hanging out with a friend who’s really into conspiracy theories but also owns a lot of power tools. Hannah works as a home health aide for an older woman. She’s found community in the local HAAV (Humans Against All Violence) group, an anarchist activist group that regularly protests the US government’s use of chemical warfare, holding up signs that say “Chemical Weapons Create Hell on Earth” and “Who Gassed Gaza, POTUS?” +

+
+
    <img alt="A black-and-white illustration of a crowd of protestors holding signs and chanting, “The People United Will Never Be Defeated!”" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/SmpcpjVql40cmWHJixm5orKAzPw=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22200667/hardtomorrow3.jpg" />
+  <cite>Drawn &amp; Quarterly</cite>
+  <figcaption>A page from Eleanor Davis’s <em>The Hard Tomorrow.</em>
+ +
+

+HAAV is where Hannah met Gabby, a fellow activist who fills a big gap in Hannah’s life — part mentor, part idol, part best friend. Hannah cuts her hair to look like Gabby’s. They sing Spice Girls songs on the way to protests and stop in the woods to harvest edible mushrooms. Johnny accuses Hannah, only half-playfully, of scheming to leave him for Gabby. Hannah loves Johnny, but she definitely has a crush on Gabby. +

+

+The Hard Tomorrow catches Hannah at an inflection point in her life, when the relationships that anchor her life are starting to give way. The woman she provides care for is ailing more and more. HAAV is about to run into trouble, upending the community Hannah has found there. And she senses a new friction in her relationship with Gabby that leaves her uncertain about her own life. +

+

+Hannah is clearly an avatar for Davis herself. “I wanted to write a book about today, and my life, but I wanted it to have the flexibility of fiction,” she told one interviewer. “Working on the book was me working through my ideas of wanting to have baby, why my husband and I wanted a baby — what that meant to us, and what that meant to the baby to be brought into this sort of world.” +

+

+In the book’s dedication, she writes: +

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+Thank you, in advance, to the person I hope to give birth to three months from when I write this. I look forward to meeting you. I don’t know what your future will look like. I hope you will forgive us for bringing you into the beautiful and terrible world. +

+
+

+That “beautiful and terrible world” Davis mentions in her dedication is the lurking shadow throughout The Hard Tomorrow. Hannah and Johnny both yearn for a baby. But they and their friends question whether it’s fair or just to bring a child into a world where all that looms on the horizon is environmental collapse, an encroaching militaristic police state, and very little reason for anything like hope. +

+

+Davis illustrates her story simply; her pen-and-ink drawings render Hannah’s world in black and white, which feels like an echo of Hannah’s inner life. She is struggling to determine whether the world is stark and binary, either good or bad, or whether there are shades of gray. Are her HAAV friends as committed to the cause as she thinks they are? What if she feels a moment of connection with a cop who pulls her over — is that okay? Could the darkness have cracks in it that her longing and yearning for a better world might widen? +

+

+Throughout, Davis subtly hints at a tension between Hannah’s idyllic, almost Eden-like existence in the woods with Johnny and the outside world, which threatens their loving harmony. (On the cover, in full color, Hannah stands beneath a vine plucking grapes and eating them — the echo of the biblical story of Adam and Eve seems explicit.) Is it possible to find your own private paradise, retreat from the world, and live in peace? Or is the world so far gone that a quiet life of community and happiness is impossible to find? +

+

+A friend recommended I read The Hard Tomorrow last fall, when I had just read Sophie Yanow’s newly published The Contradictions, which touches on similar themes and with a similar semi-autobiographical style, including a protagonist named Sophie. (In October, The Cut produced a great podcast episode about The Contradictions and the questions it explores.) Both are stories of young women who care deeply about the world but aren’t sure whether they’re doing enough to change it. No matter what they do, there’s always someone who sees them as not committed or radical enough. And the world seems to be collapsing around their ears. +

+

+In both stories, I found friends. My life looks different from Hannah’s and Sophie’s in many ways. But like almost everyone I know, I struggle at times to feel hopeful about the future and worry that I am not doing enough. Pew Foundation researchers found that a broad majority of Americans are pessimistic about our country’s future, though for wildly different reasons depending on our education level and political commitments. More than half (52 percent) of the respondents in my age bracket, 30 to 49, believe that by the time we reach retirement age, the Social Security we’ve spent our lives paying into will be wiped out. Only 11 percent of us think we’ll receive the same benefits as our parents. We expect our jobs to be taken by robots, our political polarization to grow, the economy to weaken, inequality to widen, and our standard of living to grow worse as time goes on. +

+

+What’s more, the Pew study was published in March 2019, a full year before a pandemic wiped out — as of this writing — 1 in 1,000 Americans over the course of nine months and decimated businesses, homes, and families. I doubt our optimism has grown in the past year. And while activism may have seen an uptick in 2020, so has uncertainty. +

+

+This is why The Hard Tomorrow, in particular, left me with a few scraps of hope. Not because it has a “message.” Just because it exists. +

+
+
    <img alt="Pages from The Hard Tomorrow depicting Hannah in a state of uncertainty following an attack on the activists." src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/HFmnBN7UZH1visGwEhubACb6kUA=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/22200692/hardtomorrow2.jpg" />
+  <cite>Drawn &amp; Quarterly</cite>
+  <figcaption>Images from <em>The Hard Tomorrow.</em>
+ +
+

+Last year, people who exhorted others to stay positive and make goals and keep moving forward became grating. For some, the positive talk is surely helpful, but after relentless bad news and a future dense with fog, it could seem like these people were ostriches, plunging their heads into sinking sand, not paying attention to what was going on. +

+

+But on the other hand, when everything around us seems tumultuous and chaotic and just plain bad, we also have to live. We try to read a book, or watch a good movie. We play a game with a loved one over Zoom. We cheer on our friends when they get a stroke of good luck and send love when the opposite happens. We give money to the local food bank. We read about people from the past who lived through apocalyptic times. We write letters to leaders. We have babies. We send gifts. We gather strength from spiritual practices, or religious traditions, or wise mentors, dead or alive. We drink a little wine or hot cider with friends around a backyard bonfire, shivering, glad to be alive and together. We wake up every morning. +

+

+On the first day of 2021, I have no idea what to expect going forward. I expect tomorrow will be hard. Where we will be in three weeks seems unknowable, let alone three months, or 12, or more. Everything is very hazy right now. Hope may not be accessible to us. But The Hard Tomorrow makes me feel understood, and it’s a reminder that even if everything is awful, much is beautiful. The world renews itself, over and over. Spring, at least, will come. We keep going. +

+

+The Hard Tomorrow is available from its publisher, Drawn & Quarterly, through Bookshop, and through your local bookseller. +

+ +

+A growing market of apps are promising to help you develop better habits in the new year. +

+

+For many of us, nine months spent quarantining at home has completely erased the elaborate routines and habits we had carefully constructed in the Before Times. Commuting? Wearing makeup? Going to spin class? School drop-offs? Social distancing requirements and the closing of schools, workplaces, and businesses have upended many of those pre-pandemic habits. +

+

+So it’s unsurprising that as we turn to 2021, many Americans are seeking ways to develop new habits and bring some structure and routine back into their largely housebound lives. A new survey from CIT Bank (conducted by the Harris Poll) found that 43 percent of Americans are setting New Year’s resolutions for 2021, compared with 35 percent who did the same for 2020. Resolutions focused on habits such as exercise and self-care are especially popular. +

+

+When a new year starts, we’re filled with optimism and set ambitious goals, believing that all we need is a fresh start and soon we’ll get fit, learn Spanish, eat healthier, and save more money. But few stick to those resolutions past January: A study by the University of Scranton found that just 40 percent of resolution-makers are still keeping their resolutions six months in. +

+

+That’s where habit-tracking apps want to help you. A growing market of companies has emerged that claim to help you develop — and stick to — good habits. In the last few years, dozens of habit-formation apps have cropped up: Momentum. Habitica. Done. Coach.me. Habitshare. Habitbull. Today. Streaks. There are so many that the website Lifehack ranked 22 of the “best” options. Most of the apps are ad-free, but charge their users for the ability to create more habits, for more premium features, or for access to personal habit coaches. +

+

+Much has been written about the very modern obsession with the quantified self: logging data about every part of our lives, such as our water intake, our daily steps, our menstrual cycles, our caloric consumption. But habit-formation apps are a slightly different breed: They’re aspirational. Habit-formation apps are less about distilling your life into a series of data points and more about becoming your ideal self: If you use their app, you too can become a person who practices good habits. You can become someone who exercises and meditates every day and always drinks eight glasses of water. +

+

+But do these apps really work? Can they deliver on their promise to help you build better habits? Will an app really turn you into a person who gets up at 6 am every day to go for a run and make a smoothie? I asked some habit experts about whether these apps can really live up to their promises. +

+

+How people develop habits can vary a lot +

+

+Gretchen Rubin, a writer who has authored several books on habits, told Vox there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to building better habits — so habit-formation apps can work, but only for certain types of people who respond well to them. +

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+In Rubin’s book Better Than Before, she writes that most people fit one of four tendencies when it comes to habit formation: upholders, who are disciplined and respond to both internal and external expectations; obligers, who can’t keep commitments to themselves but respond to expectations from others; questioners, who ask why and can keep a habit if they understand the logic and reasoning; and rebels, who hate being told what to do by others — so it has to be something they want to do. +

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+Depending on your habit-formation tendency, these apps may or may not work for you. Rubin describes herself as an upholder who has no trouble creating new habits. She is one of those rare people who simply decides she wants to do something and does it. +

+

+But most people are not upholders. Rubin says that obligers are the most common tendency, and they struggle to follow through on a commitment to themselves. For obligers, habit formation apps can work as a tool to introduce outer accountability — sometimes. “A lot of [these apps] are aimed at obligers, and rightly so, because that’s a big group of people. And they tend to be very helped by outer accountability,” Rubin says. +

+

+“The question is, is this app giving you the outer accountability that you need? Because if it’s not, then the app is not going to work for you,” Rubin says. “If it is, then this app is going to be terrific. And that is a question for an individual obliger.” +

+

+Rubin says that for some obligers, a simple reminder notification from an app can be enough to make them feel obligated to complete the task, whether it’s stretching or getting a glass of water or practicing Spanish for five minutes. For some, the paid nature of many of these apps can create a sense of obligation for those who don’t want to waste the money they’ve spent on buying the app. And for some, the don’t-break-the-chain mentality works well: Once you have a 10-day streak, you might be motivated by fear of breaking the streak. +

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+For others, however, it’s easy to dismiss notifications in a world of too many push alerts. For those for whom a notification isn’t enough to make them complete a task, other apps want to push you further. +

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+ +
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+Charles Duhigg, the author of The Power of Habit, told Vox that “there’s a basic structure to habits, which is that there’s a cue, a routine, and a reward; this is called the habit loop.” Duhigg explained that the key to forming a new habit is “to diagnose what the cues and the rewards are that are driving their current habits and then to try to come up with cues and rewards for new habits. That matters much much more than whether you’re using a Fitbit or something like that,” says Duhigg. +

+

+For people who fall into the other tendencies in Rubin’s framework, outer accountability might not work. Rebels, she says, might find daily push alert reminders annoying, and then resent the app for telling them what to do. Questioners need to understand the rationale of why they should do something, so they might find habit-forming apps unappealing unless they’re backed by scientific research and explain their rationale. And even for some obligers, push notifications and reminders still might not be enough to motivate them to do the thing. +

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+How habit apps use the psychology of habit formation — and why there are so many different apps +

+

+The cottage industry of habit-formation apps has tapped into different aspects of the psychology of habits in order to motivate users — whether that’s in the form of reminders, accountability, streaks, or coaching. And the reason why there are so many app options is related to Rubin’s theory of different habit-formation tendencies: No single style of app will work for everyone. So self-improvement-obsessed developers started creating their own apps to fit their own needs, and we ended up with dozens of different apps to sift through in the App Store. +

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+A post shared by Done App (@the_done_app) +

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+Many of these apps, such as Done, Productive, and Streaks, rely on a “streak” feature — they track how many consecutive days you’ve completed the habit, and some users are motivated to keep their streak going as long as possible. This concept, often referred to as “don’t break the chain,” was popularized by comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who said it was his productivity secret. +

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+Other apps offer accountability features to pressure you into completing your goal. Coach.me offers forum-like support communities around popular habits, so that users trying to, say, wake up earlier can talk to others with the same goal and hold each other accountable. Habitshare allows you to share your habit goals and your progress with your friends in the app, thus offering another form of public accountability. +

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+Some apps, like Habitica, turn habit formation into a game: The app rewards users who complete their habits with badges and other virtual incentives. Plant Nanny, an app that encourages people to drink more water, displays a virtual plant that is “watered” every time you self-report that you drank water. If you don’t drink enough water, the plant starts to make sad faces at you and eventually dies. Like a 2019 version of a Tamagotchi, it’s habit formation by guilt trip. +

+

+Most of the habit-formation apps are, refreshingly, ad-free, but charge users in various ways. Some apps, like Streaks and Today, charge a one-time upfront fee, ranging from $4.99 to $9.99. Others, like Fabulous and Habitbull, charge an annual fee of anywhere from $19.99 to $49.99 a year. And several, including Done, Momentum, Habitminder, and Habitlist, let you create a limited number of habits for free but then require you to upgrade to a premium version for the ability to create unlimited habits, if you really want to go all-in on your self-improvement efforts. +

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+Usually, these apps aren’t created by big, venture-backed startups; in many cases they’re built by a developer or two, or a small app company. Many of the developers behind these apps say they created them out of a personal need: They were facing a challenge in their own work or life and looking for a tool that would help them develop more disciplined habits. +

+

+Quentin Zervaas, one of the founders of Streaks, told Vox: “We launched the app because we wanted a really simple way to track a small number of things that we wanted to complete every day. For example, I was trying to write a book, but was finding it hard to complete, so I figured if I just completed a small amount each day, eventually it would be finished.” (Zervaas noted that he did indeed finish writing his book after building the app.) +

+

+Scott Dunlap, the founder of Habitlist, gave similar reasoning for starting his app: “I was looking for a habit tracker that had a clean, intuitive interface that could handle flexible scheduling options. I didn’t find one that worked for different situations — drink eight glasses of water every day, work out every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, water the plants every three to five days — so my streaks would inevitably end, and the app would actually make me less motivated,” Dunlap says. He eventually approached a friend and decided they would build a habit app themselves that had the features they wanted. +

+

+And Jenny Talavera, the founder of Done, was already designing and building educational apps for children. But when her husband was trying to quit smoking, Talavera told us, he couldn’t find an app that gave him what he needed, “so he asked if I could make him one. Three months later, Done was born.” Talavera added that at the time, “Most if not all habit trackers just helped you build habit. These habit trackers would let you create a habit and every day mark it done or not done, but they wouldn’t track something you didn’t want to do. He needed an app to help him quit a bad habit.” +

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+A couple of apps, like Fabulous and StickK, were created at universities in conjunction with leading experts on behavioral economics. Fabulous was incubated at Duke University’s Center for Advanced Hindsight, which is led by Professor Dan Ariely. And StickK, an app that emphasizes the creation of a commitment contract, was created by Dean Karlan and Ian Ayres, then both professors of behavioral economics at Yale University. Karlan, who now teaches at Northwestern University, was inspired to start the app after his own weight-loss journey. Both StickK and Fabulous say they use research-backed approaches to habit formation. +

+

+Coach.me is one of the few apps that takes a different tack, both in its business model and its approach to habit formation. Launched in 2012 by CEO Tony Stubblebine and called Lift at the time, Coach.me was one of the early habit-formation apps on the market. The app has raised $3.6 million in venture funding and makes its money in a unique way: through habit-coaching services. +

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+When you sign up for Coach.me and choose a habit, you are plugged into a support community of other app users so you can commiserate, support, and hold each other accountable to your goals. If you need an even more aggressive approach, for $19.99 a week or $65 a month, Coach.me will pair you up with a personal coach who will message with you every day to help you achieve your habit, like a personal trainer. Coach.me has developed a network of thousands of habit coaches, and users can browse through their profiles in the app and select a coach they like, much like a dating app. +

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+For habit-formation apps to work, a person has to develop habits around how they’re used +

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+Duhigg says that habit apps can work — but only if you actively monitor the data from the app each day and use it to analyze how you can change. +

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+“People are actually less likely to develop new habits if they’re using a device to pay attention for them instead of paying attention themselves,” Duhigg told Vox. “But if you actually use the device and take its data and turn that data into knowledge, then it can actually improve your odds of changing.” +

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+“So for instance if you take the number of steps you walk each day off your wristwatch and you write them down in a journal and look from day to day and chart by hand how your steps are changing and why they’re changing, then that actually will give you a lot of very impactful information that will help you change your behavior,” Duhigg adds. “If, on the other hand, you’re just wearing something on your wrist and you look at it every so often and you feel like you’re accomplishing something but you’re not actually learning from it, then it’ll have the opposite effect: It’ll remove that burden that you feel to actually get something done and to learn from what you’re being exposed to.” +

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+“Sometimes people get into this magical thinking of, ‘If I sign up for this app to help me exercise then that’s practically the same thing as exercising.’ When in fact it’s not at all the same thing as exercising!” says Rubin. “I think sometimes people sign up for these things to show themselves that they are making a good-faith attempt, but the app can’t really do it for you if you don’t bring that spirit of execution to it.” +

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+“People who are looking for a magic app are people who probably are not going to actually change,” says Duhigg. “There is not an app that gives you some magical ability to change. The way that you change is you spend the time necessary to look at the change you want to accomplish, to try and figure out each day why you’re getting closer or farther away from it, to give yourself rewards in order to encourage that habit to thrive, and then to actually commit to it and to make that data into actual knowledge about why you behave the way that you do.” +

+

+And therein lies the problem with hoping an app can lead you to a new and improved self: For many people, the problem isn’t remembering to complete a habit, it’s that they can’t motivate themselves to take the time to do it. A notification can remind you at 11 am to take a walk around the block to get some steps, but it can’t force you to stop working, get out of your chair, and actually follow through. Apps that remind you to complete a habit each day are only fighting half the battle. They can’t make you exercise — and that’s the real conundrum: Apps aren’t a substitute for willpower. Apps can give you reminders, accountability, guilt trips, or even a personal habit coach, but in the end you still have to do the work — you can’t app your way to a better self. +

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+Want more stories from The Goods by Vox? Sign up for our newsletter here. +

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+“Your to-do list, some days, it has just the one thing on it: Stay alive. And if you can do that, it’s a successful day.” +

+

+This is The Lost Year, a series of stories about our lived experiences in 2020, as told to Vox critic at large Emily VanDerWerff. +

+

+I spent most of 2020 in quarantine. I didn’t spend that quarantine alone. I spent it with my wife, Libby Hill. Libby and I have been married for 17 years, together for more than 20. (We got together the first day of college. Awwww.) At this point, I feel like I know her and she knows me as well as any two people can know each other. +

+

+But is that true? Our experiences of quarantine have been wildly different. I have mostly spent quarantine doing things, taking on new creative projects and challenges, because on some level, I’m trying to outrun my own sense of the world having frozen in place. Libby, meanwhile, has struggled with major depression for as long as I’ve known her, and quarantine has become a slow, grueling march through an experience that has all but forced her to have a depressive episode by making her stay inside and rarely leave her spot on the couch. +

+

+The cruel irony is that Libby, who works as the TV Awards Editor at Indiewire, had an experience this year that gave her the kind of clarity and psychological freedom she’d been hoping to have her entire adult life — and it happened way back in February. Just a few weeks later, the pandemic forced us into lockdown, and much of that clarity would sap away. But her view of this pandemic is one I’ve seen so many adopt: So long as you survive each day and make it to another, you’ve been wildly successful. Libby articulates that beautifully. +

+

+So here is the story of my wife’s 2020, as told to me. +

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+

+I’ve struggled with major depression for the better part of my life. In the first couple months of 2020, I was functional, but I was very depressed. It was back when things were still normal. I was going to award shows and sitting in press rooms. I was productive, but I was dead inside. I wanted everything to stop. Not necessarily to die, but for everything to pause, like a coma, like I could remove myself from the hustle and bustle of every day and go somewhere quiet. +

+

+I told my therapist that in my head, that place was a white room. It was quiet, and nothing was expected of me. I could just rest. It was so alluring to me. It’s what I needed, but it was so hard to explain that to people. What people would hear was, “I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t want to live. I don’t want to be a part of this world anymore.” After a few months of talking about that, my therapist said, “You’ve been in this place a while. We’ve adjusted your meds. We’ve talked about this. I’m worried you’re suffering.” She suggested I consider in-patient treatment. +

+

+When I was growing up in South Dakota, there was this one state facility, a mental hospital, and we didn’t talk about it, really. We would just call it by the town name: Yankton. “Oh, she got sent to Yankton. They’re going to send you to Yankton.” That was shorthand for “crazy.” So when my therapist suggested that to me, I was like, “They’re sending me to Yankton. That’s where I’m at now.” +

+

+But I’m lucky. I have good insurance. I have a flexible job. The more I thought about it, the more I thought, “I’ve tried everything else. Maybe it’s time to try this.” So at the end of February, I checked myself into a psychiatric facility. I was there for about a week. +

+

+It was such a distinct point in time. There was a single TV in the general area, and it would always generally be on the news or showing action movies. The news would talk about the election. Super Tuesday was coming up. There were also a few headlines about the coronavirus, but it didn’t sink in with me. It was on the fringes. When you’re in a psychiatric institution, you don’t have to care about all of that. I didn’t have my phone or my laptop. +

+

+Looking back now, it was definitely foreshadowing. I got out of there after a week. My wife [Emily] picked me up. We went home. I went back to work. I was so happy to be there with my coworkers. I want to say the stay in the hospital changed my life. Because it did! I came out of there feeling better than I ever had. I had a new perspective on my place in life. I felt free of so much that had been weighing me down for decades. I had an equilibrium I had been seeking for such a long time. +

+

+And then two weeks later, March 12 was my last day in the office. We packed up our things and went home. It’s the middle of December, and I haven’t been back. +

+

+I’m lost. A little bit. A lot. Mental illness isn’t something you have control over. You’re always in an unchoreographed dance with your body. You’re moving with the music. You think you get the rhythm and understand where it’s going, and then the music changes. You’re out of step, and you don’t know what’s next or what the right moves are. +

+

+That’s what happened. It felt like I had come to a gentlewoman’s agreement with my depression. We would find a way to work together and share the space that is my mind. And then the entire globe was put into a functional situational depression. No one left their house or saw anyone. Everyone was isolating. People weren’t changing out of their pajamas or showering. It was like I had been shoved physically back into depression by a universe that would not allow me to escape it. Obviously, the pandemic was not sent because I got treatment, but in the base sense of my brain, that’s what it felt like. +

+

+I’m an introvert and a depressive. I don’t love leaving my house or attending large gatherings of people. I’m at home on my couch in my pajamas, staring at my computer for 18 hours a day. That had been my resting state of choice before this pandemic. But I knew how to do this. I knew what the moves were. I never wanted to go to the grocery store before, so I certainly didn’t want to go during a pandemic. So it was kind of routine. +

+

+It was probably around the second time I got my period during the pandemic that I was like, “Fuck.” It was a very clear passage of time in a year where all time ran together. I realized one day that lounging on the couch had changed. It wasn’t what I chose to do. It’s what I felt capable of doing. All of a sudden, instead of being in lockdown, I was depressed in lockdown. That’s a very different, very dangerous animal. And it’s made all the worse because of how good and clear things were just weeks before we entered this state. +

+

+At the beginning of the year, all I wanted was silence. Now in lockdown, I need distraction 100 percent of the time. It’s in the silence that I find fear and anxiety and uncertainty. I need a beloved TV show streaming in the background at all times. I need to be playing a video game and reading Reddit. During my free time, I need 17 different things pulling my attention or else I’m going to drown. +

+

+Sometimes living with my wife was very difficult during this pandemic. Marriage is all about negotiations, to the extent that on our anniversary, we call it “contract renegotiations.” We’re deciding if we want to move forward for another year or take early retirement to pursue something new. Being locked down together takes that to a new level. Everything that annoys you about someone, everything that annoys you about yourself, every tiny conflict — they’re all blown up because you can’t get away from each other. +

+

+It was a couple months in before I realized we were having fights and disagreements and resentments that just wouldn’t exist if I was going to my office for eight hours a day and if she was able to go to her office or meet friends for coffee. But that didn’t mean the conflicts we were having weren’t real. They were real, and they revealed real fissures in our relationship that we needed to look at, even if they weren’t going to bust up the foundation. +

+

+My wife’s an extrovert. She had a much harder time in the beginning of the pandemic. I miss my friends, but she misses her friends a lot. She’s a social butterfly. She needs constant care and attention to an extent that I cannot provide. She needs 15 projects going on. Whether I’m in lockdown or not, I’m not that way. That was intensified by being trapped in the same apartment with each other. Our differences became so stark in lockdown that you’d wonder, “Is this tenable? Is this still the right decision?” +

+

+But then you realize you’re only questioning that because you’re trapped in an apartment with this person. It’s always a little miserable spending that much time with someone, no matter how much you love them. We were always together. We were never alone. But we didn’t spend much quality time together. So it felt like we were not really together but still like we were never alone. +

+

+One of the symptoms of depression that you’ll see in people is not caring about things and withdrawing. Laying all of my cards on the table, I’m noticing a lot of my routine is built up to not care. I can’t open the can of worms where my emotions are because they’re so big and so scary. They’re so sad, and they’re so mad. It’s a tightrope of not feeling but staying busy but not being vulnerable, which complicates things with my partner because connecting with my partner requires vulnerability and emotion. +

+

+Depression is like running waist-deep in water while everyone else is running on the shore. You’re expending more effort, and you get a quarter as far before you get tired in a way sleep doesn’t really help. I’m so lucky. I have great mental health care and medications and therapists. And I’m still miserable in lockdown. Everyone, no matter where they’re trapped in the world, is also trapped in their own head, and some people’s heads are a little more haunted than others. +

+

+But I’m not dead. I figured out how to stay alive for nearly four decades. On some level, I have to credit my depression with that. If anyone was prepared for what it would be like to live in lockdown, it was me. I have more pairs of pajama pants than I have normal pants. I was made for this. But if I hadn’t gone into inpatient treatment immediately before lockdown, I don’t know how I would have survived it. I was in such a bad place. It scares me to think about it. +

+

+Every day, for me, is a series of challenges. Whether or not I can get out of bed. Whether or not I can shower. Whether or not I can change into real clothes. Whether or not I can eat. Some days, I can. Some days, I can’t. But every day so far, I climb back in bed at the end of the day with one huge accomplishment under my belt: I stayed alive. That’s the one that counts. It’s the one thing you have to accomplish every day. Your to-do list has a varying amount of things on it every day. But some days it has just the one thing: Stay alive. And if you can do that, it’s a successful day. +

+

+I don’t want to go back to the place I was in right after I got out of the hospital. I’ll be more than a year older. I want to be better than that place. I’ve lost a lot of time to depression. I can’t afford to lose more. I have to grow from this. I want to learn something from this year. I have to fix things in my life that have been exposed as broken. +

+

+This is not a silver lining situation. More than 300,000 people in our country are dead. This is not making the best of it. If we don’t learn something from this and change the way things work to make the world better, then their deaths were completely in vain. That’s not a world I can live in. +

+

+I’m not going to lie and say I’m going to go out with new eyes and appreciate everything, because there’s a lot of annoying shit out there. But this is also an opportunity. It doesn’t have to be like it was before. I hope it isn’t. I hope we are kinder to employees. I hope we’re more flexible for parents or people suffering physical or mental health issues. I hope we learn lessons from this year. I don’t want it to be a lost year. [pause] You’re going to use that as the end, aren’t you? +

+

+Read the complete Lost Year series here. +

+

From The Hindu: Sports

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From The Hindu: National News

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From BBC: Europe

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From Ars Technica

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From Jokes Subreddit

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