Mini-Quarantines and Mini-Ethics

It's the end of the second week of staying at home in order not to spread the coronavirus. I've been managing to sleep longer.

From a logical perspective I know that this crisis is small peas in even recent history. Also, the things that worry and disorientate me the most are signs that proper action is being taken; not of problems per se.

But because of the technological demands of switching to the home office, tasks have piled up at work and I have been putting in work on Saturdays the past two weeks.

Rather having more time to read or do housework or do other things, I have been working as much as ever, and it is definitely weird to do it at home.

It is only now, because a few urgent work tasks were tackled and I have reemerged from the first state of archetypal fight-or-flight reaction, I am beginning to realize how not all right I have been, emotionally. I think that admitting the problem is good; admittedly I'm not quite sure how to proceed from here.

Having familiar routines interrupted still seems to be traumatizing for me; and I still don't know how to handle the reversal of stimuli — the pull of the sunshine and the green spring versus the rational need to stay indoors, the wish to comfort-eat versus the shortfalls in the grocery store stocks, etc.

That said, a billion other people or more on Earth are in the same boat; I just don't want to generalize on everyone else's behalf.

Because of my anxiety I haven't been able to properly think out the broader ramifications, especially the philosophical or (in my case) specifically religious ones. From what I heard in the news yesterday, the Pope called the coronavirus crisis a punishment from God for sins like ignoring the poor and the needs of the earth. I did not find this especially inspiring.

My armchair analysis is different:

To my (hopefully not too Leibnizian) eyes: like all things, the coronavirus brings with it good and evil. This good and evil are unequally scattered now, but will in the due course of time be balanced out and resolved for the good.

Much of this will wash over us without our being able to influence much; but a portion of its effect is up to us to determine. And yet, although I am trying to become a marginally better person through this interesting experience, I have felt cornered, panicked and not nice or noble at all.

That said, I think that many secular or theological analyses are likely to be better than mine!