Month: November 2021

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Pandemic Update

I’m pretty sure most of my most recent predictions have fallen completely flat. Unlike the infections curve…

The last time I wrote, I was confident that the vaccines would effectively end the pandemic, at least among highly-vaccinated populations.

I was completely wrong.

What I didn’t know was that the Delta variant was going to ruin everything. The anti-vax movement is also most likely much larger than I had believed.

As far as I can tell, everyone is going to get COVID. At one point or another, everyone is going to get it no matter what they do. Perhaps they won’t have symptoms, but vaccinated or not, they will get it.

At the moment I’m still a little frustrated with the CDC and their messaging guidelines. For a long time now, I think their one and only goal has been to increase the vaccination numbers at any cost.

That may seem like a reasonable strategy, but the problem is they are doing it at the expense of the already-vaccinated and also tarnishing their reputation while they are at it.

They are still maintaining that breakthrough infections among the vaccinated are exceptionally rare.

They aren’t.

I trusted them on that and I wasn’t careful, and I got COVID. As did many who were at the same event, all vaccinated.

The data is now showing that the vaccines aren’t very effective against the Delta variant. They are still better than nothing, and most importantly they are still very effective at preventing serious illness.

But they should be giving us all the relevant information and they currently aren’t. They are still maintaining that it’s unlikely you’ll get COVID if you’re vaccinated and that simply isn’t true. Besides my own anecdotal evidence, there is now a large body of evidence showing that it confers something like a 30-40% protection.

Good, but not great.

And now we have the Omicron variant looming. We don’t know yet whether it’s worse than Delta but it appears to be spreading rapidly.

I truly believed that for my own intents and purposes, the pandemic was going to be over by this fall. Instead, it’s now surging globally and shows no signs of slowing down. Our vaccines helped for a little while but now it is too far mutated and can barely be slowed.

With all these things in mind, predictions are quite difficult but I’ll try to make some:

  • The virus will keep mutating and being a problem for years to come
  • I don’t think it will ever go away, it will just become endemic like the Flu
  • I think that it will slowly get less and less bad until it’s not something we think about or talk about, but that won’t happen until probably late 2023
  • I think we’ll have updated vaccines in the US by Summer or possibly Fall 2022 which will more effectively combat the newer variants
  • By the time it’s done, I think some pretty stark economic divides will be revealed in the US between places that were highly vaccinated and took it seriously and those that didn’t
  • History will not be kind to anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers

I’m not sure I feel the least bit confident about anything else. Who knows what will happen.

I do think the country in general is going to go through a rough patch. People are going to get more and more angry and we’re going to have some pretty crazy events happen in the next several years.

I don’t quite believe civil war is possible for a number of reasons, but I think a reckoning of sorts is coming.

There’s never been a better time to learn another language and live abroad!

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My Productivity Has Multiplied Almost Overnight

I’m finally back on track.

I had a bit of a spell there were I was sick a bunch and got into some really bad habits of wasting time on social media and the internet and was generally overwhelmed and it sort of got a vicious cycle going.

And now I’m out of it!

It’s hard to say exactly to what extent I just forced myself to do better and to what extent I may just… Recovered. It’s possible I still had lingering effects from illness. It’s very difficult to say!

But I’ve just been focusing on improving a bit every day! And it’s worked.

The first thing I did was uninstall the Facebook app on my phone, which is something I’d strongly recommend everyone do and I keep up with in the future.

And then I just really focused on my to-do and knocking that out. I allowed small lapses were I lost focus but made sure to always go back to work soon.

Now I’ve completed all my pressing to-do items and am keeping up well with new tasks.

Additionally, I finally got around to joining a gym and have actually been going. I bought a guitar so I can practice here which is something I’ve been meaning to do since I got here.

I’m also reading again and rapidly improving my Spanish through social activity, watching Spanish media, and studying.

These are all things I wasn’t really doing at all two weeks ago (except speaking to people in person).

It could also simply be that I’ve gotten established and comfortable here. I have a routine, I know where everything is, I have a social circle, and just all around I am comfortable. That makes it easier to stay productive.

I’m not totally sure what the lesson here is yet. Maybe it’s that I need to develop a routine and get comfortable where I am. But I think more likely, I really just need to focus on productivity, eliminate pointless distractions, and generally just stick to my routines and habits despite being in a new place.

One last thought is that I tend to feel somewhat lost in a new city before I develop a social circle. Getting that social interaction starts to feel like a desperate need before long. That desperation can be quite motivating and succeeds in helping me actually meet people. But it also totally distracts me from everything else, which I need to be careful about.

That could probably be its own post so maybe I’ll expand on that another time.

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I’m Way Better at Revising Than Creating

I’ve known this for a long time, but I think that I’m way better at revising than I am at creating.

Or, at the very least, it is way less mentally and emotionally draining to revise than it is to create.

In context of work, this means that starting something from scratch is always super daunting to me. Whether it’s writing a proposal, researching and/or putting together something that I’ve never worked with before, or even building a website, it always feels like a massive burden to do the initial work.

However, once I’ve done that, it is usually very easy to tweak it or improve upon it. It doesn’t take much mental effort and it usually goes very quickly. What’s more, I am often much more able to take a step back and think critically about it and make required changes.

So what does this mean?

I think it means that I need to put a lot less pressure on myself when creating something new. It doesn’t need to be perfect. Heck, it doesn’t even need to be good!

I’ve found that usually it’s better for me to just start with something and then work with it until it’s usable.

It feels sort of like loosely molding a lump of clay into the general shape until proceeding to add detail and turn it into art. Not that I’ve worked with clay much in the last 20 years…

Even recently, I’ve found that I’ve just put off certain types of work and they become huge roadblocks to getting anything done. They make me stressed and totally unproductive. And it’s because I’m putting off the incredibly mentally-draining task of creation.

But if I focus more on simply “throwing something together”, I think that would take a lot of the pressure off and make things easier.

I’ve sort of done this in the past with proposals. I’ve broken the process up into several steps. The first one is just to basically just read my notes and break off any actionable items into another document. And it helps tremendously!

I still feel the pressure to ultimately make an entire, good proposal all at once, though. And I need to stop that because it’s slowing me down.

I’m sure this applies elsewhere, too. Creation is hard. But you can always work your creation into something usable, and sometimes that’s way easier.

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I Mostly Only Like Activities That Feel Like Growth

I had an epiphany today. I was using my flashcard app and learning new Spanish vocabulary. And while it’s not “fun” in the classical sense, I like doing it and it feels good.

Why?

Because it feels like I’m growing myself. I’m doing better. I’m creating a future that is better. And I really like that.

I tend to like anything that feels like an investment in myself, my life, or even in others. I enjoy activities that feel like they’ll lead to exponential growth.

As sort of a side note, I remember as a kid always really loving RTS games where you gather resources and grow exponentially. While I can’t help but think now that maybe those games served to subconsciously inure me to unregulated capitalism and the concomitant exploitation and exhaustion of the natural world (lol), it also maybe instilled in me the love of growth and scale.

So that’s all great, but why is this particularly relevant at the moment?

Because I don’t really feel like I have that in my business at the moment. I sort of feel like I’m just keeping up and managing what I have without any real possibility of growth.

There are lots of reasons for this, some of them more relevant than others. Since the pandemic began, I haven’t really spent any time “on the business”. I haven’t been planning how I can grow and acting on those things.

Despite that, I have continued to grow. It’s important that I acknowledge that because I think it will help me change my mindset here.

But even so, it hasn’t been MY focus. It has not been where my head is at when I’m working. And whether it’s true or not, it sort of feels like I’m at a peak.

I don’t really intend to come up with a solution in this post, but I do just want to acknowledge this problem and put it on my own radar so that I can figure out a way forward that fixes it.

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I Need to Get My Act Together

It’s a bit of a perfect storm. I’ve been consistently uprooting myself to move somewhere new, I’m in a new city, I’m trying to meet lots of new people, and I’m possibly still recovering from COVID.

The results speak for themselves.

They are bad.

I’ve been incredibly unproductive in my time here in Mexico. When I first arrived I found out I had COVID. That completely wiped me out and drained me of all energy. Understandably, I didn’t get a lot done.

But I recovered. I picked up some bad habits of watching way too much YouTube and going on Facebook.

And now I feel like I’m barely working or accomplishing anything at all. I finally moved into a place that I’ll actually stay in for a while, and I love it. I have it all to myself and it’s a place that can actually feel stable for me. I’m hoping that helps.

It’s entirely possible that I have lingering effects from COVID still. Though I’ve been recovered for several weeks, I still feel like I have very little motivation to work or get anything done. And lately I’ve felt like it’s been sort of hard to “catch my breath” even though I’m not doing anything. Granted, as I write this I’m probably sitting at nearly 7500′, so the air actually is much thinner.

Regardless, I think I just need to focus on getting back on track. I need to get into a good routine where I’m productive. I need to stop watching YouTube videos and going on Facebook.

I’m in a great position where I can travel whenever I want while still doing okay financially, but I can’t get complacent. With just a little bit of effort I should be able to continue growing the business AND having fun.