Covid-19 and Fight Club

We were driving home from school and towards a very packed Walmart for stuff to make muffins when I asked Hazel what she thought about the Corona virus today.

“It just ruins all of my fun stuff.”

And that’s a pretty good summation of how Covid-19 has bummed my admittedly small corner of the world.

We had planned to travel to Kansas City to see my family and hit an indoor water park with the kids over Spring Break. Obviously, with Kansas City now in a state of emergency, we opted to avoid the chlorinated petri dish in favor of our own sanity, and perhaps more pointedly, sanitation. In the eyes of a 7 year old, waiting to swim until summer is quite possibly the worst-case scenario for a global pandemic, and by God, we are struggling.

This isn’t to make light of the very real struggle and present fear for so many people right now. It sucks. Anything like this is disruptive by nature and it feels particularly more so in the echo chamber of social media so I felt this was as good a time as any to write a blog about why the drug we all so readily cling to is chipping away at the social fabric of the whole planet.

I'm watching you, Waszowski. Always watching.

I’m kidding, there’s plenty of people dogging on Facebook and I’m posting this for attention and “likes” and dopamine just as much as the next guy, I have no high horse upon which to sit, and will continue to roll in the bowels of addiction with the rest of you. So don’t stress a sermon.

Instead I want to focus on the incredibly cool way that children view the world and digest information. Particularly the sort of data that can be alarming to those with more life experience and less sparkle left in their irises.

Hazel doesn’t see a reason to panic because of her trust and lack of experience with bad things. There’s a line from Fight Club where Tyler says “On a long enough timeline everything returns to zero”. I think on a short enough timeline everything appears to be normal. You have so little data to compare something against and tend to accept even the scarier parts as the natural order. So rather than panic, she sees the larger picture as a mild interruption to “fun stuff”.

This ties rather well to a book we have been reading in the evenings called “Meditations” by stoic philosopher and Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius. It talks a great deal about accepting life as it comes and the acknowledgement that we are all just doing our best and insofar as that is true, you can just chill about the extras. (Yes, that’s a direct quote, Aurelius also said “lit” with more frequency than you might expect) And I sincerely hope that I am doing my best. That the actions I take are reflective of a purpose and goal I have set for myself. That the tiny ripples I create are moving the dial in some small way for the people around me, but most especially, my daughter.

So in the midst of empty grocery shelves and the absence of toilet paper I hope that you pause, self reflect, and elevate yourself. I hope you buy a bidet.

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”-Marcus Aurelius

Tl;dr: My 7 year old is even cooler than Tyler Durden.

Buy Meditations here: Meditations
Buy my own book here: No-Mod