JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

My friends in corporate jobs who are working from home all agree: It’s exhausting. It’s not just having to work in the same physical and headspace where you live, rest, and sleep, or being around spouse and spawn every single second. It’s being connected to your office all the time, on Google Hangouts, Slack, Zoom, and a host of apps. You may be physically apart from your coworkers, but they’re in your ear all the time so you cannot have a moment to think. You’re under constant surveillance. Of course your employer wants to make sure that you’re actually working and not playing games. That’s based on the assumption that people are most productive when they’re chained to their desks under the boss’s watchful eye. I’m a freelancer so technically WFH, and I can tell you that all the work gets done in intense three-hour bursts, and the rest of the time I’m getting ready for that burst by doing stuff that seems totally unrelated to work (feeding the cats, etc).

Dorski and Steph sent me an article suggesting that companies set core periods when employees have to be online (say 10am-12nn, 2pm-4pm). The rest of the time they can disconnect and work without interruption, or check that the kids aren’t setting fire to grandpa so they can focus.

Being able to work from home is a privilege, but feeling guilty about your privilege, though nice for your human development, is not useful unless you do something about it. You can’t shop or dine out, so consider donating what you would’ve spent to organizations feeding the poor, supporting frontliners, making PPE, developing Covid test kits and building labs. You could volunteer to drive for workers in essential businesses, or help encode data tracking the distribution of social amelioration funds.

There’s always something, and I find that the best thing for feeling helpless is to make yourself useful. You could keep track of the prices of essential goods and go to the social media accounts of sellers to tell them to stop taking advantage of the situation by overcharging. (A friend is appalled that at a supermarket in Santolan, oranges that used to cost P38 now sell at P80. Granted, some price increases are inevitable due to supply and demand, but 210% is scuzzy.)

Check on your friends, ask them how they’re doing. I am happy to report that my friends are sane and fairly cheerful, and doing what they can to step away from the brink of despair. In fact the only whiny bitches I know right now are straight guys. Of course even a simple text can push you over the edge, so if your friend’s doomsaying is depressing you, mute them, change the subject, or say, “I have to maintain my sanity” and show them a picture of a cat or dog.

In the Philippines we have always lived with disasters natural and man-made, so we have networks of friends, colleagues, family, contacts who pull together in a crisis and find solutions. They recommend suppliers who deliver vegetables, fruit, meat, milk and other necessities. (Books are necessities, lest we forget.) We have resources. It’s the douchebags who make the news, but people have been wonderful.

(Speaking of douchebags in training who are still just idiots, people were jogging in BGC? And taking offence when they were told off? Arrest them and the ones who still have parties (many of them are dumb enough to post photos), threaten them with a stint in our overcrowded Petri dish jails, then give them a whopping fine. As for the people who are clearly not outdoors for recreation, who need to work to eat, give them a ride.)

Lali directed me to the Twitter account of Clare Sammells, an anthropologist who teaches a class about zombies. Her heartening conclusion: “…our heroes of the moment are those who have been caring for us all along: nurses, doctors, teachers, (home) cooks, grocery store workers, farmers…That desire to reach out and help people during a crisis is often missing in zombie films, which tend to assume that we will all descend into Aggressively Individualistic Survival Mode unless forced to do otherwise. But that’s not really how people are, most of the time.”

Maybe we haven’t seen the worst, and maybe those we admire will turn out to be shits. But we will need each other in the months and years to come, so find your people.