It's time for a while that I thought about things in which I do participate

There is one thing I have begun to realise.

How much of my comments and thoughts are about events in which I do not participate.

For some reason, commenting on things happening elsewhere to other people did not feel strange before. Everyone talks about the news.

Then The Quarantine happened. Governments did things that they have never done before, not even in wars, and some of them assumed powers that no-one should be allowed to keep. For a day. What is happening in America now is unbearable to watch. A once-great nation is breaking up before our eyes.

What is happening in the rest of the world is also incomprehensible, if you try to understand it as the rational reaction of governments to a virus. Understand it as the desperate reaction of exhausted politicians to one more pseudo-crisis being exploited by special interest groups, and hyped up by a media driven by sensation and producing anti-government propaganda, and it makes perfect sense. Now they have to back out of it while maintaining the pretence that it really was serious, without panicking a noisy chunk of the population who believe the hype and without alienating all the voters. That's quite an act.

And here I am, participating in the whole farce and I don't want to comment or think about it. Of course I have, because understanding what happened to cause the Quarantine is the single biggest test of an analyst's abilities. Now I have done it(*), while carrying on with the day job, standing in lines to collect my prescriptions, and trying to run a life, and now I'm done with it.

But right now, I have nowhere to go, and even if I did, I'm a little short on motivation.

We can fix that. There are at least another six weeks before my gym is allowed to open, and large companies will continue to be asked to keep their staff at home for at least another five months. So I have plenty of time to experiment with how I live and work at home.

Which is what I am going to think about now. It's time for a while that I thought about things in which I do participate.



(*) When Boris announced the Quarantine, all the academics and public health advisors said to themselves:

****, he's actually going to do it. He wasn't supposed to do it. Quarantining healthy people is so dumb even the WHO knows it's dumb. He was supposed not to do it, so that if things went bad, we could all say we advised him to do it, but he wouldn't listen, and look what happened, and how superior are we? Just like we always do. Of course he shouldn't have listened to us.

That's what happened. The experts overlooked how hyped-up the media were, and how tired the politicians were after Brexit, and years of appeasing the unappeasable activists. The disaster that has come on our country will not, however, make the media or the experts or the activists one whit more responsible. Repeat after me...

Experts. Huh. Look what happened the last time we listened to the experts! We got locked in to our homes for four months for no reason at all. **** the experts.