Coronavirus Info & Helpful Direction

[Twodogs]

Re: Coronavirus Info & Helpful Direction

Nah they don’t need to nail them. The police have a red tape that is illegal to be removed.

But they do install cameras from time to time.
That’s how you control a massive population with very low paid, in many cases, semi-illiterate security force.

Someone posted on Twitter tonight. Isn’t strange how people can’t be with dying relatives, no matter how vaccinated, long the quarantine or strict the conditions, yet we can still have sports people travelling around the country.
Beginning to get very dark on some aspects of this.

Thanks GD that makes sense. Same as it's illegal to remove that chequered tape VicPol use to section off crime and accident scenes. You don't want to be found with it laying around your house if you've got the rozzas going through it for any other reason. I know from experience.

Is it the tweet by Dave Hughes you're talking about? IMO he hasn't exactly covered himself in glory with some of his takes over the last little while.

[jeemak]

Re: Coronavirus Info & Helpful Direction

Hi JM, am working at an IB school in Shanghai teaching art and design. I was in the TAFE sector in Geelong before this. Last I was in Australia was Feb 2020, doing some workshops in Portland. I bumped into Billy Picken at the Hamilton Library on that trip.

How about yourself? Where are you and hopefully you are still able to work.

An IB school, interesting.

I'm in Melbourne, have been since December 2019. Came back to reconnect with friends and family, but COVID hit and I've mainly been in my apartment by myself for that time! Been really lucky with work though, so can't complain. A LOT of people are doing it tougher than I am even though I'm not having a great time of it.

[Ghost Dog]

Re: Coronavirus Info & Helpful Direction

An IB school, interesting.

I'm in Melbourne, have been since December 2019. Came back to reconnect with friends and family, but COVID hit and I've mainly been in my apartment by myself for that time! Been really lucky with work though, so can't complain. A LOT of people are doing it tougher than I am even though I'm not having a great time of it.

Connecting but not - frustrating I can imagine. How long have you been in lockdown for in total?

[jeemak]

Re: Coronavirus Info & Helpful Direction

Connecting but not - frustrating I can imagine. How long have you been in lockdown for in total?

I think in terms of days a few more than the runs Brad Hodge put up in Perth before being dropped from the test team.

[Bornadog]

Re: Coronavirus Info & Helpful Direction

Take care Chef, Kyabram and Echuca have tier 1 sites. Hope you are ok.

[chef]

Re: Coronavirus Info & Helpful Direction

Take care Chef, Kyabram and Echuca have tier 1 sites. Hope you are ok.

Thanks mate, after so long of being lucky shits just got real.

Just tier 2 sites though, I'm avoiding everywhere atm.

[EasternWest]

Re: Coronavirus Info & Helpful Direction

Thanks mate, after so long of being lucky shits just got real.

Just tier 2 sites though, I'm avoiding everywhere atm.

Chef in two weeks

[Twodogs]

Re: Coronavirus Info & Helpful Direction

I had a pretty close call. Yesterday I was checking the latest case alerts on the Vic Health website and noticed that Yarraville Cole's was listed as a level 2 exposure sight. The case was there between 9.55:and 10.25am on Monday 23/8/2021. I went and did the weekly shop at Cole's Yarraville on Monday 23/8 in the morning. Luckily I'd kept the receipt and I'd left the store at 9.42am.

Missed it by that much!

[jazzadogs]

Re: Coronavirus Info & Helpful Direction

I was sent this article by a friend recently and it REALLY hit the mark for me. Link

At first, I didn’t recognize the symptoms that we all had in common. Friends mentioned that they were having trouble concentrating. Colleagues reported that even with vaccines on the horizon, they weren’t excited about 2021. A family member was staying up late to watch “National Treasure” again even though she knows the movie by heart. And instead of bouncing out of bed at 6 a.m., I was lying there until 7, playing Words with Friends.

It wasn’t burnout — we still had energy. It wasn’t depression — we didn’t feel hopeless. We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. It turns out there’s a name for that: languishing.

Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021.

As scientists and physicians work to treat and cure the physical symptoms of long-haul Covid, many people are struggling with the emotional long-haul of the pandemic. It hit some of us unprepared as the intense fear and grief of last year faded.

In the early, uncertain days of the pandemic, it’s likely that your brain’s threat detection system — called the amygdala — was on high alert for fight-or-flight. As you learned that masks helped protect us — but package-scrubbing didn’t — you probably developed routines that eased your sense of dread. But the pandemic has dragged on, and the acute state of anguish has given way to a chronic condition of languish.

In psychology, we think about mental health on a spectrum from depression to flourishing. Flourishing is the peak of well-being: You have a strong sense of meaning, mastery and mattering to others. Depression is the valley of ill-being: You feel despondent, drained and worthless.

Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health. It’s the void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being. You don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but you’re not the picture of mental health either. You’re not functioning at full capacity. Languishing dulls your motivation, disrupts your ability to focus, and triples the odds that you’ll cut back on work. It appears to be more common than major depression — and in some ways it may be a bigger risk factor for mental illness.

The term was coined by a sociologist named Corey Keyes, who was struck that many people who weren’t depressed also weren’t thriving. His research suggests that the people most likely to experience major depression and anxiety disorders in the next decade aren’t the ones with those symptoms today. They’re the people who are languishing right now. And new evidence from pandemic health care workers in Italy shows that those who were languishing in the spring of 2020 were three times more likely than their peers to be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.


Part of the danger is that when you’re languishing, you might not notice the dulling of delight or the dwindling of drive. You don’t catch yourself slipping slowly into solitude; you’re indifferent to your indifference. When you can’t see your own suffering, you don’t seek help or even do much to help yourself.

Even if you’re not languishing, you probably know people who are. Understanding it better can help you help them.

A name for what you’re feeling
Psychologists find that one of the best strategies for managing emotions is to name them. Last spring, during the acute anguish of the pandemic, the most viral post in the history of Harvard Business Review was an article describing our collective discomfort as grief. Along with the loss of loved ones, we were mourning the loss of normalcy. “Grief.” It gave us a familiar vocabulary to understand what had felt like an unfamiliar experience. Although we hadn’t faced a pandemic before, most of us had faced loss. It helped us crystallize lessons from our own past resilience — and gain confidence in our ability to face present adversity.

We still have a lot to learn about what causes languishing and how to cure it, but naming it might be a first step. It could help to defog our vision, giving us a clearer window into what had been a blurry experience. It could remind us that we aren’t alone: languishing is common and shared.

And it could give us a socially acceptable response to “How are you?”

Instead of saying “Great!” or “Fine,” imagine if we answered, “Honestly, I’m languishing.” It would be a refreshing foil for toxic positivity — that quintessentially American pressure to be upbeat at all times.

When you add languishing to your lexicon, you start to notice it all around you. It shows up when you feel let down by your short afternoon walk. It’s in your kids’ voices when you ask how online school went. It’s in “The Simpsons” every time a character says, “Meh.”

Last summer, the journalist Daphne K. Lee tweeted about a Chinese expression that translates to “revenge bedtime procrastination.” She described it as staying up late at night to reclaim the freedom we’ve missed during the day. I’ve started to wonder if it’s not so much retaliation against a loss of control as an act of quiet defiance against languishing. It’s a search for bliss in a bleak day, connection in a lonely week, or purpose in a perpetual pandemic.

An antidote to languishing
So what can we do about it? A concept called “flow” may be an antidote to languishing. Flow is that elusive state of absorption in a meaningful challenge or a momentary bond, where your sense of time, place and self melts away. During the early days of the pandemic, the best predictor of well-being wasn’t optimism or mindfulness — it was flow. People who became more immersed in their projects managed to avoid languishing and maintained their prepandemic happiness.

An early-morning word game catapults me into flow. A late-night Netflix binge sometimes does the trick too — it transports you into a story where you feel attached to the characters and concerned for their welfare.

While finding new challenges, enjoyable experiences and meaningful work are all possible remedies to languishing, it’s hard to find flow when you can’t focus. This was a problem long before the pandemic, when people were habitually checking email 74 times a day and switching tasks every 10 minutes. In the past year, many of us also have been struggling with interruptions from kids around the house, colleagues around the world, and bosses around the clock. Meh.

Fragmented attention is an enemy of engagement and excellence. In a group of 100 people, only two or three will even be capable of driving and memorizing information at the same time without their performance suffering on one or both tasks. Computers may be made for parallel processing, but humans are better off serial processing.

Give yourself some uninterrupted time
That means we need to set boundaries. Years ago, a Fortune 500 software company in India tested a simple policy: no interruptions Tuesday, Thursday and Friday before noon. When engineers managed the boundary themselves, 47 percent had above-average productivity. But when the company set quiet time as official policy, 65 percent achieved above-average productivity. Getting more done wasn’t just good for performance at work: We now know that the most important factor in daily joy and motivation is a sense of progress.

I don’t think there’s anything magical about Tuesday, Thursday and Friday before noon. The lesson of this simple idea is to treat uninterrupted blocks of time as treasures to guard. It clears out constant distractions and gives us the freedom to focus. We can find solace in experiences that capture our full attention.

Focus on a small goal
The pandemic was a big loss. To transcend languishing, try starting with small wins, like the tiny triumph of figuring out a whodunit or the rush of playing a seven-letter word. One of the clearest paths to flow is a just-manageable difficulty: a challenge that stretches your skills and heightens your resolve. That means carving out daily time to focus on a challenge that matters to you — an interesting project, a worthwhile goal, a meaningful conversation. Sometimes it’s a small step toward rediscovering some of the energy and enthusiasm that you’ve missed during all these months.


Languishing is not merely in our heads — it’s in our circumstances. You can’t heal a sick culture with personal bandages. We still live in a world that normalizes physical health challenges but stigmatizes mental health challenges. As we head into a new post-pandemic reality, it’s time to rethink our understanding of mental health and well-being. “Not depressed” doesn’t mean you’re not struggling. “Not burned out” doesn’t mean you’re fired up. By acknowledging that so many of us are languishing, we can start giving voice to quiet despair and lighting a path out of the void.

[jeemak]

Re: Coronavirus Info & Helpful Direction

I had a pretty close call. Yesterday I was checking the latest case alerts on the Vic Health website and noticed that Yarraville Cole's was listed as a level 2 exposure sight. The case was there between 9.55:and 10.25am on Monday 23/8/2021. I went and did the weekly shop at Cole's Yarraville on Monday 23/8 in the morning. Luckily I'd kept the receipt and I'd left the store at 9.42am.

Missed it by that much!

Man I live across the road from Vic Gardens in Richmond. Every day I go over there is pretty much a roll of the dice!

Glad you're OK TD.

[jeemak]

Re: Coronavirus Info & Helpful Direction

Great read JD. Thanks for posting.

This stood out for me:

Last summer, the journalist Daphne K. Lee tweeted about a Chinese expression that translates to “revenge bedtime procrastination.” She described it as staying up late at night to reclaim the freedom we’ve missed during the day. I’ve started to wonder if it’s not so much retaliation against a loss of control as an act of quiet defiance against languishing. It’s a search for bliss in a bleak day, connection in a lonely week, or purpose in a perpetual pandemic.

This is something I struggle with because of the work I do, but mostly because of the way I validate my existence as a result of work.

Between the months of August last year and May this year I was very much questioning my return to Melbourne from Hanoi, and also my decision to go to Hanoi in the first place. In Hanoi it was a new job, completely different from the one I had prior to it where I had become institutionalised within a massive behemoth of a company that was dysfunctional. I literally packed up everything, went there without even knowing what I was doing in my new job and languished. In honesty I should have been shipped out after a few months but politics in work is everything (don't let anyone tell you otherwise) and I was able to hold on. I de-institutionalised, got good at working in Hanoi and then decided to come back home for family reasons and a longing to reconnect with people here.

Then the pandemic hit, I was here basically in a new job again, and languishing. I couldn't see friends and family, I couldn't get face to face time with clients or colleagues/ managers and I was shit at what I was doing. Hanoi isn't Melbourne/ Australia, standards are different and powerpoint slides aren't universal. A month or two into the COVID crisis we ran out of billable work, jobs were on the line, I was in the gun. Every day it felt like somebody was standing on my chest. But the tide turned, I all of a sudden had nothing in my life but work, and too much of it. In addition to that Melbourne was the only place in lockdown and everyone was "VIC-Kicking" to their hearts content. Since that time to about May this year I had four days off over Christmas but the rest of it was working ten to twelve hour days minimum in the most feral client landscape you could imagine.

And I still felt lucky to be working like that.

This time around it feels like there's more empathy from everyone, particularly those north of the Victorian border. People are a little bit kinder, but it's still easy to fall into the trap of being fixated on the one constant that is there - work, and the need to languish after the work is done daily and stay up late at night and reclaim some semblance of control and not working.

I'm extremely conflicted. Everyone is experiencing their own type of COVID torture. Mine is the constant grind, I work hard and it takes all my energy not to eat like shit. I can't motivate myself to exercise, I eat OK, but drink too much. My apartment gets filthy (by my standards) until I can't stand it anymore. But yet, I have a job, I'm able to work and keep things going, and I am luckier than so many others out there and I feel bad for thinking selfishly when they're literally unable to put food on the table.

While I said people are more empathetic this time around, one thing that cuts me up is the derision of people lashing out and protesting because they're forbidden for putting food on the table for themselves, and or their family. I have no idea what it feels like to be told you can't work, and you're not going to be compensated for not doing so and you have to suffer disproportionately compared to people like me.

We can afford to make the lives of people in that situation better, and it seriously guts me seeing them protesting and being lumped in with the conspiracy nut jobs because we won't.

[jazzadogs]

Re: Coronavirus Info & Helpful Direction

Great read JD. Thanks for posting.

This stood out for me:

Last summer, the journalist Daphne K. Lee tweeted about a Chinese expression that translates to “revenge bedtime procrastination.” She described it as staying up late at night to reclaim the freedom we’ve missed during the day. I’ve started to wonder if it’s not so much retaliation against a loss of control as an act of quiet defiance against languishing. It’s a search for bliss in a bleak day, connection in a lonely week, or purpose in a perpetual pandemic.

This is something I struggle with because of the work I do, but mostly because of the way I validate my existence as a result of work.

Between the months of August last year and May this year I was very much questioning my return to Melbourne from Hanoi, and also my decision to go to Hanoi in the first place. In Hanoi it was a new job, completely different from the one I had prior to it where I had become institutionalised within a massive behemoth of a company that was dysfunctional. I literally packed up everything, went there without even knowing what I was doing in my new job and languished. In honesty I should have been shipped out after a few months but politics in work is everything (don't let anyone tell you otherwise) and I was able to hold on. I de-institutionalised, got good at working in Hanoi and then decided to come back home for family reasons and a longing to reconnect with people here.

Then the pandemic hit, I was here basically in a new job again, and languishing. I couldn't see friends and family, I couldn't get face to face time with clients or colleagues/ managers and I was shit at what I was doing. Hanoi isn't Melbourne/ Australia, standards are different and powerpoint slides aren't universal. A month or two into the COVID crisis we ran out of billable work, jobs were on the line, I was in the gun. Every day it felt like somebody was standing on my chest. But the tide turned, I all of a sudden had nothing in my life but work, and too much of it. In addition to that Melbourne was the only place in lockdown and everyone was "VIC-Kicking" to their hearts content. Since that time to about May this year I had four days off over Christmas but the rest of it was working ten to twelve hour days minimum in the most feral client landscape you could imagine.

And I still felt lucky to be working like that.

This time around it feels like there's more empathy from everyone, particularly those north of the Victorian border. People are a little bit kinder, but it's still easy to fall into the trap of being fixated on the one constant that is there - work, and the need to languish after the work is done daily and stay up late at night and reclaim some semblance of control and not working.

I'm extremely conflicted. Everyone is experiencing their own type of COVID torture. Mine is the constant grind, I work hard and it takes all my energy not to eat like shit. I can't motivate myself to exercise, I eat OK, but drink too much. My apartment gets filthy (by my standards) until I can't stand it anymore. But yet, I have a job, I'm able to work and keep things going, and I am luckier than so many others out there and I feel bad for thinking selfishly when they're literally unable to put food on the table.

While I said people are more empathetic this time around, one thing that cuts me up is the derision of people lashing out and protesting because they're forbidden for putting food on the table for themselves, and or their family. I have no idea what it feels like to be told you can't work, and you're not going to be compensated for not doing so and you have to suffer disproportionately compared to people like me.

We can afford to make the lives of people in that situation better, and it seriously guts me seeing them protesting and being lumped in with the conspiracy nut jobs because we won't.

It's too late in the night (doing some revenge procrastination I guess) for a long response, but I appreciate you sharing and agree with some of your broader thoughts. I hope you're doing well - this lockdown has been really tough.

[jeemak]

Re: Coronavirus Info & Helpful Direction

It's too late in the night (doing some revenge procrastination I guess) for a long response, but I appreciate you sharing and agree with some of your broader thoughts. I hope you're doing well - this lockdown has been really tough.

Thanks man. And likewise.

I don't expect you'll agree or otherwise with my experiences, they are what they are. I guess in the latter parts of the post I'm just sharing some of my feelings of compassion for people who are doing it tough.

As for me, things are much better this time around mostly. Just need to tidy up things I know I can with a bit of effort. Overall I'm doing well and much better than some/ many I talk to.

[Twodogs]

Re: Coronavirus Info & Helpful Direction

Man I live across the road from Vic Gardens in Richmond. Every day I go over there is pretty much a roll of the dice!

Glad you're OK TD.

North Altona, Central West and Footscray Cole's which are the others that are close by keep getting listed too. They even listed a Cole's in Footscray that I didn't know existed.

Maybe it's time to swap to Woolworths or Aldi

[Eastdog]

Re: Coronavirus Info & Helpful Direction

North Altona, Central West and Footscray Cole's which are the others that are close by keep getting listed too. They even listed a Cole's in Footscray that I didn't know existed.

Maybe it's time to swap to Woolworths or Aldi

Quite a number of places exposure sites in the western suburbs. Take care Twodogs and other woofers out in the west.