The Spreading of Ideas with Covid
Around March 18th 2020, the United States went into a lockdown that has lasted a year in California. After reading an article by the New York times student editorial contest winner Harnessing Boredom in the Age of Coronavirus by Elan Cohen, it reminded me of my experience with the Covid-19, and my personal observations throughout the year.
Prior to this article, my experience with quarantine was more or less, live by the day, and see what the world gives you. With this article, it made me observe what I have done throughout the past year, and has helped me plan my future a little better.
In the article, it highlights the idea of boredom. It depicts boredom as the ultimate mental enemy to kill time, and this is true. The article also harnesses the idea of inner thoughts and the idea of deep diving into those thoughts is not always a bad thing. Throughout this article I did realize that I did do a lot of investigation with my thoughts, it consisted of a lot of planning of what I can do once everything was back to normal after “two weeks”. However, I had to keep adjusting them as I realized the quarantine would be a year. What I noticed was that this article did express a period of self-exploration where the writer did go out and explore a lot. However I am really curious as to what the writer is maintaining about themselves as the essay was written during June of 2020 where the pandemic started. A common theme that I found among these articles about what to do during the pandemic was self reflection coupled with self-development. There were two types of people, those who used this opportunity to abandon their bad hobbies in the past, and those who found new ones that they carried with them to now. This time period has acted as a funnel to those who were wanting a time to escape from urban life, but couldn’t find any.
Throughout this experience from a reading standpoint, the article had a fairly simple idea. Nonetheless, I admit that this did spark a set of ideas in my head on my perception of what is going on throughout the past year. It has acted as a catalyst for ideas to flow through my head on what I did throughout the past year on things I have done, and other things that I would rather not do. From now on, I will do my best to set my future based on these decisions to create a future where all my decisions will have no regrets so I can look back at this time period with some degree of pride in a harsh time.
