Hello, everybody. Back again, with more writing exercises and ideas. The last two posts were fairly genteel posts about how to be a great healer in competitive video games. I'd like to take a departure from that to talk about something substantially more serious. However, if you are a competitive gamer that plays Heroes of the Storm, Overwatch, or Team Fortress 2, I highly recommend reading those last two posts. So, what I'd like to discuss here is a fairly simple idea that I've touched upon already in older posts from weeks ago; Despite the mass communication of the internet, COVID-19 has caused a major disruption in all of our lives, turning us into a plague of lighthouse keepers.
There are already a lot of people in our communities that don't like to be around others. With COVID, they have an excuse to be even more distant and go even more into isolation than previously before. Here's the kicker; until COVID is dealt a grievous blow, we're stuck in this mode of humanity, which is terrible for our health, well being, and mental health.
Next, I'd like to go into these details as they pertain to myself. I'm naturally a very outgoing extrovert that likes to be around others. I've been on a leave of absence to be safe and stay away from potential COVID spreaders for two months as I work retail. The only contact I have with people right now is when I talk to my family, when I text friends, when I direct message people on social media, or when I play online video games with voice chat or text chat. Because of all that COVID hasn't really affected me much, but it has impacted me enough for me to take notice and write my thoughts about it in a meaningful way.
You lose a sense of community and mental well being when you're not around people and start spending almost all of your time alone. I'm actually really looking forward to going back to work in June not because I need more money [thank God], but because I'm used to a certain amount of screentime with others, engaging in conversation, and being acknowledged as a person for who I am in my community and workplace.
Without that I'm a much different sort of person; I stop talking on voice coms and text chat in online competitive video games because I don't see the need for it, I stop direct messaging on social media apps because I think my people need more space away from me, I give my family more space and seclude myself more in whatever ways I can. The question is, is this good for me, and is it sustainable in the long run? What are the ramifications of living life in a lighthouse keeper sort of way?
For some people, none of this might apply to them because some people naturally don't like to be around others much, and try to spend as much time away from them as possible, as well as saying as little as possible. Obviously, for those people, COVID is helping them out in a societal way. But for the vast majority of the population, they need that social construct in order to engineer their lives in a more meaningful way, myself included.
We can't all keep going on like this and we know it. I've done really well under the circumstances but the show can't go on. As great as the digital age of the internet is in sharing and communication, it's a piss poor substitute for the real world. And that, essentially, is where the problem of COVID lies therein; it forces us to disperse and stay away from each other, and possibly even stop caring as much as we used to, and instead turn to our own quarantined, lockdown, isolated lives, looking for that spark of inspiration, that zest for life, that we simply can't get anywhere else.
Still waiting for my saviour,
storms tear me limb from limb
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