On Free-time, On the Abyss, On Adulthood: Ruminations from Quarantine Part 1
Quarantine Diary part 1 from David , 21-year old business major at Berkeley
Age: 21 | Gender: Male
Occupation: Senior at Berkeley
Location: Los Angeles, California
Displacement Status: Moved from Berkeley to Los Angeles. Quarantined with my parents, sister, and a Canadian family friend.
State of calmness: Very calm. My family is healthy. There is much to be grateful for and much to do.
Reaction to local/state/federal response to the area: We live by the coast in Los Angeles. The beaches just closed. Our neighbors love roller-skating shirtless and surfing — their favorite activities are now gone. Los Angeles is a ghost town. It’s bizarre to drive through West Hollywood, Griffith Park and the 405 so quickly. The city is smaller.
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Hello, I’m a student at UC Berkeley who loves traveling, listening to music, and collecting maps. Since early March, all in-person classes have been cancelled. I fled Berkeley and returned to Los Angeles to be with my family. I have been sporadically documenting my experiences. I write whenever I feel inspired. These entries are about ideas, emotions, and experiences which may or may not directly relate to my day-to-day activities.
Day 1 (March 14, 2020)
The Year 2020
I lay in my bed and stare at the ceiling hopelessly as stress strangles me. I need to do something, but I can’t seem to move. Something else must happen first…or so it seems. I take a nap, read a bit and now, here I am. Typing into my journal before I workout.
I am worried and I am uncertain.
A storm is coming in my life. Or so it seems.
CO-VID19 is slowly sweeping across the planet. Corporate budget forecasts are falling. Non-essential functions are the first to go. My swanky agency job may have to wait a little while.
I may be unemployed after college.
I may have to live with my parents who don’t seem to want me.
I may suffer a speed bump in my career.
I may not graduate.
I may lose my mind.
These are the thoughts that swirl through my head. My bed is a coffin. I stare at the ceiling as though it’s the painted, glossy underside of the wooden box that seals my fate. These are just thoughts though. Not realities. In fact, I spend a lot more time thinking than doing. That’s one thing I realized lately.
Yesterday I grabbed dinner with some friends in San Francisco. We smoked fancy weed, laughed our asses off on Billy Goat Hill, took silly pictures, ate some great pasta, and went back to my house. We then drank some sour wine and gawked at strange videos.
It felt backwards.
The world feels backwards.
Day 2 (March 15, 2020)
When the Floor Drops
It was a strange day today. I woke up and just laid in bed. The ceiling stared at me: unblinking, unnoticing, unforgiving. There’s a piece of plaster chipped off the ceiling. It’s been there since I first moved in. It just stares at me. Maybe it reminds me of a hole. I made breakfast and talked to my housemate about the coronavirus. It was a mathematical conversation. I then rushed off to school. I needed to finish a case competition. We finished everything. I walked home to scarf down some chicken and rice. My throat has been a bit sore today. I’m scared I may have the virus. I walked to campus and returned Advertising Today by Warren Berger. I adore that book. I got ice cream from CVS and scarfed that down too, as I watched the Theory of Everything. The film stirred me. It reminded me of the giant abyss that lays beneath us all. It’s an abyss of emptiness, purposelessness and loneliness. The abyss reminds us of the pain of existence. It taunts us and reminds us that we are truly alone.
You can peek into the abyss. It looks back at you, slowly pulling you into its inky black breast. It wants you. It wants you really bad. You know that. This is just a peek through. It’s just a peek.
Don’t stare into the abyss. Never stare into the abyss. Staring at the darkness for too long means that all you may ever see is darkness. It’s like when we stare into the sun, we go blind. When we stare into darkness, we can only see darkness. Somehow the darkness is love though. It is love for another part of our humanity. We aren’t just all rainbows, pixie dust and giggles. Character depth is achieved by leveraging the darker aspects of existence. A good person who battles inner-demons is a vastly more interesting story than a good person who lives a good life all the time. As humans, we all struggle in one way or another. Therefore, the stories we share must communicate struggle. To relate to one another, we must have known the struggle.
This is one of those days when the floor feels like it’s dropping from beneath me. I feel like I am floating in the limbo of reality. It hurts. There is no purpose to life. There is nothing ever to do. I am simply just existing. I feel truly alone.
I remember this feeling from the summer after freshman year. I was living in Berkeley alone for the first time. I was working at a startup in South San Francisco. I would come back home, and watch television. I would sometimes think that I was trapped, desperate and alone. I felt like there was no purpose to life. I felt like my friends and family would turn their backs on me. I thought I would be single forever. I thought and thought and thought. I literally drowned in thoughts. They suffocated me every single day.
Fuck those thoughts.
Perhaps the abyss doesn’t exist. I look up. I see bleached, white clouds in bright blue skies of promise. Somehow the David in the clouds is fit, full of life, successful, and fulfilled. That David is very problematic though. That David doesn’t exist.
If I close my eyes now, I can envision a beautiful body, a beautiful relationship, a beautiful apartment, beautiful clothes, beautiful cars, beautiful job titles and beautiful friends. Somehow I am more popular and energetic than ever.
In reality, that David with all those nice things will just want more nice things. He will want more and more and more until he can’t take it. The successful, wealthy, healthy David is a very sad David. He will just have other things to be sad about other than money and time. Perhaps those sadnesses will be even more crushing than this sadness I experience now.
What is the antidote then?
This moment is all that I have…truly. I live with this flesh covering my body and colors bombarding my eyes. “Me” is all I have and “Me” is beautiful. “Me” is all I really need. Existence is hard but at least I am existing. There are figment realities to work towards but those realities aren’t me. I may have a spiritual calling to them but those realities are never me. The only me is the thing that is experiencing everything around me in this exact moment now.
The Problem of Freetime
What do I want to do with my free time? After days like this, where I do very little and spend a lot of time simply consuming media and getting bored, I often feel like doing something. I want to build and express things. The world is always on fire. There are millions of problems that impact human civilization. All these fires, give us something to do. These fires are a challenge. I like problems, they give me something to think about. I like thinking about things. I love planning, chatting and talking. I love writing, drawing and ideating. I love doodling, dancing and researching.
Therefore, what should I do in my freetime? Let’s consider I have a “flywheel” at work just as Bezos believes. When I feel energized at work, I feel energized at home. When I feel energized at home, I want to do something just like how I want to do something now.
I want to learn how to draw.
I want to learn how to design.
I want to build a city.
I want to learn how to dance.
I want to learn applied math??
I want to dance.
I will dance.
I want to run.
I want to read books.
I want to talk with a soulmate.
I want to drive somewhere.
I want to look at the night sky.
I want to go for a walk.
I want to swim in crystal blue waters.
I want to explore the world.
I have a lot of wants. I keep defaulting to a similar routine though. I look at Netflix, swipe on social media, scroll through dating apps and complain about life. They have us in their claws. They harvest our time and money. It hurts but we love it.
Now that I think of it: these addiction are really powerful. If I have some free time, my first thoughts are Netflix, YouTube, internet browsing and that’s it. I check messages throughout the day just looking for something to do. Those blinking notifications are more stimulation for my brain. I’m really nothing more than a bunch of habits.
I have all these other things I like to do but they just don’t work. They aren’t on the top of my mind.
Day 3 (March 21, 2020)
Invisible Hands Run Society
When I woke up today, I pressed the snooze button. I pressed it again and again and again. I finally mustered enough willpower to get up, put on my pants, and walk downstairs. I boiled water, munched on cereal and trudged back upstairs. My fingers typed away for hours.
*Click click click*
I scoured hundreds of internet websites, typed thousands of words, and edited dozens of pages. I saved pictures of protests in New York, collaborated in zoom with a classmate, built an app feature, scrolled through Instagram, napped for a couple of hours then ate dinner and watched a mindless Netflix show about criminal psychology.
Truly, this day has been a marvel. I tapped into dozens, perhaps hundreds of different technologies. My health was fine. I had plenty of food. I talked with people from around the world. I never worried about my personal safety, I could chat with my dog, and I had bountiful water and electricity.
It’s insane how this all just works. It’s taken a massive amount of human coordination to figure all of this out and it takes a massive amount of human trust and conditioned behavior to maintain this all as well. I’m almost in disbelief we’ve even gotten this far. Truly, underneath our pristine faces and neck gullets are fragile humans. We all want to cooperate, live peacefully and procreate, but we also all have the capacity to murder, betray, and decieve — in other words, survive. We’re all just surviving. Some of us are trying harder than others.
Once we get past the point of surviving, we have free time. When we have too much free time, our inner-demons start speaking. Suddenly, the voices in our head are amplified. They normally take a backseat in our rapid lives but we don’t live rapidly anymore. We’re home 24/7. We’re working minimally and we have millions of hours worth of entertainment at our fingertips. We’re suddenly confined in our personal boxes, confronting the horrors of who we are as human beings.
We’re all connected now. We’re all living through an equalized experience. Rich or poor doesn’t matter because this is the arena of life and death. Fate, our game master, determines the outcome. We can fight as hard as we can with whatever personal tools we may have but we will never determine the outcome.
Maybe all of our societal progress will be for nothing. Maybe we’ll simply blow ourselves up one way or another. Maybe we’ll re-enter the dark ages as right wing populist movements take over the world.
Day 4 (March 25, 2020)
Trapped in a Madhouz
I’ve spent a long time in this house. With every day that passes on, reality shrinks a little. The world as I know it imploded by a continent or 2. There is no Europe, no Asia, no Africa.
Eventually there is no New York, Georgia and Arizona.
Eventually there is no San Francisco and San Diego.
In this house, there is only me and Los Angeles. Somehow, empathy is drained from me the longer I stay inside. Everything else outside of this earth fades away. It’s a Madhouz. It’s no structure though. It’s simply my mind. I’m slowly becoming trapped in my mind. Thoughts are not defined, memories are as vivid as dreams, and my body is the “outside world.”
It’s quite mad. My perception of “outside” has shrunken from continents, to countries, to states to regions, to cities, to a house, and now to my body. Is this the limit?
Day 5 (March 27, 2020)
Quarantine Day 9
I went outside for the first time in 5 days today. It’s strange living in Los Angeles, growing up as a California Boy and not having gone outside for an entire 5 days. To be honest, I forgot what the experience was like. I forgot the buttery warm sun dripping on my skin. I forgot how soft sand tickles your feet and kisses your toes. I forgot how fluffy clouds look like strange confections in the blue sky.
I went down to Hermosa beach to simply walk by the ocean and think. I stared at white adults running shirtless along the beach. I saw white moms and dads playing with their white kids. There were a lot of white people today. Actually, coastal Los Angeles is really white now that I think about it.
That’s another thing I forgot about the outside world — how different our neighborhood is when compared to my home. Inside this house, we are Brazilian, Philipino and German. We talk about Chinese art, watch British media and drive Japanese cars. We eat Mexican food and speak Portuguese.
Outside, there are burger chains, Range Rovers and white families — verrryyyy white families.
Coming back inside was not as exciting as it was 9 days ago. Staying in the house devolved into a chore. It’s a chore to stay insulated from the world.
Inside, tiny things become your world now. I just finished a 2 day documentary binge. Being exposed to documentaries almost exclusively about design, advertising and Russian steel plants had me thinking that these are all we have left in our world. Those were the only things that mattered. When you go outside though, there are thousands of things screaming at you, telling you that they are the only things of importance in this world. The noise out there cannot be controlled. You are constantly being pulled one way or another. The noise in here is all up to me. It’s liberating and constraining.
Day 6 (March, 29, 2020)
Move Over
Move over designers of today. Communication designers like Goodby, Silverstein, Lee Clow, DDB, Steve Jobs, the Kelley Brothers, Yves Behar, Kaws, Virgil Abloh, and more.
Your time has come and now it has gone.
You are leaving this earth. Your creations are celebrated by many. Your impact has been made. You tried to change the world. You made it worse. You tried to instill joy into humanity but you left it more broken than before.
Move over designers of today. A new generation is coming.
We are digitally savvy, love experiences, understand the human mind, respect community, believe in doing good for our planet, and, most importantly of all, we are starving — starving to change the world.
Your hunger has been satiated. Your appetite is wet. Move over designers of today.
The future generation is taking the helm.
Stickers
I stared at my laptop. It is covered in stickers. These stickers are remnants of a past life I can never recover. It was a beautiful life but now it’s time to move on. These stickers were bought online. They were meant to subtly gloat about my “Berkeley” education, “SEP” club admission, and my “Wanderlust” on the road. These stickers were meant to flash in front of college students to let them know that I matter. I was screaming for attention with these stickers. Now it doesn’t matter. I ripped all of them off. I don’t need such flashy forms of identification to express myself. My work, my lifestyle, my dress, my creations, my writing, and my relationships are an expression of who I am.
College is done. I am finishing the semester at home now. That’s all good and fine. It doesn’t matter. I am an adult now. I am making my own decisions. Suddenly, the education runway has fallen beneath my feet. It’s time to fly. Which direction am I flying in? It took me years and years and years to figure it out. Now, I have some semblance of direction, some semblance of confidence and lots of youth. David’s adult form is slowly setting in. The whiny, scared, confused, David of adolescence is rapidly fading away.
We have a lot of time to ourselves now. We’re all uncovering new depths to ourselves. For some, it may be demons. For others, it may be forgotten power.
I’ve been learning about my values. When a global virus ruins your travel plans and threatens your family members, you start to question what truly matters. You think about your values. I am grateful to have the time to think about my values. Perhaps my life will change when this nightmare is over. Perhaps not. Only time will tell.
