Back to the social media. Part I.

These are some thoughts about what is happening and what i am doing. Part 1.

Where are we?

Three weeks ago a quarantine was established because of the covid-19 pandemic. We cancelled the workshop we were going to do, get a new plane ticket and were able to get back to Tenerife just in time. Our official plane was cancelled the next day.

I am in Canary islands with Margot. We both love science fiction, disaster movies and science (without the fiction) so we established a plan and some procedures to stay safe. We self quarantined ourselves before the official announcement. Got a big shopping and prepared to stay a long time isolated. We both knew the official period for isolation was not real and too short.

The information overload

The first days i overloaded myself with information. I read every possible scientific article about the situation. Then i started reading other kind of shit. Then the people started to stay at home and that meant a lot of free time. And what do people with free time? They go into social media, they complain, they argue, they look for an explanation for their miserys. Others share important data, give support and try to bring some happines to the world. But they are soon shadowed by the first ones.

So after a couple of days reading, doing my own calculations, checking the “official ones” and remembering my statistic and maths subjects from university, i arrived to some conclusions and three possible scenarios and a decision.

The social network isolation

The decision was to isolate myself from social networks. So i stopped using everything except facebook for 10 minutes during the morning and 10 minutes at the afternoon. I went completely away from instagram and all the other networks. Best decision ever. I got all that time for myself and didnt have all the noise input from a lot of people with too much free time and too much stress.

After i dont know how many days and weeks with no social media i feel really much better. I could focus a lot on other things. I could spent a lot of time with myself thinking. I had a lot of extra time to be in touch with the people I really love. I learnt a lot of new stuff.

The scenarios were the good one, the bad one and the worse one. You all know them now. I wished spain was never going to be as bad as italy, that had more than 20 thousand infected people. Now we are at 130k. I worried about USA, the stock market, the unemployement and specially about the people.

Panem et circenses

Give people Panem et circenses and everything will be ok.

First thing we removed was the circus. No football, no going out, no masses, no nothing. All the systems that most people use to deal with the tension, with anger, with stress, were cancelled.

Then someone tweeted that toilet paper was done in china and we will run out of it.

And everybody went crazy.

I dont know if your country is in isolation. If it is, a lot of people will have realized by now that they were not social drinkers, that addictions don’t stop so easily, that free time is something a lot of people dont know how to manage. And that being alone with yourself is something most people avoid everysingle time 🙂 Nobody is buying toilet paper anymore, but flour and beer. And the new circus is not football but reporting your neighbour to the police, because she went down for 5 minutes with her 2 year old kid that has attention problems and need some air.

This crisis is bringing the worst in us. And also the best.

The bad scenario was very bad, but not probable. We are now in a path very close to the middle one, the not very bad but not very good. Our country did well. Politicians sacrificed the economy for the health of the people and today the R0, the infection rate, went below 1. Today R0 is 0.98. Each infected person is infecting 0.98 new people. That is very good news. Quarantine worked. I dont want to imagine what could be the situation now if the goverment didnt force que quarantine.

The conclusions.

Conclusions were very interesting. We are living now in a very mild postapocaliptic world. Capitalism is fucked. We are in the late stage, where countries try to steal other countries medical supplies. Unemployement is skyrocketing, tourism is destroyed, and nature is coming back (that is very good).

In Canary islands the approach was to kill the tourism. I don’t know if you realize what does this mean.
These islands live from tourist and bananas. And we dont have a lot of bananas left.

It was a hard approach but it worked very well. 99% of the flights were cancelled. Only some specific planes could leave or enter thre islands. All hotels. ALL OF THEM. Are empty. Beaches are empty. Complete touristic complex as big as cities are empty.

Whales and dolphins are coming to the coast and you can see them a hundred meters away. Pollution went away. A LOT of people with allergies are much better now. Oil prices went completely down. Energy demand and production went down so much that some countries are effectively working on renewables. My garden is full of animals, lizards, kestrels…

Ok, the conclusions. This time for real XD

So back to the conclusions. Margot and me, well, we were not living normal lives one year ago. A lot of misfortunes happened to us, but we were able to transform every single disaster in an opportunity. This was the best training ever. We learnt a lot. We worked hard, on ourselves, on the situation. On our loved ones.

Our way of living didnt change a lot. In fact a lot of people are approaching our way of living, that is more normal every day. I never truly believed in things like pension plans, the goverment system for unemployement, some kind of taxes… Being nomad makes you bulletproof if you do it well. Learning about passive income and active income, having always alternatives, never again putting all the eggs in one basket.

Shibari and Work

So we lost completely the shibari workshops income and possibilities. And I really think this will never go back to what it was. I understand that a lot of people try to stick to what they do but be honest, there is not going back to normality. Everybody is trying to go online, look different alternatives to teaching, fund themselves in different ways. I like it. Two kind of people will keep trying. The ones that really love shibari and the dumb ones that still didnt realize that this opportunity they saw some years ago to do easy money is over. Only the first will be here in some time.

But our shibari workshops were not our main income source. It was not even our second one! 🙂 So not a problem 🙂 We will give all the workshops we programmed when this is over, and we will continue learning and teaching when this shibari thing is not trendy anymore.

What happened with work? Did we lost a lot of income? The opposite. All the adult content is skyrocketing now. We are getting a huge amount of custom requests. People have a lot of free time and if they want some content, they better ask for exactly what they want.

All the editing work in a more professional way is also really good. No expenses, lot of free time to edit, so a LOT of work done. And i still have enough work for the next three months nonstop.

So, what have we done while in quarantine? How did we deal with this? Next post 🙂