It will pass.

It will pass.

It’s called pandemic, it implies the lockdown, to stop the virus. Three terms that, together, no longer cause anxiety. They would if they were new, if they aroused different and stronger emotions upon hearing them. And instead no, they really don’t arouse anything. Indeed, perhaps they create disgust, nausea, headache, exhaustion. Coincidentally, precisely the symptoms of the virus.

This virus is so intrusive that paradoxically it is increasingly rare to hear its name by now. We all know it, there is no need to make the subject explicit anymore. Not even to identify it as You-Know-What, as if it were Lord Voldemort. If we talk about schools, hospitals, nightlife, and much more, there is no other context to which we can refer.

It seems like a conversation that never ends, a back and forth that has been lasting for months. At each blow, the response propagates in the network, and this is a blow for a new response, and the cycle continues.

We are always present, yet so far away. Never like today do I see myself, and the loved ones next to me - because I can only see them - seeking comfort in the news of the world. In the anger generated by others, which becomes one’s own. They look for it on Facebook, on Twitter, in newspapers. Then they solidify it with talk shows, which are now full of journalists and are no longer talk shows, but debates at the intersection of politics, society, philosophy and scientific approximation. Obviously, I look for it too.

Then they bounce between one reality show and another: the real ones, namely Big Brother, Temptation Island and The College, and the fake one, The Decree. How funny reality is now, isn’t it? Added to this are the most interesting matches: forget those of the Champions League or Serie A! Fontana against Ricciardi, Brusaferro against Zingaretti: doctors of politics against politicians of medicine (or is it the opposite? Oh well, you decide, it’s the same).

Between the life outside - which we can only live inside - and the life inside - which we would like to live outside, the paradox is unprecedented. We liked ‘smart worki’ (cit.), but now we are re-evaluating it. Smart working is nice when you can decide where to work from, not when you are forced - we realized this, and we also understood that Zoom fatigue exists.

Our life is always the same: wake up, work or study, chat, lunch, TV series, podcast, work, eat, coffee, book, articles, youtube, Among Us (or Fortnite, or FIFA, or whatever is fashionable at the moment), eat, sleep, start over. Select freely a combination of these, and you will have composed your day.

The pedometer marks 1,746 steps at 20:00. The average of 2019 was 7,500. Obviously: we work a lot, but staying still. And what do you do, don’t you take advantage of this period to make some extra money? Don’t you take advantage of it to find a better working method? To read those articles for which you didn’t have time before? After all, this pandemic will resolve soon, right?

Here, this is us. Maybe everyone has differences based on the job they do, but I can say that this, anyway, is me. I tell myself it’s a passing situation, that it will pass. That I have to make the most of this period, that I won’t have others like this. But I can’t really realize that this is a difficult period for everyone, very much so. I tell myself that I am only 26 years old, and that those older than me have seen worse. Well, maybe not: maybe only those who have seen the world wars have seen worse. But I don’t know, I don’t have the perception of it, so I can’t use this information to my advantage.

I can’t tell myself “Relax. You are, we are all facing a terrible period in which social relationships, pillar of our existence as social animals, are inhibited to face an invisible threat that the whole world thinks to defeat but that still hasn’t even proven to know thoroughly. The road is still long, and the sooner you realize that you can relax and allow yourself some weaknesses, the better.”

Maybe this will never happen. Just as it hasn’t happened and won’t happen to many others like me. We won’t let go, we won’t allow ourselves mistakes, shortcomings. But I wanted to write these lines to fix, not only in memory, the words I thought, because I thought them, but I couldn’t give them weight. I don’t know if it happens often to you too: you know that something is wrong, or must be done in a certain way, but all the same you continue to do as you think. Because you don’t have the perception associated with the mistake, and therefore it doesn’t strike you. It has no effect, like when you use earthquake on a flying type Pokémon: damn, but of course it has no effect, the bird flies! It is not affected by the effects of the earth beneath him..

So, in the same way, I can’t think that, if something goes wrong, in the end we exist in the middle of a pandemic and therefore it’s okay that something might go wrong. Maybe I feel this way because, as a young person without future prospects guaranteed by the rule of law, like one who, for the little he has done, made himself with a thousand obstacles and always against the tide, a pandemic seems just one more obstacle.

And instead it is a damn mountain, which can be climbed only with a pickaxe and a pair of nice hard boots.

The problem is that it can also be a whole planet to cross, but I will always and only see it as a track and field hurdle. I think it’s a problem of my generation.

And so here is the only solution to solve this great dilemma, between climbing the mountain and waiting for the mountain to move or lower, is always the second.

It will pass.

Extra: a clip from a recent South Park episode explains the paradox even better