Since the country loosened its grip, everyone seems to have grown up overnight. People have learned to take care of themselves: not going out, not gathering, sometimes not even going downstairs. The streets, restaurants, and courtyards of residential compounds have all become strangely empty.
Too many people can be irritating; too few can leave a hollow feeling. When there are hardly any people in daily life, even the blogosphere feels quieter than usual, with noticeably fewer updates. Maybe everyone is caught in that same emptiness, not wanting to say anything or do anything. But emptiness can deepen. It can turn from not wanting to do things into being afraid to do them. To avoid sliding abruptly from passive inaction into fear of action, one has to find something transitional to do. The best way to move smoothly between two extremes is to keep doing ordinary things, to keep daily habits intact.
For me, daily life is mostly work, reading blogs, exercising, and reading books. But lately, blogs are either not being updated at all or are filled entirely with COVID. The more I scroll, the emptier I feel; the more I scroll, the more afraid I become of testing positive. Emptiness mixed with anxiety weakens the mind, and then books become difficult too. I have been reading Max Weber’s Economy and Society for nearly two weeks and have not even made it through 300 pages. If this state continues, I may switch to a novel, just to avoid becoming more impatient the more I read.
On Friday I ran 10 kilometers at a pace of 5'44" per kilometer, which is not slow for me. But my heart rate shot up to 164. In the past, at that pace, it should have been around 150. On Sunday I ran another 10 kilometers, this time at 5'57", with a heart rate of 159. It felt harder than it should have. My legs were noticeably weak, and every now and then there was a twitching pain in my lungs when I breathed.
My wife developed a fever on Sunday. Today her antigen test showed two lines. I still do not have any obvious discomfort, but I also feel as if I have a collection of cold-like symptoms: discomfort in the lungs, weakness in the legs, dizziness, and a very slight runny nose. There seem to be many symptoms, yet all of them are vague and half-present, making it impossible to tell whether they are real symptoms or just fear of becoming positive.
We do not have many antigen test kits at home. My son has been coughing for more than a week and tested negative twice. The remaining kits need to be kept for my parents, so I will not test myself for now. I will keep exercising until clear symptoms tell me that I really have turned positive, or until I can no longer work out.
We have gradually stocked up on some medicine. If we get infected, we will treat it like a cold. That is what the experts say anyway. The only real worry is my father, who has had a cerebral infarction before. But apart from frequent disinfection at home and wearing masks indoors, there does not seem to be much else we can do.
I bought an ultraviolet lamp and hypochlorous acid disinfectant on JD.com. A week has passed and they still have not shipped. Clearly JD’s logistics system has also taken a serious hit; otherwise, with JD’s usual speed, it would not be delayed this long.
There have been quite a few obituaries from Tsinghua and Peking University over the past two weeks. Several national-treasure-level experts have passed away.
What we are experiencing now is only the beginning of the post-pandemic era. Perhaps there is plenty of overseas experience to learn from, but the virus keeps changing, and national conditions differ. Other countries’ pasts can be referenced, not replayed. Experts keep making predictions, then keep revising them. This has convinced me that economics is not the only field whose research mainly exists to explain things after the fact.
Some experts say this wave will peak and pass by March next year, and that normal life will return. Another group of experts says the data show the economy is already improving and will recover significantly next year. I hope what they say matches reality, rather than merely becoming another round of revisions.
There is one question worth thinking about: should expert forecasts be pessimistic and conservative, or optimistic and aggressive?
A pessimistic forecast can create widespread public sorrow, which affects the release of positive potential. An optimistic forecast can make aggressive people even more aggressive, leaving them badly hurt when the gap between reality and prediction becomes too large. Judging from historical experience, expert forecasts are generally inclined toward optimism. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the forecasts that become mainstream are usually optimistic ones.
Which kind of prediction makes you feel less secure: a pessimistic one, or an optimistic one? In fact, your temperament is usually the opposite of the kind of forecast that unsettles you. If you are a pessimistic person, then overly optimistic predictions will make you uneasy.
The experts say everything will be fine.