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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

I'm a physically and socially isolated introvert in a rural county and have been working from home for a decade. About the only difference for me was the occasional need to put on a mask before walking in a store. My greatest inconvenience was very minor: I was turned away from a convenience store for not having a mask with me.

Early in the lockdowns I made a trip to the closest big city for a dentist appointment and I was amazed by the transformation, the closed businesses, the long lines, the obvious ubiquitous fear. Several family members struggled after losing jobs. It's quite clear how this disaster has seriously affected so many other people.

So while I don't count myself as a winner in this, it does seem to be a substantial win to not be one of the losers.

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Same here. I live in a quiet house far away from everything in the middle of the Swiss Alps. I get the majority of my food from small farmer stalls around me. The most of other things I just order online. Except my partner the only real contact I have right now is my family I see maybe once a month. However they visit me as I don't really want drive down to a busy town. I have no work related contacts either as I life from my own projects.

Even when my partner is away for a few weeks I don't feel alone. I've spent months alone in Asia without feeling alone.

I feel really lucky today for being in this situation. Some people turned their life upside down and I just got more of the life that I always wanted.

Edit:// I forgot to mention that I indeed have friends and also did all the social things regularly 2 years ago. My point is that I often felt like I have to attend these social things and I actually don't miss them. Still chatting online from time to time.

What kinds of projects afford you this, I'm curious?

Different things. I've had AdSense heavy site and sold that years ago, then built a SaaS and sold that. I do some e-commerce stuff, I have dozens of websites with different kind of affiliate, working on a SaaS right now and I too had some luck with crypto this year.

Basically years of building more or less successful side projects.

But to be fair no 2 years ago I was delivering paper ads for a few months, because a bunch of random projects surely aren't a sustainable income , always :)

Edit:// also it is actually cheaper living as I do than it was living down in the city. My house is old, we heat with wood only. Farming markets here are generally cheaper than supermarkets for quality meat and Vegs. The $500 overhead we pay for our car leasing we would not need otherwise is way less than what we save per square meter living so remote. And we need some extra space for the mentioned e-commerce

So while I don't count myself as a winner in this, it does seem to be a substantial win to not be one of the

Same. I was extremely fortunate that this disaster and my work, family, and financial setup meant things had little impact on me. It hit my kids harder socially, but educationally they ended up much better because they had a highly educated retired family member as a neighbor. They did and did their remote schooling there, with help available at all times to extent far beyond what 1 teacher with 25 kids can do in a classroom.

That was extremely fortunate, especially seeing other kids in the school whose families basically had no choice but to lose a year of school-- but the way things are functioning, they're still moving up a grade and schools all over the country are going to be having problems with a significant % of students who not only didn't learn anything, but are 1.5 years away from the last time they were even in the habit of having to learn.

"Not a loser" is indeed winning in this case.

In the California lockdown, we weren’t allowed to visit with neighbors (we’re in a 34 floor apartment, and we weren’t even supposed to ride the elevator with other households). It sounds like your region may have had a softer lockdown since they allowed people to visit.

For an elevator and considering the magnitude of the CA outbreak, I kind of understand the elevator restrictions.

But for neighbors etc that were in the same social bubble observing the same careful restrictions it seems too much. I think the government has been well within its rights in certain mandates that ensure careless people don't inflict their negligence on other people, but in some cases I think it went too far.

On the other hand, especially at the beginning, everyone was dealing with incomplete and imperfect information. It was not an easy time to be a decision maker on such issues especially when people's actions became expressions of political affiliation. Masks are a perfect example:

Resistance started as a rallying cry to allow people take personal responsibility, a mindset I can understand. But it then morphed into a refusal to take some precautions-- essentially a refusal to consider personal responsibility issue-- due to the politics involved instead of a reasoned & informed stance on the risks. (PLEASE note that I'm not making a statement about masks themselves one way or another-- just pointing out that choices influencing medical issues became driven by political affiliation. I saw extremes of this behavior on different ends of the political spectrum, substituting critical thinking with selectively listening only to experts that were aligned with a given political stance.)

It seems like you "won" because you kept your job, living in a rural area and being introverted was just a side bonus.

Yeah it also seems like he didn't give in to the fear and went about his life as best as he could. He went to the dentist early in lockdowns. My social circle would've cast you out for that and it is for sure a smaller circle than it was in March 2020 because of media provided moral imperatives that if you didn't follow week to week, you were no better than a Republican

Actually, it eventually made me Republican.

Really it was a lose-lose situation. Ignore it and you stack bodies in a freezer truck like in NYC. Lock down and a lot of your businesses no longer exist. Hopefully we're done with it for the next 100 years.

The next “thing” will happen in 20 years. 9/11 -> Covid -> (whatever 2040 cooks up for us to make sure the next generation lives in fear)

OPs right,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics#Chronology

> wtf is with downvotes of this comment?

It clearly has nothing to do with epidemics, so what's your link supposed to prove?

> Really it was a lose-lose situation. Ignore it and you stack bodies in a freezer truck like in NYC.

I can't tell whether this is sarcasm, but in the unlikely event that it's not, how do you explain every place that didn't lockdown having dramatically better numbers than NYC?

Surely there's no remaining possibility of regarding lockdowns as a success?

What data can possibly conclude this experiment if not the data which already exists?

Overuse of ventilators in the first wave probably killed a ton more people than expected. Once they dialed back ventilator use and established cortison treatments and normal oxygen instead death rates lowered.

How did ventilators kill people?

Ventilators:

- are intended for use for a few days, not a few weeks. The artificial air pressure destroys lung cells and capillaries

- patients are sedated to avoid pulling out tubes. This weakens both their lung function and the rest of their body due to immobilization, including bed sores. Usually their trachea is damaged and they cannot talk after removing the tubes for a period of time, and must do physical rehabilitation afterwards.

- doctors and nurses consider patients on ventilators the sickest in the hospital, followed by recent ventilator patients

- being in a hospital for a month or more exposes patients to other infections, which are not immediately apparent in a sedated patient

- China warned about ventilator use being usually unproductive with corona very early in 2020, so it took a while for US doctors to understand that the low oxygen levels measured in corona patients was not a critical thing in most cases if they could still breathe on their own.

ER doctors are not researchers, so they follow previous recommendations until told otherwise.

Google scholar is probably a better resource to answer this question (and the "how" is still in the early stages of being understood).

Some doctors claim that during the first wave ventilators were used too much and too early (instead of just breathing masks). Ventilator can actually damage your lungs. At the same time, cortison treatments were banned, another decision several doctors criticised (including a relative of mine). During the next waves cortison treatments and a reduced use of ventilators decreased the mortality rate a lot.

Doctors didn't dare to go against the guidelines, even with their reservation (they could be held responsible if they did).

Some people I know wrote a book on the subject and are claiming we should held governments accountable for those dead in the first wave (and they've been promptly censored and facebook-banned out of existence). I tend to err on the side of incompetence more than malice.

That said, there is plenty of ignorant people claiming ventilators kill based on statistics - but it's usually the other way round: once you need a ventilator you're either dead 100% or you can get a 40% survival rate with a ventilator.

This summarizes my situation, with one exception: the occasional trips (~twice a month) to work from the local coffeeshop, and/or ~twice a year trips to company retreats, helped varying the scenery and avoiding feeling burned out. Now I don't have that escape valve anymore and so, despite being remote for 10+ years, I'm dreading it.

> So while I don't count myself as a winner in this, it does seem to be a substantial win to not be one of the losers.

Same. My wife and I actually do live in one of the big cities hit hard by the pandemic (NYC), but ended up having some of the initial restrictions work to my advantage. For instance, having a limited selection of restaurants (order-in only) led to us cooking more and calorie counting again, and we've lost 30 pounds each. We also bought an apartment once the initial hard restrictions were lifted last summer, and I suspect the extreme lack of buyers made us look a lot more attractive to sellers than we would have in 2019 (NYC co-ops are infamous for requiring 2 years of mortgage+maintenance fees in liquid which we certainly didn't have after shelling out a 20% down payment). My wife spent the entire year looking for a job after being laid off in January and COVID made that significantly harder, but I think it did help her finally find a fully remote company a year later - her new employer embraced remote work in COVID by allowing employees to move away from their CA and NY office, now she's helping them expand hiring across the entire US and Canada (she's in HR and they don't use a PEO for payroll, its a surprisingly non-trivial effort). We both prefer working remotely so this was important for us.

Overall I feel good how things ended up for us but considering how terrible its been for huge portions of the world its feels uncomfortable to call it "winning lockdown".

Ultimately I have to count myself a winner. I’m fairly young and with no family (and too nomadic to have deep friend groups in one place), I was able to move out of my house share and back to my parents to work remotely. I got a dedicated home office, free accommodation, and people who didn’t drive me insane. The upshot was a saved tonnes, so when I moved to London in January everything went smoothly.

I'd like to hear more about your life experience - how much human contact do you have on a weekly basis?

Does the internet count?

Not the poster but I could easily go a few years without human contact. It's just not important to me.

I have daily human contact online at work. I've never met one of my coworkers in the flesh. In meatspace, I drive into a tiny village once a week to get mail at the post office, usually talking to nobody. Every other week I go to a more distant small town and hit the grocery and hardware store, and pass a few words with a clerk or three. It isn't unusual for a month to go by without speaking in the flesh with anyone that I'm not buying something from. I've had years go by without a non-commercial visitor to my home. I built a desk a couple of years ago and I'm still waiting to show it off to somebody.

It isn't a good way to live. But for some weird reason it isn't very lonely ... until I'm around people. Then the loneliness becomes unbearable and I retreat.

> Then the loneliness becomes unbearable and I retreat.

I don't understand how this goes. Could you describe your experience with more details ?

> I built a desk a couple of years ago and I'm still waiting to show it off to somebody.

Well, you could paste a picture here :).

when you are alone, you are alone, but when you are among people that you don't know how to interact with, or don't want to interact with because you don't feel you have anything in common with them, then you feel lonely.

Yes, thank you.

So much this. I never feel as lonely as I do in a packed city visiting for work.

> Well, you could paste a picture here :).

That does sound like a pretty nice thing to say! That said, i can't exactly recall seeing many "Show HN" posts about making furniture, though awesome stuff like that does occasionally appear in the comments.

I do feel like reaching out to some of the online communities for those particular interest groups could be pretty beneficial, though! For example:

  https://www.reddit.com/r/Carpentry/
  https://www.reddit.com/r/woodworking/
  https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/

(just using Reddit here as an example, because it's one of the better known sites)

Just posting the picture right here, in this comment thread, although completely off-topic, will probably be accepted positively (net karma gain). HN folk seem to like personal tidbits, stories, and cool stuff made self.

I find there is something enormously satisfying and intrinsically rewarding about working with one's hands, doing woodworking and the like. It's especially so when one has everything to hand and one can work on without distracting interruptions (such as having just remembered that you lent your No 5 jack plane to a friend and you now need it to continue). :-)

I've found that working this way and being able to see the product of one's labors slowly forming and taking shape often brings rewards in and of itself that I seldom experience in my technical work. It's difficult for me to put into words but there's something inherent in the nature of the process and to the flow of this way of working that provides fulfillment and that one rarely seems to tire of doing it. I know a few technical/professional people who are disparaging of such pursuits and view such work as just an unskilled or menial activity—or that it's tedious and boring.

I feel sorry for them in that they've not grasped the idea or notion of doing creative work with one's hands is not the slightest bit in conflict with their professional work and in fact that both activities usually complement one another.

It also makes considerable sense to me that introverts would seek solace and comfort in such activities for the very reasons I've given.

Ohh, i largely agree with what you're saying! The results of woodworking, metalworking, any sorts of crafts or even farming are just way more fungible than a piece of software. Both can be useful to yourself and possibly society at large, both can be satisfying, but the types of satisfaction definitely differ!

Plus, it's a way to get some fresh air or have a reason to spend a bit more time outside, in addition to leisurely activities such as boating or hiking. I don't actually have any stats on this, but it seems like quite a few people who work in software also have such pursuits outside of work, some joke about retiring to a farm or a secluded place amidst nature. :)

When i have the time, i rather enjoy jogging, helping my parents with their greenhouse or vegetable garden, mowing the fieds with a tractor or even just doing some woodworking. That said, most of it is rather utilitarian and not all that pretty to look at.

Right. Utilitarian or not, it's the process that counts.

> It isn't a good way to live.

Why do you choose to live like this. I am asking because wht you are describing here stuff of my dreams. I even bought a piece of land in rural colorado during the pandemic that I plan to start building in september.

Yea, I was going to say, OP's living situation sounds like a paradise to me. Also saving up for the big piece of rural land in the middle of nowhere. It sure beats commuting hours from a cramped home or apartment stacked up in a city with thousands of others, to a cramped office building where you sit literally shoulder to shoulder with hundreds of others and try to do work all day.

Sounds like a case of “the grass is always greener”.

There are things that only start to affect you after extended time in a lifestyle.

Maybe it would actually be great for you, but it could also be that the downsides only become apparent after a year or two, at which point it can be hard to find a way to get to a good place.

EDIT: Current situation doesn’t sound healthy, though. The sweet spot is probably somewhere between the two extremes.

Exactly. I read so many posts on HN about living alone in the middle of nowhere being better than driving 2 hours each way in terrible traffic to sit shoulder to shoulder in an open plan office. There are lots of downsides to living in the middle of nowhere, healthcare, access to other resources, etc.

Don't get me wrong, I've fallen into that trap of thinking.

My wife and I bought a small RV trailer that we tow to these kinds of "middle of nowhere places", we stay for a few weeks, or long enough to make us want to come back.

My point - so.many of these comments I read on HN focus on putting all eggs in one basket. Why does it have to be bumper to bumper traffic and open plan offices vs. Hermet life in the woods?

The reality is if one finds a good job I a semi-major urban center that often allows them to live both lives. Take a month or two off int he summer, live and work remotely in the boonies, then go back to "normal life". If you live full time in the boonies and align with that lifestyle that's all you get, it's hard to then go live for a few months in the city without blowing the budget.

Variety is the spice of life?

> Exactly. I read so many posts on HN about living alone in the middle of nowhere being better than driving 2 hours each way in terrible traffic to sit shoulder to shoulder in an open plan office. There are lots of downsides to living in the middle of nowhere, healthcare, access to other resources, etc.

If those are the baseline options, then it's really easy to have the best of both: Have a nice comfy property 100 miles from a city, then make visits to the city outside of rush hour so it takes less than 2 hours.

(Though honestly 20 miles can usually get you quite rural.)

Variety is the opposite of what I want. Putting all eggs in one basket is exactly what makes me excited.

I’m generally this way too. Life is beautiful in simple solitude. Other people bring with them all manner of drama and complications, which all see completely pointless to me. I like being around people when they aren’t balls of anger, stress, drama. But those people are extremely rare and they tend to also isolate.

I'm not sure personal contact is that important. Imagine this page as a giant table, and when one speaks, the rest listen. Reading through all these comments feels like being in a room where conversation takes place. For older people who do not use internet, TV or Radio plays that role. Moreover, one soaks atmosphere of given community (even online), and adjusts behaviours, thoughts accordingly, to some point at least I think.

Not the one you replied to, and I live in the city. But my only normal IRL contact is my wife, and the cashiers at the supermarket. I have more contact with people online anyway.

On a year-to-year basis, there is usually one metal festival 2-3 concerts, 2-3 visits to the parents and every few months meeting with friends, those were pretty much the only things I lost during the pandemic.

I generally count myself as a winner of the pandemic, my job was not affected, private life barely, and I only know one person who got Covid (an American who studied in Germany a few years ago, he’s young and got over it with no lasting effects).

How does dating work when you are so strongly introverted?

I met her online.

And it’s only a recent development. The older I get, the less extroverted I am. When I was in school and early in university, I tended to stay out till noon the next day. Then it changed to 5 in the morning. And nowadays, I go to bed at a time I used to start thinking about going out ;)

I'm in the same boat - introverted and living in the country. I have tons of human contact because I have a family with whom I live. I spend most of my non-work time with them. I go out to stores, I go to church, I even see friends and extended family on occasion.

Frankly, I have very little difference in the amount of human contact I have now vs. what I did when I lived in a city before the pandemic.

Where you live can certainly influence how much contact there is in your life, but you can be surrounded by people in the country just as easily as you can be a hermit holed up in your apartment in the city.

I had a similar experience but I was still bothered by the government restrictions.

I was working remote before covid so daily life didn't change much.

But they also closed my gym, my kids' school, cafes and restaurant I used for fun and prevented me from travelling.

Sure, I'm lucky my job is safe, albeit I'm not as lucky as those who were furlough in the UK and got 80-90% of their paycheck without having to work for months. Incidentally, I'll have to pay for this massive spend with an upcoming massive increase in taxes and delays to when I'll be able to withdraw my private pension.

Overall, not having childcare available and no fun didn't make me very happy and caused to lapse again into depression.

I stopped training for 6 months (Even though I bought a home gym), got fat, miserable and angry, had problems sleeping and burn out at work.

And I still count myself to be one of the lucky ones.

Indeed, I was trying some avenues to be less introverted. Those shut down. I became worse off, but it really is a matter of what we consider the baseline

What were the long lines for?

Occupancy of things like grocery stores was limited, but people still needed to go to them. Many had long lines out the door. (Reference point: suburb of Boston)

Ours were the opposite. Stores emptied out and we could shop comfortably.

Ah, that's right... Per another comment I made, I was in the very fortunate position of being able to pay a premium for delivery. So I didn't see the grocery store situation, though I know they set up special times for seniors to come and shop. I also very much appreciated the fact that the people delivering groceries didn't have the luxury of working from home and tried to calculate tips that were high enough that even if they had a few inconsiderate people who didn't tip that mine made up for some of it. (And also account for people who needed to stay safe and have groceries delivered but couldn't afford to be as generous)

It's interesting how all of this highlighted social divisions, even subtle ones that weren't much of an issue before, like well paid doctors and nurses and other medical staff that couldn't work from home, and had to take risks with their & their family's safety:

I know someone whose spouse is an EMT, and they basically has to quarantine him in the house to stay safe because they worked in an extreme outbreak hotspot. Even then, the EMT brought home COVID and the other spouse ended up in the hospital, all just before the vaccine became available. That person still hasn't fully recovered, even though they're otherwise a perfectly health non-risk-group person, still weakened enough that even a partial return to working in person is at least a few weeks away.

There's going to be research for decades just on all of the social impacts this has had on society.

The closest comparison I can think off-- though not perfect-- are the social and workforce changes that occured I'm the wake of WWII... Not to mention the failed attempt afterwards to put the genie back in the bottle of women in the workplace.

Strange, interesting, horrific times we're in.

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