Here’s To The Ones Who Dream… Of A Better Year Ahead

January 7, 2022

If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the last two years, it’s that we all need a coping mechanism in times of stress and uncertainty.  Some of these methods are more healthy than others.  Fortunately, mine have focused on exercise, talking (venting?) with family and friends, music, movies and golf (even at this time of year – yes, I did celebrate the new year with a round of golf.  I am lucky to have two friends as crazy / dedicated as me to play on a raw, rainy day in January). So, as I wound my way through the holiday week with the never-ending news and social media cycles of the impending apocalypse de jour, I decided I was going to start my new year with an old comfort movie (one that I wrote about in my first comfort movie post almost a year ago here).  It was nice to greet 2022 with this brilliant musical number from one of my favorite movies, La La Land.  Are you kidding me with this choreography and direction from Damien Chazelle?  No wonder he won the Oscar for Best Director.  I can’t wait for his new movie later this year – Babylon, a tale of 1920s Hollywood with Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt. 

I think these stressful times have me yearning for musicals – we watched Hamilton again on New Year’s Eve and I can neither confirm nor deny that I saw a recently released musical for the second time in the theater (spoiler – it’s phenomenal, but more on that in the next few weeks).  While I started the year off right with La La Land, the next day I watched There Will Be Blood.  Insert joke about that film being a documentary about the end times we seem to be living through every day.  No, that one was about a sadistic oilman in the early 1900s and was to prepare for next week’s post.  Considering it’s probably the best movie of the last twenty years, I’m not going to let it temper my mood from La La Land.  And don’t worry, this isn’t the 5,000 word post about my love for that movie.  I’ll save that one for when I really run out of ideas.

I’ve Seen This Film Before

I am more convinced than ever that in ten years, when we look back at this era in our lives, the years 2020, 2021, and 2022 are all going to be jumbled together in our minds.  You’ll be having a conversation with someone, recalling something that happened and not quite remember what year it was.  Was that 2020 or 2021?  Did that happen early on?  In the middle?  At the end?  When was the middle?  Which middle?  Was that the first ending?  Or the second ending?  Oh, shit, I don’t remember – I just know it was after 2019 and before “now”, whenever now is.

Because, let’s face it.  The last month or two has felt very dicey.  You can hold your breath for a little while, but not very long, especially when it feels like we’ve been holding our breath for two years.  Despite the sigh of relief we felt in the Summer of 2020 when we could safely be outside with friends and family, the euphoria of the promise of effective (but not perfect – we all knew they weren’t perfect, even if a swath of people chose not to pay attention to details) vaccines in late 2020, and the pure joy of being fully vaccinated and starting to feel like normal again, we’ve gotten a cruel reminder the last few weeks that this freaking virus ain’t done with us yet.  Thanksgiving felt great.  Christmas felt….awkward and strange again.

Yes, it was nice to see everyone again, and spend time with family, but it didn’t quite feel the same as the “before times.”  Everyone is on guard again, hoping that we can get through this next wave (closer to a two foot low-rising wave than another full-on tsunami) relatively unscathed.  But it’s creating added stress again to the same people who have been dealing with this bullshit for two years (plus).  First and foremost, doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, police officers, firefighters, and anyone in healthcare who can’t just “work from home.”  Teachers, students, people who have to risk their safety to go work every day to put food on the table and pay their rent.  It downright sucks that there is still the stress of having this nagging feeling hanging over your head that it’s only a matter of time before you (or someone you care about) gets sick.  Hopefully, if they do, it’s mild (no worse than a bad cold or flu) and they recover quickly, because they have been vaccinated.  Of course, over a year ago, those words would have been considered blasphemy.  Isn’t it funny how things change?  And that’s a good thing – opinions and recommendations change as information evolves.  It’s not complicated – it’s science.  OK, maybe it is complicated.

As I made my own personal changes over the last year, I’ve been constantly thinking about the risk calculus.  Where was I going?  Who would I be with?  Is it a masked environment?  Are there vaccination checks at the door?  Where am I in my vaccination cycle?  How are things in the community I will be in?  The answers to all of those questions were sometimes harder to answer in certain situations, than others, especially when you don’t have hard data (which sucks when you are a numbers guy who likes black and white answers).  But I found my way to safely enjoy live music, gatherings with friends and family, small vacations, and plenty of movies.  But it certainly wasn’t easy, because every day we want to check the pulse of how we’re feeling, and when you are whipsawed back and forth between the extremes of “We’re all gonna die!” and “What’s the big deal?”, it’s rather stressful. 

Where To Turn?

I’ve been relying on doctors and scientists that I follow on social media and podcasts, trying to make informed decisions as best that I can.  I recognize that information changes month to month, which is why when I heard a doctor say last Summer that with full vaccination, your risk was comparable with getting the flu, I felt more comfortable than I did six months earlier.  But things change week to week and it’s hard to keep up with the changing landscape, and more importantly, know what to believe.  I certainly don’t listen to mainstream media reports, which cannot accurately communicate messages in 30 second soundbites, and are more interested in clicks and ratings than providing key health care information.  And I certainly don’t listen to the extreme ends (on both sides) of the media that even approach anything political.  It’s like a third rail that I will steer away from anytime I sense it’s going down that route.

The troubling part the last six months especially has been a floundering effort from the Federal government on data, reporting, messaging and supplies.  Don’t get me wrong – it’s a hell of a lot better than two years ago when we had a clown in chief who placed the interest of the country’s health one hundred spots below the importance of a re-election campaign.  But, when people don’t have access to rapid tests at their house before the holidays and they are waiting for hours in line to get tested, and we have made zero improvement on this issue in two years, yeah, that’s frustrating. 

The data reporting has also been frustrating.  At the beginning of the pandemic, case counts were the hot statistic, because it was readily available and at least gave people a sense of how things were going (low, medium, high, raging fire).  But with inconsistency in testing processes, any good actuary will tell you that the sample sizes could skew results.  So, the positive testing percentage became a good statistic, and immediately shut down certain government leaders who suggested that if we tested less, we’d have fewer cases.  And that was pretty good for a while.  But now that we have so many (but not enough) people vaccinated, even those stats might become less important.  If you can still test positive, but have a mild reaction because you’re vaccinated, then maybe it’s not that big of a deal.  Insert my weekly reminder that I am not a scientist, doctor, epidemiologist, or anything more than a number cruncher who likes to write.  What about hospitalizations?  Ok, that’s a good stat.  Holy shit, look at all those hospitalizations, especially in kids.  Wait, now you’re telling me that a lot (some? most?) of those kids were hospitalized for something other than COVID, but happen to test positive for it?

As a Finance guy, we used to always start with data.  Good data.  Solid data.  If it wasn’t perfect, that’s ok.  But give me something that’s reasonably close to perfect.  Give me a rubric for understanding the data, to help me make informed decisions.  Then, when I’d present that data to people, I’d walk them through it, focusing on the three key questions a former CEO used to tell us to remember.  What?  So what?  Now what?   It’s pretty simple – what did you learn, what does it mean, and what are we going to do about it?  This is the kind of messaging we need, in a standard communication every day from our government officials – not filtered through interpretations by millions of wannabe scientists and meme makers on social media and the internet.  And not filtered through the media corporations that are more focused on advertising dollars rather than public health.  And when recommendations come out, they need to be standardized with not just the “what”, but the “why.”  People will feel more empowered to follow guidance if they understand the rationale behind a decision.  And if a government leader changes their mind on a talk show a few days later, that certainly doesn’t help.  Because the most uncomfortable feeling when trying to make a decision is flying blind because you have little (or bad) data.  And it sure feels that way, especially the last few weeks.

OK, I might need another coping mechanism.

Art Imitates Life Imitates Art Imitates Life….

It was cute at first.  Hey, isn’t that funny?  They’re doing a TV show on Zoom.  They’re just like us.  They also had internet problems, just like I did during my meeting today.  Look, they have to wear masks in public too.  Yeah, that novelty lasted about 15 minutes.

As we made our way through 2020 and 2021, one thing I quickly realized was that I wanted no reminder of the pandemic in my entertainment.  It was bad enough dealing with it in our day to day lives (and my experience pales in comparison to those who have it way worse than my family and me), I didn’t want it on my TV.  For certain programming I cared about, I tolerated it, but some choices made by those in the creative arts were not ones that I cared for.  Anytime I had to watch characters interact on Zoom, I was checking out.  Some movies even had their entire plot revolve around people in lockdown.  No, I just didn’t need to watch that.  I had plenty of old programming I could go back and watch or rewatch for comfort.  In fact, I have been more impressed with movies I’ve seen that were made during the pandemic, marveling at how they were able to create something that doesn’t look like it was forced to be made with a limited cast outdoors, spaced apart.  We were watching Shark Tank the other night and my wife said, “Oh, this must be a newer one, right?”  That’s because all of the sharks were sitting far apart from each other and there were no hugs with the business owners after a deal got made.  Yes, we’re now through the looking glass of “Before” and “After” the pandemic.

Usually, I am not one to watch anything that hits too close to home, especially for emotional topics.  There are still a few critically-acclaimed 9/11 movies that I can’t bring myself to watch, because I think it will be just too difficult.  So, consider me very skeptical when I heard about a new HBO show that was set in the time after a worldwide flu pandemic wiped out 99% of the population.  Station Eleven is a limited series, based on a 2014 novel, that will be wrapping up its impressive ten episode run next week.  There are two facts that make this not feel like a show about the pandemic we’re living through right now.  The first is that it is based on a pre-existing novel and that it began production before the events of 2020 turned our world upside down.  The second is that this is not focused on millions of bodies and the gory outcome in which the characters find themselves. 

While the first episode is a little challenging (and maybe traumatizing for some), the series itself is more focused on the emotional impacts of this world’s pandemic, and bounces back and forth between the immediate weeks after the pandemic started, and twenty years later.  The future timeline focuses on a group of traveling theater nomads who perform Shakespeare plays around areas of Michigan, and interact with a cult, led by a mysterious “prophet.”  The series deals with themes of grief and loss, friendship and family (especially ones formed unnaturally due to the characters’ circumstances), and how the world changed in the twenty years since the pandemic.  There are elements that reminded me a lot of Lost and The Leftovers, a wonderful (but underrated and under watched) HBO series from a few years ago.  If Station Eleven isn’t your thing, I’ll be shifting gears back to my usual topic next week, so hopefully you can find some recommendations there.

Moving Forward

So, we’re entered this bizarre time period where we might need to hold our breath a little longer, get through another “hunker down” phase, and hope that this next wave subsides quickly, with little impact.  And then what?  Your guess is as good as mine.  I’m hoping we can get through to a Spring and Summer that are even better than 2021, which was better than 2020.  Continual progress.  That’s all you can ask for and hope for at the start of every year, right?  My mind has wandered into the territory of “What is next Winter going to be like?” but I’m shutting that down for now.  One step at a time.  One day at a time.  One coping mechanism at a time.  Back to my favorite music playlists and movie watchlist.  What’s next?

Thanks for reading this week’s rantings.  See you next week.