This has been an especially rough year for covid cases. Maybe it is because more people are letting their guard down, but many people I know who are cautious have gotten sick recently. I have many friends who are much older than I am. I actually have very few friends my own age; while I am a Gen Xer, my friends tend to either be in the Silent Generation, are Boomers, and some are Millenials. This is something that is recommended, but the downfall of having so many friends who are so much older is that you see many of your friends die.
I have lost many people to covid, but the vaccines and Paxlovid are helping. That isn’t to say that my friends are having an easy go. Since Pfizer has more than doubled the cost of Paxlovid and it is no longer subsidized by the U.S. government, many pharmacies simply have not ordered enough to keep up with demand. One of my septuagenarian friends just contracted covid, likely from going to the YMCA (hadn’t really gone anywhere else), and then spread it to his wife. He was able to get on Paxlovid, but his wife was not. Both have Medicare, so both would be eligible to have the costs covered at least until the end of 2024. If Will or I contract covid, we will be able to get Paxlovid sent to us overnight free of charge because I signed us up for Test to Treat through the National Institutes of Health. My main reason was to get home tests for influenza in addition to those for covid, but now I am so glad I did this and am urging others to do this also.
If my friend hadn’t already started his Paxlovid, he might have given it to his wife. I am friends with another couple, they are in their 60s, and when their entire family contracted covid in December, they were all able to get prescriptions for Paxlovid. The husband is very healthy, but his wife is on immunosuppressive drugs to treat psoriasis, so he opted to set aside his Paxlovid for her in case she catches covid again. This is the kind of sacrifice, a profound act of love, that defines romance for me. I sincerely believe that love does not exist without sacrifice. Not all sacrifice requires physical suffering. Sometimes it is moving across the country, leaving the life you knew to be with that one special person. Sometimes it is cooking a meal, even if it is made up of foods you are not able to eat, for someone else. Sacrifice can be big or small, but each personal sacrifice is an expression of love and gratitude.
So many news stories I have read this past year make me think that we, as a species, have reached peak schadenfreude. When you are deprived of many experiences due to disability or lack of finances, it is easy to delight in the misfortune of stranded Burning Man attendees or, more despicably, the deaths of deep sea voyagers. It is easy, which should be a tip-off that it is far from virtuous. Arthur C. Brooks, in a feature in The Atlantic titled 31 Days to a Better You, talks about envy as a happiness killer. There has never been a truer statement.
When I still had accounts on several social media sites, I wound up unfollowing, even unfriending, people whose feeds were filled with nothing but happy vacation photos. Now there is a lot of research pointing to the idea that people are seldom as happy as they appear to be on their social media feeds, but that didn’t matter to me. What hurt was the reminder that I would not have these same opportunities to travel. Not only because of the money, but now because of the barriers posed by my disability.
I try to remind myself of what a friend of mine in grad school said to me: “You may not have travelled overseas like many of the rest of us, but you are actually the most worldly.” While I have not travelled to so many places, I have had many enriching experiences and have gotten to know and befriend people from all over the world. The internet makes a lot of good things possible. Why waste time on envy scrolling?
I plan on launching a publication called Homebound Experiencer, and the first thing I am exploring is Cyberdelics. I want to hear from others about their experiences and find out if there are things about certain experiences (such as flashing lights) that should be avoided by some.
This publication will essentially function as a travel magazine for those who cannot easily travel, and for those who want to have new experiences in a more eco-friendly way. For example, I just ordered some authentic Parmagiano Reggiano from Italy, and it’s flight to the U.S. is far less carbon intensive than what my flight to Italy would be. The epicurean experiences of travel can be emulated with more ease than ever before. I’ve been able to sample the juice of the cashew apple, and take part in some flavor tripping with the use of dried miracle fruit. One can even engage in some epicurean time travel, discovering recipes and even novelty confections from a bygone era.
While I experienced the places I have visited by walking the streets, hiking through forests, and swimming or wading in bodies of water, I also would make a point of meeting the people, sampling the foods and absorbing the culture. Those are all things that can be done from home with the help of the internet. So many people travel to all-inclusive resorts where they experience nothing authentic. It is ironic to think that a person can have more authentic experiences via virtual reality, but I believe that it is possible.
I am grateful for the friendships I have forged via Second Life. It is where I met my best friend, the man I live with. I am grateful for the unique experiences I have had, but also joyful for missing out on many of the more annoying facets of travel (such as long waits in airport terminals). Some are even saying JOMO is the new FOMO. Either way, joy is something we experience in the moment. It is not something people experience in posed photographs.
I look forward to having many more experiences as well as helping others find enriching experiences. Please feel free to share your Cyberdelic experiences in the comments. They may appear in the first edition of Homebound Experiencer.
I think you're so right about what real love is. The media always portrays it as having something to do with desire or possession. I read in Tara Brach's book Radical Acceptance that love is about paying close attention, and in my mind, I added, "and love is about service." Maybe it makes sense to just say it's about giving, and I would even say it's about the desire to give.
I never could wrap my head around the idea of being jealous of people on social media. For some reason, it just doesn't compute for me. It makes me happy to see people happy, whether it's with their kids or pets or on vacation.
Whether they're doing something has no impact on whether I can or can't do the same thing, so the connection just isn't there for me. For the past several years, I haven't been able to do much traveling because of Zophia being ill, then Basil being ill, then Dylan being ill. We always had a cat that needed daily care. I was upset about the lack of travel, but it never bothered me to see anyone else travel.
One time out of the blue, my therapist asked, "You don't do much comparison, do you?" I hadn't really thought about it much before then, but I guess I don't. I've seen myself as too much of an outsider for too long to compare myself to other people. Growing up, no one cared what I did. It never mattered how good I was at something or how smart I was. I was always still the lowest on the totem pole--the weird kid with no friends and last to be picked for anything. If life is a competition, I lost a long time ago.
Sometimes, I get the feeling from some people, especially old friends, not you, but other people, that they begrudge me whatever happiness I manage to scrape out of this world. It boggles my mind.
I guess they don't know about the reason I've moved around so much; I was forced out of my childhood home because we were about to be put on the streets of LA. We were sent to strangers in Wisconsin because we had no other family. By the time I was in high school, I no longer had ties to Wisconsin because my extended family had blown apart from various tragedies (dead grandmother, dead aunt, and dead uncle, another uncle in prison, and my closest cousin gone, all within a few years).
My dad was a drug addict. My mom was schizophrenic. And, people ask me, "Where did you get the courage to move around so much?" I got it because it would've taken more courage to stay. I move around to various places because I haven't had a home since the morning when was 11 years old, and my dad shook me awake, and said, "Pack. You're going to Wisconsin."
So, maybe that's why I don't bother with comparisons. It's not a personal choice, so I guess it's not a personal choice for anyone else, either. We feel what we feel. We're better off acknowledging our feelings than ignoring them, but I think that comparison kills kindness. It turns life into a competition and makes us forget that everyone struggles.
However, when my therapist asked me about comparison that day, I did say, "I'm only ever jealous of things related to writing and publishing. The times I do experience jealousy, I just recognize that I'm envious, and I kind of enjoy it. I find it to be a positive experience because envy shows us what we really want. It shows us our own priorities."
Envy led you to start a new project that will probably have a really positive impact on people's lives and the environment. So, in the end, all those travel pictures that made you jealous were a good thing, and the envy you experienced was a good thing. I wish you the best of luck with it. If you ever need any help, like if you want help creating a website or something, I'm happy to do it.