UNITED STATES—It feels like 2020 has put us on the technology burnout. So many of us have resorted to working from home, using your cellphones to communicate, zoom meetings, tablets and TV to stay entertained for a lot longer than I ever imagined. I feel like I have been burned out from watching so much TV, but the problem is there hasn’t been anything on TV this year. So many of our favs especially as summer ushered in, were not able to film new episodes, so we’ve been watching repeats of some of our favorite series.
The problem is after a long day of work all I want to do is to watch a TV program for an hour or two, but my body is telling me: “Get up, get off that couch do something.” I think that is the mental state of 2020, so many of us have thrown in the towel on this dreadful year that has tested us in ways that we have never been tested before.
I love a good TV show and if it’s really good I can binge watch, but I think that has happened only 2-3 times in my entire lifetime. It is just so rare for such a thing of that magnitude to transpire America. However, the quarantine 15, 20, 30, 40 or (higher for some people) during this pandemic is a very real thing. You know why? We’ve been sitting on the couch stuffing our face with all types of bad foods as we just sit immobile watching TV for hours end.
Yes, I think we all know our eating habits have been terrible, but in the process of having bad eating habits, we just have been under so much stress and chaos, no one cares. Let me take that back, we care, but we don’t have the big motivation to want to make a change. Even I will admit this past week I was in a bit of a funk, and it was not intentional it just seemed all that pressure of the mayhem that has transpired this year reached a boiling point.
I just needed a moment to relax; I needed to do something to get my brain in the right state of mind. You might say exactly what does that mean? I needed to do something that brought me peace and a sense of joy. I needed to do something that allowed me to escape from reality a little bit and not to think or worry about work. I think that is the biggest thing so many Americans are struggling with: stress from work. Not knowing if you’re going to have a job from one day to another, not being paid enough from your job, constantly being stressed about silly or stupid things from work the list goes on.
Look, I’m essential worker, so during this entire pandemic I don’t know what it is like to have a few days off. I didn’t get that opportunity, but I sense why so many people felt a bit of pressure relieved when they got that extra $600 in unemployment benefits for several months at the start of the pandemic. They could catch up on bills, put a bit of money away, but at the same time it caused a few people to get lazy.
However, it is a double edged sword that I can understand from multiple perspectives. You’re making more money sitting at home, so why would you want to go to work? At the same time, you cannot get people to go back to work because they like the money they are making and in the process we become lazy or our bodies become immobile so it’s a bevy of situations colliding people.
My eating habits were stellar at the start of 2020 because we were forced to cook at home because the pandemic closed nearly everything. With that said, as things started to slowly open back up, I stopped cooking. Not because I wanted to, I was just burnt out from eating at home for months and I wanted a change of pace. That change of pace ultimately led to a continuation of eating unhealthy and realizing that I needed to make a change. Want to go to the gym, but not fully comfortable doing that in the midst of a pandemic where too much chaos is taking place America. So I work out at home, but not on the consistent basis that I should be doing America.
So yeah, 2021 is around the corner, but at the same time, 2021 is not going to change what transpired in 2020. The ramifications of 2020 will still exist, but there will be things we can do to change the bad habits the mental funk that so many of us endured and we are desperately trying to get out of. It will take time to make it happen, but knowing that you see a problem and you want to fix it is a start people. It’s a start.
Written By Zoe Mitchell
