Day: 7 October 2021

This morning I found that I did have trip desire after all. As I drove out of a village towards the East I found that I had this desire. I did want to go for a long drive, and go on a trip. It has been January 2019 that I haven’t traveled. My reason, before, was that we need to stay locally, to stop the spread of the pandemic. I had the old fashioned notion that a pandemic should be neutralised as soon as possible.

That quaint, old fashioned notion is no longer contemporary. In the age of information, in the age of mRNA vaccines, 24 hour news, hundreds of hours a minute of information by audio, video, text and more, people are more vulnerable to propaganda and disinformation than before. We see how vulnerable societies have become to manipulation. People said of media studies, that they were a Mickey Mouse course, a soft topic to study. This pandemic shows that the opposite is true. It is because other people are media illiterate that they have been so easy to mislead and manipulate.

The result is a paradigm shift. We have gone from “We must control and stop pandemics from spreading as quickly and efficiently as possible” to “this group don’t get sick” and “wash your hands”, despite it being common knowledge that the virus is airborne.

All this to say that my principle of not traveling during a pandemic is a waste of time. I might as well go on a road trip. It doesn’t mean that I won’t keep isolating to a maximum, anyway. It just means that my self-isolated walks will be in a different landscape, as well as my walks. I think that after almost two years I have earned the right.

I would have gone sooner but I have finished the Beginner WordPress Developer pathway, which means that my learning can be more experimental as I practice the new skills I learned during the course. This can be done anywhere, and a few minutes at a time. I don’t need to be in a quiet space to focus and make progress.

It is also of course an excuse to drive the new car for several hours in a row. My longest drive during this pandemic has been to Lausanne and back. This next trip will take about thirteen hours of driving. If I have good sleep hygiene over the coming week I should be fine.

And that’s it for today.