Day 37 of Self-Isolation in Switzerland – The Future, Or Uncertainty

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I question whether we’re living in the future, or uncertainty during this pandemic. One friend on Facebook wrote that Coronavirus is making us live in the future because of a number of reasons, as listed in the embedded post below.

If I am being myself then I would say that we’re living in the past. We’re living in an age before cars where our village or neighborhoud has become our world. For the first month my home village and the shopping centre one village over were the only two places where I spent any time.

I resorted to walking from home and exploring more and more of the local countryside, to the point where I was walking along dirt tracks that only farmers use to avoid crossing too many other people.

It’s also living in the past because we’re living with very little to no use of the car. The car, for someone like me, is synonymous with going for an adventure in the mountains, whether hiking or other.

Working from home, in my case is blogging, and looking to find opportunities on various websites and through e-mails on an almost daily basis. We’re connecting with people online via WhatsApp, Zoom, Infomaniak’s video tool and other methods. I even used facetime for the first time in a long time.

We’re seeing which countries have good self-discipline and those that do not. I’ll focus on the positive without being negative. The positive is that Switzerland said that people should self-isolate, stay at home and keep two meters away from other people and to a great extent they did. I’m not saying things were perfect all the time, because previous blog posts show they weren’t.

What we do see in Switzerland is that at least at the time of writing this post the number of new cases was flattening to a couple of hundred a day compared to the higher figures from previous weeks. Switzerland said “you should stay home and avoid being to close to people” and people did this.

The consequence is that Switzerland is a rare eutopia, in that we could go for two hour walks if we wanted, we could go on long bike rides and more. In other countries people were restricted to ranging within one kilometre of their homes as in one country, and in other countries of being under house arrest, except for shopping, going to the doctor or other.

Uncertainty

We live in uncertain times because we don’t know whether we’ll have a normal summer. In Switzerland at least one third of people have cancelled their summer plans. On the oil futures market the value of petroleum went down to zero because those that had the ability to buy petroleum did not have the storage space to keep it.

Imagine being in a moment in time where petroleum is worthless, albeit temporarily. For the environment this may be great news because oil producing companies will have a strong incentive to innovate. We have to see if the fall in demand for oil lasts long enough for oil producers to reach a point of no-return in producing alternative fuels and technologies.

At least twice in the past oil crises have helped push innovation forward but that progress was abandoned when oil, once again became a cheap alternative.

A Short Daily Walk

Today my daily walk was a lot shorter than usual. This is due to the weather not being as nice as usual but also because my leg muscles feel tired and in need of a rest. After a 30km bike ride, a 16km walk with 790 meters of climbing and another ten-kilometre walk over three days my body needs a rest. It needs to recover. This wasn’t a zero-day so much as giving my body an opportunity to recover and rest.

I should prepare dinner soon.