Virus teaches people about the true essentials of life – or not

I am thankful for the COVID-19 virus attack on the world – though many lives will be lost – a terrible cost – because we will be taught as a society a different sort of social contract with our leaders, and people around us. We also will be reminded about the essentials of ‘life’, which is not about boozing up 3 nights per week, jetting off to exotic destinations on credit card money, take-away meals, etc. We shall become more appreciative of the freedoms we take/took for granted.

Based on my experience of people over the last 20 years and more recently, I have come to realise that people do not actually think much about what is essential to life. Errrh.. as always, I should define what I’m talking out to avoid some moron drifting into a tangential argument. By life I mean, the things that sustain life in physical form.

In times of abundance, people seem to know that life is about living it up!
1. Take-aways
2. Eating out.
3. Cinema
4. Driving up and down the place.
5. Flying to exotic destinations on credit card money.
6. Spending disproportionate hours on the likes of Facebook.

Now an itty bitty but powerful virus has caused a lock down on nearly all the above. Hey ho – KFC, Burger King and one or two other fast food outlets are about to re-open or have re-opened. For my part I knew I wasn’t going to visit any of those outlets if they were paying me to attend and giving free food! But in conversation with some colleagues at work, their expectation was that people would flood into the fastfood outlets like nobody’s business. I thought about it – and agreed! How? Why? Because people are STUPID! Well, there were photgraphs of people queuing up outside of these fastfood outlets. Like – people were dying for a Burger King burger. Never mind about catching COVID-19; it’s like that burger was life itself.

My so-called friends – because a small handful consider me a friend, though I know I have no friends – are busy wasting their time at home during lockdowns. They occupy themselves with the usual round of mind-numbing activities such as:
1. Social media!
2. Endless movies on the likes of Netflix, Amazon and other streaming services.
3. Reading a whole pile of novels.
4. Stuffing their faces – and not losing weight, on the grounds that they couldn’t exercise well enough during the lockdown.

In conversation with one so-called friend, I discovered that they had no list of priorities – as that causes stress. I didn’t want to cause any stress, so I basically played the game of hypocrisy and said ‘That’s great. Stress is bad‘. If you tell people what they want to hear, they’ll just lap it up. So funny really.

Passing strange, if only to myself, that people have so much more time on their hands to sort out so many aspects of their lives that they always wanted to, but then they focus on all sorts of time-fillers that won’t really take them very far forward. Did I say that some people are not getting into education and personal development? I did NOT. When one makes a generalisation which may cover any significant percentage of people, it’s the usual for ‘some’ to find the exception that applies to them. Tough – I am not at liberty or inclination to do statistical surveys on who does what. So, I’ll generalise away as I please! People deserve what they don’t get. Arrgghhh.. oh gord.. .!