Everyone has become hyper-creative in quarantine. At least how it appears on social media. From making art, working out, meditating, baking sourdough or banana bread, doing the arm-numbing dalgona coffee (as well as its bootleg version, dalgona peg), to following celebrities and influencers’ live home concerts, cooking demos, chat shows, and work out videos. To ensure you don’t get off this hamster wheel of productivity are universities, fitness/yoga/culinary studios, e-learning sites offering premium courses, apps, podcasts, audio e-books, virtual tours, tutorials, 14 or 21-day challenges, and more.
However, not everyone doing a work from home (WFH) has the extra time. Or has full-time help and the funds to focus on their interests and distract themselves from the piling up socioeconomic woes.
These competing narratives indicate that people are coping differently in this unprecedented crisis. But watching everyone around them appearing to have the zest and time to try out new things is causing severe FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) in those who can’t.
“I feel there is this added pressure to come out of this quarantine having learnt a skill or done a course. Like this productivity party I am supposed to be having,” rues Trishann Henriques, 28. “A lot of us who are self-isolating have jobs, and end up working 10-12 hours a day. But I see people cooking, painting…those who never displayed an affinity to art have suddenly metamorphosed into artists…,” adds the communications specialist. Similarly, *Yvonne D’Souza, 33, an art director at an ad agency, finds it throttling with “tons of free courses jumping up at me from everywhere, everyone working out 10 times more, throwing online parties... You feel like s**t if you are not doing even five per cent of it, and if you don’t want this ‘pressure’, then you have to get off social media platforms.” For her, the first week of WFH proved so disorienting that she had vertigo spells and couldn’t produce any quality design.
Only after her boss temporarily restructured her role and removed design did the dizziness disappear.
For *Kasturi Mishra, 32, an unemployed media professional, Covid-19 and the tanking economy coupled with the gap year she took to recover from health issues are proving big thorns. Being home alone in the lockdown, she says, has aggravated her anxiety, leading to poor concentration and confidence levels. “I want to do courses from Darmouth, Harvard, and Columbia. But these are paid courses, and with the financial crunch and my anxiety issues, I am investing my energies in looking for a job.”
While Priyanka Hosangadi, 33, DGM at a content marketing agency, managed to sign up for the free online course on baking sourdough by ‘the bread whisperer’, Sujit Sumitran, she has not managed to go past the first few modules in the course because of her grueling WFH schedule. “I want to bake sourdough to go off commercial white bread. And in this pandemic, bread is not always available… but first I need time to finish the damn course!”
‘You are enough’
“If I can survive and keep my family fed and watered, for me, that is enough. The rest is just pressure from popular culture that makes everyone seem accomplished, poly glossed, polymaths...,” says author Kiran Manral, who adds that whenever feelings of inadequacy arise, “I tell myself ‘you are enough’ and that has helped me.” Any form of self-improvement, she says, should not stem from FOMO as the initial euphoria can fade if you are not intrinsically driven. “But, if these activities make you feel in control, then wonderful,” she adds.
Understand that everyone is finding ways to deal with the disarray the pandemic has thrown our lives into, explains Ila Kulshrestha, clinical psychologist at Sukoon Healthcare, Gurugram. Many of her clients have said they are unable to complete house chores or the daily to-do lists by their boss. One even expressed to feeling horribly incapable at life because ‘Shakespeare wrote King Lear in quarantine, but here I cannot get anything done!’ “But it is the human tendency in popular culture to celebrate stories of survival, happy endings, coming out of a tragedy with five gyaan points for everyone to learn,” explains Kulshrestha. “Understand that there is ‘privilege in access’, and a financial capital aspect behind all these viral challenges and courses that are geared to keep you ‘productive’.”
She warns that repeatedly thinking you are not productive can make you feel ashamed and invalidate the fact that it is the environment (the pandemic) that is causing you this pressure. It is why the pandemic has re-triggered mental health problems, as the protective factors (like getting a high-paying job) developed over time, have suddenly been taken away.
“Acknowledge your struggles and celebrate when you overcome them. See who you can call upon to help you think differently. Even if that friend doesn’t give you a solution, just saying it out offers emotional catharsis,” Kulshrestha advises.
Instead of hopping on the bandwagon of trying a new skill, Henriques has decided to continue dabbling in water colour and reading voraciously as she did before COVID-19.
“I also take the time to relax. Like disconnecting from reading work emails during my 15-20-minute lunch break.” D’Souza is also consciously putting her well-being over what’s trending.
“I’m okay with not having all the qualities in the world, and just using whatever time I get to exercise, watch Netflix shows, and read. I feel in this pandemic you have the freedom to do nothing or everything, and no one, but you, is judging you. But, that’s the liberty we don’t give ourselves.”
*Names changed to protect identity