{"id":4992,"date":"2020-06-21T14:28:44","date_gmt":"2020-06-21T20:28:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/?p=4992"},"modified":"2020-06-21T14:29:09","modified_gmt":"2020-06-21T20:29:09","slug":"the-covid-depression-era-pt-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/?p=4992","title":{"rendered":"The Covid Depression Era Pt 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have two therpists at the moment. That may sound nuts but I’ve found it essential for me to mentally survive these days. One handles my general existential anxiety, and the other helps me work on my sympathy and empathy for other people, especially pertaining to my current relationship. Since Covid hit I’ve been slowly trying to unpack why I almost immediately went into a mental dive bomb into completely not giving a shit about myself, which runs counter to my previous stoic self-perception and “body temple” mantras.<\/p>\n

I have a friend who used to joke that if we were stuck on an island, he would kill and eat me in the first five minutes. My situation is kind of the inverse of that: as soon as Fauci told us to stay home, I basically decided\u00a0 “fuck it, time to eat myself to death”. I really don’t understand if this was some sort of valve release or something. I’m not sure.<\/p>\n

For me, positivity is a tendency I have to really work hard at. I describe it like Donkey Kong in Mario Kart: it takes a long time to get momentum. Once it gets going, I can ride it like a powerful wave, but if I hit a tricky curve I basically eat shit and have to start over again.<\/p>\n

So I just started pounding deep dish pizza, ice cream, rice, pad thai, burritos, brownies, banana bread, peanut butter cups, mocha lattes, spaghetti, french fries, pancakes, scones etc… The more the news told me we were fucked, the more I felt like eating.\u00a0 This was basically coming right off a jiu jitsu competition loss that I was trying to bounce back from . I had leaned out to a comfortable 160lbs and was game planning to start actually bulking up, like I was thinking about getting swole as a body experiment.<\/p>\n

A month into lockdown I stopped giving a shit about Zoom workouts and I couldn’t even look at my kettle bell. Days were blending into each other and it felt like the only kind of physical activity I ever cared for (jiu jitsu) was getting crushed out of existence: gyms going out of business, epidemiologists projecting Covid’s presence way into the future, and constant conflicting data about how it spreads creating a general pessimism about the grappling sports industry’s survival. On a podcast, one of jiu jitsu’s biggest stars jokingly exclaimed that the sport was dead. Unfortunately the joke felt more like the truth.\u00a0 So I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to be working towards. I pretty much just stopped exercising.<\/p>\n

On top of that my social media anxiety was hitting a critical peak. The non-stop white noise felt like waking up to 24 hr buzz saws and sloshing through the psychic chaos of the world for months. I don’t know if other people experience this as well, but how my brain works is, if I’m presented with a problem from someone else, my instinct is to create a succinct game plan to fix it. Emotions, pain, and anger in other people make me extremely nervous and uncomfortable, like I’m in trouble for something. So I default to either hiding from it or telling that person how to fix what’s going wrong. The past several years of therapy have helped me understand that other people’s pain doesn’t put me in danger. Rather I can allow outside people to experience their pain\/anger etc without me feeling like I’m on trial to fix it. When I take on this attitude it gives me more psychic bandwidth to actually be helpful and empathetic instead of distant and instructive. I’m revealing all of this because it’s definitely a work in progress, and I think it illustrates my extremely strained relationship with social media. Basically being an introvert, with a heavy fear of group dynamics, and hyper-vigilant sensitivity to other people’s emotions makes taking on world trauma extremely challenging; especially through the platforms which most of us choose to communicate through now i.e. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and comments sections. What compounds this challenge is my complete mistrust of our new dominant language of memes.<\/p>\n

Not to get too deep into the woods about this, but in short I’ve aligned with some kind of general theory that memes are highly energized mantra viruses that collectively fuel the manifestation of powerful real life daemons or djinns. Other people have talked about this as well<\/a> (also see here<\/a>). It explains in a way the election of Trump and the emergence of extreme internet groups that overtly refer to this kind of thing i.e. the alt-right meme god named Kek, which was personified by Pepe the Frog. Most of this kind of thing stayed contained within the alternate reality of the Internet, but really it was a pressure cooker for this energy to manifest in physical life conflict between the djinn of the Left and the djinn of the Right. Not that this hasn’t happened before many many times over, but I think meme magick adds a new spin on degrading discourse and critical thinking, while raising the climate of paranoia and the artistry of trolling. Memes are a powerful tool for energizing basic ideas, antagonizing\u00a0 opposing ideologies, and discouraging meaningful dialog.<\/p>\n

All of this feels pretty analogous to the idea of the Force. The Force is neither good or bad, it depends on how you use it. So if\u00a0 you are seduced by the dark side of the Force (in this case meme power) you get quick results, but in the long term your world gets twisted up and ugly. The light side of the Force is way harder to use effectively because it almost requires that you don’t use it (i.e. Luke not<\/em> killing his father). So most people default to the Dark side. Trust and Truth break down as a result and power becomes based on who controls the most fear. Okay that’s enough of my brief meme theory, suffice to say I personally will never post a fucking meme anywhere.<\/p>\n

I realize there are more important and pressing things going on than me feeling like shit and eating like shit, and being cynical about social media, but I guess I’m talking this stuff out because maybe it might be helpful for people experiencing similar existential lethargy and then game planning a way to get your back your ability to function. Possibly as a result, being able to engage with what’s going on in the world in a more effective way. I ran through some other scenarios in my mind: What if I was put in prison? What if California sunk into the ocean? What if there was some kind of nation destroying apocalypse\/second civil war and I had to scavenge for food and all my art was destroyed? How would my mentality hold up? From the evidence\u00a0 gathered so far, not very well. I learned my lifestyle is basically a house of cards that can’t handle much disruption. I think this is useful information. It creates an objective to better understand myself and to grow into a person who can exist in the same space as chaos rather than be defeated by it. I guess that’s why I’m writing about this. I don’t know if it’s all that interesting but I if you made it through this full post then maybe you resonate with these thoughts on some level.<\/p>\n

So as a result of the world’s current symptoms manifesting and gaining full expression, I gained 20lbs of sympathetic weight and lost the will to be a fighter. I’m 179.5 lbs right now which is the heaviest I’ve ever been I think. (I realize that for many people of varying heights and body compositions, 179.5 might be a goal weight. But I’m putting my numbers here as a clear way to track my progress over the next couple months.) I was looking for a way to get pumped, or someone to inspire me to come alive but nothing was clicking. Most of the highest functioning athletic achievers seemed to have doubled down on the self centered mindset that got them to where they are, and the more thoughtful ones were either lost in doubt or depending on inspirational memes to keep them going. Reality seemed like the wrong place to look for getting my mind right.<\/p>\n

This is me right now with skinnier arms.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

To be continued… which is weird to say because maybe I will just stay like this.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have two therpists at the moment. That may sound nuts but I’ve found it essential for me to mentally survive these days. One handles my general existential anxiety, and the other helps me work on my sympathy and empathy for other people, especially pertaining to my current relationship. Since Covid hit I’ve been slowly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[13,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4992"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4992"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5001,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4992\/revisions\/5001"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jessemoynihan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}