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    We Are Not Shakespeare in Quarantine
    We Are Not Shakespeare in Quarantine
    We Are Not Shakespeare in Quarantine
    Ebook131 pages1 hour

    We Are Not Shakespeare in Quarantine

    By Adolfo Ramírez Corona

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    About this ebook

    This is not King Lear or Macbeth. You will not find the development of a new calculus.

    Instead, you will go through ideas and stories about our emotions, lessons from a little prince, challenging decisions, anxiety, remote work, working with children at home, videoconferences, challenges in the new normal, the post-pandemic crisis, the future, post-traumatic growth, and how to escape lockdown.

    These ideas and stories will help you with the anxiety and stress we are living in now. There are useful resources to work through this challenging time. This is what a psychotherapist, father and remote worker has written until now about living and working with his family during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    We are not Shakespeare in quarantine. But we are not alone either.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAdolfo Ramírez Corona
    Release dateJun 17, 2020
    ISBN9780463673164
    We Are Not Shakespeare in Quarantine
    Author

    Adolfo Ramírez Corona

    Adolfo Ramírez Corona is a writer, thinker, psychotherapist, coach, media and audience specialist, but more than anything, husband, father, and lover of the present.He has worked on several projects and works, from Philosophy and Photography teacher, to be a consultant in areas about systems and informatics, education, audiences and media, from very operative jobs, to executive and directive ones.As a psychotherapist and coach, he attends to different needs, but always pointing to the practice and development of meditative and hypnotherapeutic techniques as a way of change and transformation.He writes for different publications in a wide range of subjects. To receive updates on his work, writings and books, subscribe to https://adolforismos.substack.com or follow him on https://medium.com/@adolforismos.

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      Book preview

      We Are Not Shakespeare in Quarantine - Adolfo Ramírez Corona

      Adolfo Ramírez Corona

      We Are Not Shakespeare in Quarantine

      Ideas, practical recommendations, and reflections about being in lockdown

      Copyright © 2020 by Adolfo Ramírez Corona

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

      Adolfo Ramírez Corona has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

      Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book and on its cover are trade names, service marks, trademarks and registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publishers and the book are not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. None of the companies referenced within the book have endorsed the book.

      First edition

      This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

      Find out more at reedsy.com

      Contents

      Preface

      I. LIFE

      You’re not Angry Enough

      5 Lessons on Isolation and Restraint from the Little Prince

      Hard Decisions Are Coming

      Anxiety in Times of Crisis: What the Psychotherapist Says

      What Would They Have Thought About This?

      II. WORK

      What desk setup would you bring to a desert island?

      7 things you should know about starting remote work

      How to Work with Children at Home

      Brain settings for remote work: using your 5 senses

      Why Videoconferencing Is for Rookies

      3 challenges in the new normal

      A Post-War Concept to Help the Post-Pandemic Crisis

      III. FUTURE

      11 hypotheses on how life may change in a post-pandemic world

      Where Are the Astrologers?

      A Remedy Against the Future

      I Don’t Want to Come Back to Normal Anymore

      Are You Ready for Post-traumatic Growth?

      IV. EPILOGUE

      How to Escape from Lockdown

      About the author

      Acknowledgments

      Preface

      When the Covid-19 quarantine lockdown began, the always extreme positivists of social networks began to spread memes to make everybody feel better.

      Shakespeare wrote his best plays under quarantine.

      Newton developed calculus under quarantine.

      There are a lot of positive things about positive psychology, of course. I use it as a tool when practicing psychotherapy or coaching. But positive psychology without data is negative for your mental health. Positive psychology must be based on reality. Positive psychology is made to change a stuck negative point of view about our lives, not to provoke a negative response, worse than the problem it tried to solve.

      Any clinical psychology, any psychotherapy, any coaching, must avoid comparisons. Comparing us to Shakespeare or Newton didn’t make us feel better but the contrary.

      Some began to answer the memes:

      I guess Shakespeare didn’t have children to take care during quarantine.

      Did Shakespeare write King Lear before or after doing remote work for his employer?

      Did Newton wash dishes and clean the house while thinking about calculus?.

      Humanity failed to predict a new virus outbreak as much as predicting how life was going to be under lockdown. It has been hard.

      There is no event in the history of humanity like this coronavirus pandemic. None. Scientists knew that the ingredients for a noticeably big outbreak were set human mobility like any other time since humans habit the face of earth. There were even plans for the contention of the pandemic, which means, there were plans for the first two or three months of the pandemic. No one thought about what could happen more than that. No one thought about what could happen with the consequences of the pandemic: the socio-political and economic crisis we are living in.

      No one thought about that because no one could imagine it. Yes, imagination has limits.

      Think about the movie Independence Day, The War of the Worlds, or any other about extraterrestrial invasion. Humanity defends itself from extraterrestrials. Most people stay secure at home or in refuges. Some fight against the invaders. Time passes but as spectators or readers we only follow the plot about the battle for independence or the war against the enemy. We don’t see what happens to people at home or refuges. We missed the lockdown life under interplanetary war.

      While the protagonists fight against extraterrestrials, who goes to the supermarket for toilet paper? Who is still working to secure money for the family? How do food and other supplies continue distribution from producers to homes? Do the kids keep school via Zoom?

      And the most important question, who writes a tragic play or develops calculus during an extraterrestrial invasion?

      Anne Frank wrote her diary during lockdown. My eldest daughter loves to write. She writes fiction. Lockdown could be a good moment to develop her writing. But Ana Frank didn’t have to videoconference all morning—yes, from 8 am to 2 pm—taking high school classes and use her afternoons and evenings doing homework and preparing for exams. My daughter did.

      We are not Shakespeare or Newton under quarantine or Anne Frank in lockdown. We are doing our best and that’s it.

      As an author, I wrote and published fewer articles in April, when the hard part of the lockdown began for our family. I have felt frustrated because of the lack of productivity and subsequent income. But, at the same time, I haven’t done more effort in all my life to keep home going on. I’m proud of how the family has responded to the situation.

      Of course, the topics changed for almost every writer and author. How could you not talk in some way about the pandemic, the lockdown, or the crisis? Almost anything you write about has been in some way affected by recent events. Every time I start writing, the lockdown ghost gets into my words.

      To my surprise, the day a friend asked me to share the articles I have written about it, I noticed how much I have published about the topic. I can compile a book!, I thought. And here they are, all the articles until now, I have written about our change of life after the quarantine.

      This is not King Lear or Macbeth. You will not find the development of a new calculus. Just some ideas, practical recommendations, and reflections about being at home.

      I have divided the book into three sections: Life, Work, and Future. Sometimes I write more as a psychotherapist and coach. That is under Life. The texts about remote work, business and productivity are in the Work section. The more analytical, sometimes philosophical texts are in Future.

      The articles were published before in Medium, UX Collective, The Startup, Age of Awareness, and Apparatum. Minimum modifications were made. Links and references were sent to the end of each chapter.

      I hope these articles work as a companion in these times of crisis. We are not Shakespeare in quarantine. But we are not alone either.

      June 2020

      I

      Life

      To Alejandra, the only one I want to live with in the zombie apocalypse

      You’re not Angry Enough

      You have every right to be angry. It’s one of the best emotions we have.

      According to science, there are six basic emotions: joy, sadness, fear, disgust, surprise and anger. Yes, practically the same presented as characters in the movie Inside Out — Paul Ekman, the expert scientist in emotions, was a consultant for the movie. ¹

      Everybody loves joy. It’s great, right? It looks so much like our idea of happiness that almost everybody falls for it.

      But it’s not. As the movie establishes, if you are happy all the time you can’t deal with the problems in real life. When the environment changes and something is wrong, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust, or anger, are necessary to make our body and mind take notice. And the people around us too.

      In the movie, you aren’t going to find a character representing surprise. The reason is that surprise is not persistent. It’s an emotion that gives place to another. You can be surprised about a surprise party or a surprise dismissal at work, but the surprise doesn’t last much. You get another emotion — joy at the party, and fear, maybe, for the

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