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You know what part they never show you in zombie apocalypse movies? The part a month before the zombies come when you’ve already secured yourself in your house, or bunker, or boarded up mall, and you have to just…hang out there.

Obviously watching this would be boring to the point of driving you insane, and unfortunately for a lot of us, living like this can be as well. So I don’t want to be overdramatic, but I think it’s fair to say that if we don’t approach this quarantine the right way, pretty soon we might get so bored that we’ll be praying for someone to come and eat our brains.

Sure, you can load up on supplies for sanitizing your hands, microwavable dinners, and wiping your ass all you want, but you can’t buy six “How to Not Lose Your Mind” kits for the price of four from Costco, so here’s my point: in these next few weeks or months, it’s going to be crucial to maintain the health of our lives, brains, and relationships as well as the health of our bodies.

I don’t need to tell you the inevitably bad news about all of this. People are going to die, someone you know is likely to be impacted, and way more of us are already losing our jobs. There’s no way around how much all of that sucks.

But if you’re looking for the good news, here it is: with the right preparation, and with some luck that keeps you and your loved ones mostly out of harm’s way, your quarantine can not only be managed, but it can be an amazing opportunity for you to reset your life.

But first, you might need help figuring out exactly how to function in quarantine, and for that, you need an expert.

From an Expert in Hermitology

I don’t get to instruct the world from a place of greater life experience very often, so you’ll have to indulge me here.

For you see, I’ve been social distancing since you were doing jello shots at high school parties. I’ve been staying home for days at a time long before it was fashionable or even slightly beneficial. I’ve got a PhD in hermit life. This is all absolutely nothing to me. You all are trying to learn freestyle with floaties on, and I’m Michael Phelps. I’ve been training for this quarantine for my whole life, and so now, I’m here to help you.

I’ve learned from experience that there is a right and a wrong way to shut yourself off from the outside world. There are tactics that keep you sane and productive, and as 21-year-old me found in much of my past, there are also tactics that turn you into a socially incompetent weirdo who has lost all touch with reality.

So take it from me: this is how you quarantine while leading a productive, mentally healthy, enjoyable life.

1. For the Love of God, Give Your Life Some Variety

So you’re about to see the exact same place over and over, wear the same basic things over and over, eat the same things over and over, and do the same things over and over.

Fuck. That isn’t great. Pretty quickly, you’re going to look at your front door, and feel a subconscious tinge of, “Ugh. There’s my fucking front door again.” You’ll feel trapped, stuck in a fog of monotony, and you’ll slowly start to lose your mind.

Some degree of this is kind of inevitable. Sorry.

What you can do is mitigate this by filling your day with a nice variety of healthy, enjoyable, beneficial things to do. This is the key to staying sane, and starting to live a functional life, even while stuck in between the same four walls.

Here are just some suggestions:

-Exercise

-Meditate

-Finally shut your friends up by watching Game of Thrones

-Read books

-Read updates on what’s happening in the world, and die inside a little

-Teach yourself to cook, you domestic derelict

-Play video games

-Organize the 50,000 photos you have in your phone that you’ve never looked at

-Redecorate every week or so that your place feels less like a prison cell, and more like a fun prison cell

-CALL YOUR GRANDPARENTS

-Try on different outfits, and record which ones look totally cute

-Free creative time. Do whatever. Write a poem from the virus’ perspective. Draw a picture of your dog with crayons, cave paint on your bathroom wall so that when this is all over, aliens will know what happened in a thousand years.

-Reach out to chat with like, ten different people.

-Work towards your big life projects

-Giggle at some dope ass quarantine memes

-Do all of these things in varying places in your home as much as you can

-Play every board game you have

-Try weird food combos. Put jam on your microwaved burrito. I don’t know man. Go for shit.

-Look for new music to listen to

-Play with your dogs

-Become one of those insufferable people over the age of 14 on Tiktok.

-Go ahead and vacuum again

-Load up on foods you haven’t tried before on your grocery runs, then try them! Who knows what a goldenberry tastes like? Now you will!

-Practice a craft: guitar, sewing, building toilet paper castles–whatever you can get into.

-Journal about this wild indoor adventure you’re currently experiencing

We’ll go into more detail on these in a second, but wow! Look at all of those! Imagine how diverse your life can still be! Think of all of the different things you can do in a given day, and consider how not fucking crazy you’ll go, if that’s actually what you commit to doing!

2. Scheduling: Your Path to a Normal-Feeling Life

When you live as a hermit, there’s a huge risk of your life becoming aimless, because there’s nothing you technically need to do right now, and even widely varying activities feel less varied because they’re all taking place between the same four walls.

This is why living with a schedule on quarantine is so, so important. Let’s look at an example.

If you don’t have working out scheduled for after lunch, then instead of working out, you’ll internally resort to most toxic question in the modern first world: “What do I want right now?”

That’s hard to figure out when you don’t have specific plans, so you’ll sit on your couch, and try to think of what sounds good, and nothing will, so you’ll just blankly scroll on your phone for one or six hours. This is your one way ticket to getting depressed as fuck and wasting your quarantined life. Don’t buy that ticket, and don’t get on that train (or any train right now for that matter).

Scheduling is magical this way. Scheduling makes each day feel like its own individual journey, and not just an endless mass of barely conscious depression.

So plan out your day with a nice variety of these activities. If it’s in your schedule, then the schedule–not the whims of your immediate desires–is your determining factor for what you do. This is what makes your life feel real, and varied, and tangible, and important, and keeps it from being an interminable pajama and cookie dough and phone scrolling blob of nothingness.

Enforcing variety and abiding by a schedule are how your life can still feel kind of normal.

3. Stay Home Together

So, here’s the good news: The solution to this is in no way you being fully isolated for like four months or however long this shit is going to take. All that would do is create a second pandemic of loneliness and depression. There’s a reason why solitary confinement makes people lose their shit, and that doesn’t really go away just because you’re not technically in prison, and can currently scroll through Insta THOTs.

So first off, the time is now to develop your Quarantine Family. These are the people you’ll exclusively see in person throughout this whole process. You’ll quarantine together, and none of you will visit other people until you can trust they’ve also been exclusively quarantining for the full two weeks necessary. Yes, your Q-Fam can grow, but only when everyone follows the damn rules. So you’ll hold each other accountable for staying in, you’ll rely on each other, and you’ll play Monopoly together.

But secondly, your social life can extend far beyond your Quarantine Family.

In fact, here’s a perspective you might not have considered: Your quarantine is likely the best opportunity you’ve had to build a social life in a very long time. That sounds weird, but it’s true. Let me explain.

If I were writing this article 150 years ago, and you didn’t have a family or roommates or anything, I’d probably be telling you to draw a picture with a quill and ink pot and start talking to it a lot Cast Away-style, because that’s how important a base level of human interaction is. I’m not sure how they survived without social interaction during the black plague. My guess is they couldn’t, they interacted anyway, and that’s why everybody fucking died.

Fortunately, you have the wonders of technology, so use them. Call people all the time. Reach out in IM. Text people. Have the longest conversation you’ve had in years with your high school bestie. You’re not bothering anyone. What are they doing? Waiting for their vegetable soup to cook? Throwing a toy for their dog? “Working from home?” Ha! Fuck that. They can talk to you.

And it’s not like you guys have nothing to talk about. There’s a whole fucking plague out there. Sure it’s breaking down the foundations of society, but it can also break the ice!

This also works for dating. You shouldn’t go on any actual dates in a while, but man, what a time to start a lengthy text back and forth, to hone your emoji usage, to build a real, conversation-based bond with someone. What a romantic start to a lifelong relationship–to be penpals during the great plague of 2020. Granted, there are likely to be some nudes swapped back and forth in there as well, but you don’t have to tell your grandkids about that.

Again, it’s counter intuitive, but also 100% true: staying inside for several months can be just the boost your social life needs.

4. Get Your Shit Together

I feel like most of us have a pile somewhere in our homes. It could be a pile of mail you haven’t looked at . It could be a pile of clothes on that chair that stopped being a chair, and started being a $340 hanger sometime around June of 2018. It could be a pile in your head of things you have to do in your house so that it doesn’t collapse into an endless money pit.

Most of us have several of these in our house at a given time. They’re constantly growing, morphing, and sliding off the table and all over the God damn kitchen floor.

So tackle all of that shit you’ve been putting off until “you have the time” because, well, now you do. Get through every last metaphorical and literal pile you have so that when your life starts again, there won’t be a bunch of clutter between you and a less stupid life.

5. Become the Person You’ve Been Meaning to Become

The nice thing about going for a run outside right now is that, as long as you’re not too slow, you can execute the hell out of your six foot rule.

In fact, there’s a quarantine-friendly version of learning or developing just about every positive habit or skill you can think of, so you’re out of excuses. Get started.

If you don’t want to run, there are countless streaming workout videos. You can finally journal your day. You can finally do your KonMari cleaning. You can take online courses in photoshop, or coding, or how to talk to women like a competent human being. You can finally start looking at that number in your bank account and figuring why the hell it seems to always get smaller. You can schedule your meals, or start drinking more tea, or you can read for the first time since you read the Grapes of Wrath Cliff’s notes in your junior year of high school.

In this ocean of downtime, you finally have the time to become that person you’ve been meaning to become. By the time you re-enter reality, you can learn the new skills, develop the new habits, and re-enter the world as a powerhouse who can totally read, find what sparks joy, and ask women how their day is going.

6. Reflect on Your Life and Make Plans

Fair warning: This is the scary part of this quarantine that nobody is actually going to want to do.

So let’s start with the more fun part of it.

First, take some time, and reflect on all of the positives in your life. Go through your whole existence, from your relationships, to your dogs, to queso dip, and write down everything that’s fucking great. Look at all of them. Think about them, and really dwell on how much you appreciate them. Keep them posted somewhere where you can see them all the time.

Don’t nod along as you think in the back of your head “Ha, never doing that!” You actually have the time now! Doing a deep, conscious gratitude reflection will feel fantastic, and being deprived of so many great things in your life will make you appreciate them all the more, and you’ll need that feeling before part two.

Part two is all about reflecting on the shit in your life that needs to change–I’m talking about your career, the way you treat your parents, your roommate who eats all of your Tillamook cheddar–all of it. Write this shit down too. Sit with it. Stare it in the face.

You have to do this. What else are you going to do? Play another round of Mario Kart? (Well yes, but what about after that?)

Next imagine your life if all of these things were better. Really dwell on what your life can become once you fix these problems (and are no longer housebound by a plague).

Then, sit and brainstorm what to do about all of this shit. Figure out how to fix it, how to improve it, how you’re going to take bigger steps in life to turn this around. Plan it out step by step. Do this over the course of days if you have to. You’ve got nothing but time. Develop real, clear, concrete plans.

Then, start to do what you can now. Dive deep on your big projects now, and work that into your daily schedule. This is an opportunity that’s hopefully unlike any other you’ll have in your life to actually get shit done, and it could transform your life.

Look, again, this whole thing objectively sucks. People are going to die, and society will kinda somewhat crumble for a while. But if we’re looking for how to make the best of it, and if you’re lucky enough to avoid this virus in any kind of significant way, it can be subjectively great for you.

And maybe, someday, you can even look back and tell your grandchildren, “It all turned around for Pop Pop when a deadly virus broke out.”