4 Life Lessons I learned Living Through 245 Days of Hard Lockdown.
What happens when the most livable city in the world for 7 years turns into the world’s largest open-air prison.
Photo by Urlaubstracker on Unsplash
My hometown of Melbourne is now officially the most lockdown city in the world, congrats.
The former most livable city in the world has turned into a living nightmare. With the initial novelty of lockdown and feelings of solidarity having worn thin, our once cohesive society is being torn apart.
Violent protestors shut down the city as mandatory vaccination was announced for construction workers. A city remains starkly divided on support for continued lockdowns.
I’ve seen friends and families torn apart because of differing opinions on vaccination. I didn’t think we could have a more divisive issue than Trump or Brexit, but here we are.
And just when I thought things couldn’t get worse, we also endured a once-in-a-lifetime earthquake that took down a building and scared the living shit out of us and our pets.
Can you believe I am only describing what happened during one week in September 2021?
Our stay-at-home orders have been some of the harshest seen on an international scale.
Most of the lockdown:
All restaurants and cafes can only do takeaway
All gyms, outdoor parks, and anything fun are closed.
Unable to have visitors to our house.
Allowed to only leave the house for 5 reasons (food, exercise, testing, vaccination, providing care).
Allowed to exercise for only 2 hours per day.
Allowed to travel within 5kms of our house.
Allowed one person to do grocery shopping.
Not allowed to leave our house after 9:00 pm or before 5:00 am.
Suppression of the virus was the name of the game in 2020. And it worked. After months of hard lockdown, we got to the magical number 0 and never looked back. Well, at least not for 7 months.
2021 was a different beast. People are well and truly over it. Scaring people doesn’t work anymore. People wanted their freedom back. The sentiment of ‘we are all in this together’ dissipated with the New Year fireworks.
Despite having the same lockdown measures, Melbourne and Sydney are now experiencing more daily COVID cases than ever before.
I am quite privileged to be able to say that the lockdown has only been a minor inconvenience rather than a threat to my livelihood. I did not lose any work or income. In fact, I’ve made more money over the lockdown than ever before.
But for better or worse, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed and disrupted our lives. There is no going back to normal. We are clumsily creating a new social contract for how we live and work.
I suspect my future grandchild will look back on this period and will be asked to write high school essays about this period in human history.
Here are some things I would tell them:
Adversity only reveals what’s inside of you
COVID-19 didn’t destroy your discipline or resilience, it only revealed how much you had to begin with.
When ‘not having enough time’ was no longer an excuse, people started to tell me they had equipment at home to exercise. Once they bought some equipment, they then told me they had no motivation to exercise.
You don’t have a time, money or motivation problem, you have a discipline problem. It’s fine if you don’t want to exercise. Just don’t make excuses or complain. You are just lying to yourself.
Once you lie to yourself once. You can lie to yourself again. It gets easier and easier to sabotage yourself with each lie. Accumulated lies become a story. That story becomes the script to which you run your life.
How you do one thing, tends to be how you do everything.
This is the same reason that you didn’t start a business, undertake further study or do anything productive with your time. These same people choose cheap entertainment and meaningless distraction instead of investing a small percentage of time to improve their life.
I am not saying you have to be productive 24/7 but your life should at least improve in some measurable way with more time on your hands. Every day you had a choice to improve your life by 1% or make it worse by 1%.
You can create opportunities for yourself no matter what your situation. The only thing stopping you is your mindset.
Opportunities are hidden within adversity.
Challenges are opportunities cloaked in pessimism. Opportunities are challenges cloaked in optimism.
Your mind is the greatest facilitator or inhibitor of your ability to identify and exploit opportunities.
When people started to lose their jobs, I saw many take to social media to vent their frustration and reinforce their identity as a victim. Where are they now? Probably still unemployed.
But I also heard stories of those who lost their jobs and saw another opportunity to create a career they never saw coming.
27-year-old Louise Hagger Poppy O’Toole was trained in a Michelin-starred kitchen before losing her job during the pandemic in 2020. Instead of sitting complaining, she took to Tik Tok to create content for her cooking.
A year later, she‘s amassed 1.8 million followers and now has a book deal with Bloomsbury.
She’s not an outlier. There is a whole string of viral food stars ranging from stay-at-home parents to ex-Starbucks baristas who leveraged social media to their own benefit.
You create opportunities for yourself. The only thing stopping you is your mind and perspective.
The relationships in your life are the key to your happiness. Prioritize them and embed them into your schedule.
It is only when I couldn’t see my friends and family did I start to appreciate them way more. You want what you can’t have. And the heart only grows fonder with distance.
This is not to say I didn’t appreciate them before. I definitely did. But when you experience a turbulent period of high uncertainty, the safety and familiarity of loved ones go a long way.
When protests were happening, an earthquake hit or I faced some initial job uncertainty, I only wanted to be with friends and family. Nothing else really mattered to me. I got clarity on the priorities in my life.
On the flip side, there are some relationships I let go of. I started to realize that we weren’t at the same point in life and they made some low-integrity decisions that I couldn’t look past anymore.
I now regularly schedule calls and Facetime with friends and family. I hear more from some people than I did before the lockdown.
Prioritize your relationships. Your family and friends will continue to love you even when you lose your job.
The world is inherently uncertain, so stop trying to control it. The best you can do is adapt to the situation.
People will choose unhappiness over uncertainty — Tim Ferriss
When faced with uncertainty, people react in different ways.
There are those who jump into action and adapt rapidly. There are others who are overwhelmed and become paralyzed by the magnitude of change. And there are others who just seem unphased.
Whatever your reaction, COVID has taught me that we live in an uncertain world. The only certainty in life is constant change.
I’ve started to create my life to become what Nassim Taleb calls anti-fragile.
Becoming anti-fragile means you benefit from disorder and chaos. Rather than building a life on the assumption that most things will go right, I calculate the cost of the worst things going wrong and work backward.
I apply an anti-fragile mindset to my income, investments and business.
Before I bought a house earlier this year, I did a forecast of a potential housing market crash in Melbourne (we are due for one). I invest money in crypto with the understanding this could go to zero.
There is nothing more liberating than knowing you will prosper even if your worst fears are realized.
Most people were caught with their pants down when the pandemic hit because they never thought about what would happen if they lost their job or business.
Don’t let this happen to you.
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