Ask HN: How are you holding up?

Feeling this. We have a 1.5 yo, not potty trained, the infinite loop of food in/out is a suck on productivity. He also doesn't understand why we can't play with him. Before Covid, we were pretty firmly against screens for him. Now he's a straight up couch potato, first thing in the morning he looks for the remote instead of wanting breakfast :( Yesterday, with much covid related hesitation, we put him back in day care. His original day care still is closed so we had to find a new one, luckily only 2 minutes from home.

The flip side is, I feel blessed to have spent a ton of quality time with him and realized how little time we spent with him in a pre-covid hustle and bustle world. I've been wanting to downsize our lifestyle for a while and now my wife is finally seeing why and possibly on board. I'd like to sell our real assets and move to the beach somewhere and basically retire early / maybe do low volume consulting. I don't know if I can totally sell her on leaving the US, but getting closer. I really love this place, but it's freaking toxic. I do a good job of ignoring new media, but lately it's been impossible. I know the upcoming election is going to be a last straw that makes me say F this place, but I have to convince the fam too.

I don't work remote very well. For above mentioned reasons, home = family/life, office = work, and I have partitioned my life this way for ever and it's very hard to make the change to WFH. Luckily, I'm a little older have saved enough and could likely retire now. But not by our normal QOL standards so best part of this thing is getting my wife to stop shopping and we aren't eating $100 meals on weekends. Hanging out at the park, swimming pool, etc. has been fun to have lowkey entertainment.

Not great.

I spend 22 hours of my day in the same room, split between ten hours laying in my bed and twelve in my chair.

I had just moved to a new city before everything, started a new job. I don't know anyone, it's impossible to really meet new people.

My roommates all disappeared to larger living spaces in the middle of March. They're paying rent but I'm alone, and even when they were here I have nothing in common with them.

It's hard to find projects to do because I have no space to do them. I stopped watching tv because doing so in a deskchair sucks. I go through spurts of playing large amounts of video games. I spend most of my time either trying and failing to work, trying and succeeding to work, or aimlessly cycling between Hacker News, Reddit, rss feeds, youtube, and discord.

The only thing keeping me sane is taking 1 to 2 hour electric skateboard rides around my area and listening to podcasts but I'm starting to get bored of it.

There are a lot of underlying problems to my current life that I'm not addressing, and existed before all this started. The excuse of covid has only made justifications against self improvement easier. I'm stuck in a loop, I'm depressed, and I'm not sure what to do.

My company doesn't really have a good time line for going back. I'd love to work remote, it'd mean I can move to somewhere with more space. But until I get an OK from my company I'm stuck in the limbo of a place not really meant for remote work with no where to really go to.

I've been an intern in a new state since January, and I work here til August, then I finish my last year at school. It's been tough. I'm in a new state where I knew no one besides my coworkers, and I rent a room in a house with a few other people (a few have left, now it's just me and one other). Even prior to COVID, it was a bit lonely, but I'd go to a rock climbing gym a few times a week, go to coffee shows, and I had been on a hand full of dates. Then COVID hit.

I've never been one to get homesick, and I still don't think I am, but holy cow is it easy to get lonely when you don't see anyone besides other passer bys in the grocery store once a week. At the beginning, my only real interaction with people beside the occasional call with family were my morning stand ups. 10 minutes of human interaction with people I knew, and I needed it. Some days my boss's schedule would fill up and we wouldn't have stand up, and those days were awful. My motivation had plummeted, but I spent a bit more time with some friends from high school on Discord.

With all that said, that was at the beginning. Now, I'm going quite a bit better. I've gotten used to being able to be alone a lot longer, and as my state has opened up, I've been able to see some coworkers/friends outside of work, which has been a huge help. My motivation is still pretty lacking, and I'm much less productive from home than I am in the office. I can't wait to get back into the office so I can have a good environment again. I live in a 170sq ft room, and share a kitchen and bathroom with my roommate. 170sq ft that I sleep in, work in, eat in, entertain myself in, pursue free lance development in, make coffee in, etc. I do everything in this ratty beaten up room that has peeling paint in a drab white color. I'm someone who has always preached the value of separation of spaces, and here I am, confined in one space.

All in all, I really can't complain though. I'm very lucky that I haven't really felt depressed at all (sometimes a bit sad, but nothing serious), mt expenses are low and I can save a lot, I have a lot of great friends and family I can talk to regularly now that their classes are over, and I'm taking some classes this Summer to ease my last year at Uni, so that makes my time feel a bit more productive. I'm very fortunate to have what I do, and it looks like things are getting better right now. With that said, this year blows.

Wow that's pretty crazy but an interesting take!

The state of the world isn't great, but I have never been more productive and more relaxed and fit at the same time. Time to read, write, build businesses, develop software and do a lot of exercise. Even though mandatory quarantine here ended, we are making it more permanent.