Ask HN: How are you coping with all the (mostly bad) news around you?

What about art, mathematics, fiction, music, etc?

You impress me as a healthy person who is financially secure and/or has a strong safety net of family/friends/governmental support, who finds it not difficult to stay on the sunny side of life. I'm not sure you have much to offer people who are struggling with health problems, overwhelming family responsibilities and/or financial insecurity as we head into a recession. Some people are wondering how they are going to support themselves and where they are going to live in the near future, so "Just enjoy the sunset" comes off as a little vacuous. edit: sp

>panic buying of everything

It's not panic buying when you are basically told to stay in your home for weeks on end. You say two weeks- but in Washington here our schools are closed for SIX WEEKS. People want to be prepared. I have kids, they eat like adults. Do you realize how big of food shopping trips people normally do every 1-2 weeks anyway with full families? And we simply don't know if production is going to slow down, how fast stores with be able to resupply various items. Might be no big deal or might be a problem.

So I think you really confuse panic buying with being prepared.. having to go to the store every few days because you don't stock up pretty much defeats the purpose of what we are doing.

>markets down in historic marker

And why should it not be? The markets were already pushing themselves to the limits.. you add a simple normal reversal on top of this mess and you get exactly what we are seeing. Plus, there is no modern equivalent for the economic impact this will have. It's going to spiral and seep into every aspect of the economy. Why shouldn't the market plummet? The uncertainty is almost unfathomable.

>everybody acts like they can't make the next payment

Well.. you have tons of people who simply cannot work right now. Enough people in the country/world live essentially paycheck to paycheck anyway- now suddenly we take away potentially weeks/months of income? What do you expect?

>We are so under-prepared for anything really serious.

Yes and no. This situation just shows how utterly fragile all parts of the economy depend on each other, how much supply chains are linked, and how much we take it for granted that everything is always working as usual.

As a socially reclusive nerd I have been training for this my whole life. Finally a chance to show off my skills. You're not getting me, COVID-19!

I'm cautiously optimistic that most of us will get through this crisis successfully, at least here in Scandinavia where solidarity is still a thing (however imperfectly).

What I do worry a little about is the knock on effects; the amplification of existing trends that reduce physical commerce in town centres, driving shops, cafés, etc., out of business.

If we want to have places to shop other than supermarkets and online and a reason to maintain and develop town centres someone is going to have to figure out how to change various tax regimes to make it easier for such places to survive.

In most towns that I visit there has already in the last forty years been a dramatic reduction in the range of goods available and of course this just drives even more people to shop online further reducing the turnover of the local shops.

Of course it could be that we should just let them go out of business and find an alternative way of living.

Other than that, as keiferski says we live in much better times, even with this crisis, than pretty much ever before.