[S]he lies awake fretting about finances and lost retirement plans, then chastising herself for self-pity when others are dying of covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus. Most nights, she waits in the darkness until she hears the thump of the newspaper hit her front door around 4:30 a.m. That’s when she gives herself permission to rise and read about the country’s latest crises at her dining table.ADDED: I published this post, then thought: Look at the comments, look in order of up votes from readers, and see how far you need to read before somebody blames Trump. I predicted it would be the very first thing, and, indeed, this is the most up-voted comment: "it isn't the virus causing my insomnia, it's the orange idiot."
“Sometimes, the thought goes through my head that maybe getting this virus really is inevitable, that I should just get infected and get it over with. And if I die, I die,” Schmidt said. “It’s not that I really have a death wish, but in the middle of the night, I think to myself, I can’t continue living this way."
September 5, 2020
"I get this sense of dread, like I’m not going to wake up, like something is seriously wrong in the world."
Said Cheryl Ann Schmidt, describing "the heavy, knotlike feeling that hits her solar plexus every time she lies down at night, and even when she tries to nap," quoted in "The pandemic is ruining our sleep. Experts say ‘coronasomnia’ could imperil public health" (WaP).
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“Sometimes, the thought goes through my head that maybe getting this virus really is inevitable, that I should just get infected and get it over with."
Take it from me, immunity is great. "Try it, you'll like it."
(Apologies if this double posts. Stupid blogger.)
I assume she is reading WaPoo and it is making her ill. There might be a lesson there.
Over the last 4 years I've tried to understand this (but I've given up now) phenomenon. This willingness to let him live in their minds rent free. The countless hours, days of life lost hating him. Even the most concerted obama-hater never allowed that hatred to dominate their waking moments. There was never a 'Obama derangement syndrome'.
Seriously, there will be psych studies done in the future, and books written about the phenomenon 100 years from now. How one man made half the nation certifiably insane.
I keep looking for the pictures of the mass graves.
Crazy people gonna crazy. They are crazy in so many different ways it’s amazing to witness. Some blame the masks, some blame the orange man, some are in denial, some live in abject fear. Personally, I blame the ChiComs and don’t whine about the sacrifices that my choices have forced upon me to newspapers.
What she should do is turn off the news feeds on her phone and cancel her newspaper, click off cable news, and check up on the virus once a week or so. Things don’t change even that fast, it’s a slow moving beast. It seems to be fading.
Why worry about your retirement? Once you are that old you are expendable so you won’t need the money. Ask just about any commenter here. What will happen if you do manage a comfortable retirement is that you will become an object of resentment from people like Pants. In fact I can’t figure out why people plan to have money at a time when their life will be adjudged to be worthless and in the way and the rest of society just wants them, well, not dead exactly, but you know, dead if that’s what it takes to cause us less bother, no matter how trivial.
She is clearly expressing that she can’t handle the truth, so she would prefer to be ignorant. Only if she had known that in the same period about 1.5 million Americans died — insert the perfunctory even 1 death is too many — one has to have a sense of proportion or tune out the news of the world.
"it isn't the virus causing my insomnia, it's the orange idiot."
Well, if I were on the fence,this would cement my vote for Trump.
Switching from the NYT to WaPo is like switching from CNN to MSNBC. Or from Ripple to MD2020. Or crack to meth.
None of them are good for you.
woman problems
"[S]he lies awake fretting about finances and lost retirement plans . . . I can’t continue living this way"
The panic promoters have a lot to answer for.
The woman is an idiot. She is wallowing in her unfounded fear of death from covid. About 1000 people die from it a week in a nation of over 300 million. Although each death is sad, so is each death from cancer, heart disease and diabetes but she doesn't lose sleep at night over fear of dying from them.
What’s wrong with this foolish woman? Of course the virus is inevitable! But the first couple months of the lockdown bought us time to learn how to treat it effectively. Now it’s time — past time! — for all of us to get back to living.
In fairness, GWB used to make them all constipated.
"Most nights, she waits in the darkness until she hears the thump of the newspaper hit her front door around 4:30 a.m."
Cancel that paper. You'll feel a lot better.
There's pretty much world peace but we gotta get rid of the guy what did it.
"it isn't the virus causing my insomnia, it's the orange idiot."
Boo hoo. If they hadn't allowed Hillary to rig the nomination they probably wouldn't have this fucking problem.
I’m often reminded of a characterization of the criticism directed at Reagan over his handling of the AIDS crisis—they seem to think it could be cured with the wave of a magic wand, but Reagan is being chintzy with the pixie dust.
The WAPO is owned by Bill Gates, Amazon's biggest shareholder. Amazon does a lot of business in China. Taking down Donald Trump will please Amazon's Chinese masters and increase their revenue. Follow the money.
Atlantic's owner, David G. Bradley, gave $500K to the Biden Campaign. Follow the money.
Strange, because I did the best sleeping of my post-twenties adult life last spring when work slowed down and became less office-based. Long luxurious snoozes, slipping in and out of consciousness during that part of the morning where I normally would have been up and at ‘em. It was wonderful, something I thought I had lost the capacity for around the time of the birth of my first child. Maybe the title of the article should have been, “The Easily Panicked, Panic”.
Schmidt is just collateral damage in the campaign to make COVID-19 even more serious than it is, to allow certain politicians to shut down the economy and, they hope, thereby weaken Trump in the election.
Of course somebody is going to mention Trump straight away. It's the Trump virus. Nancy told us so. As an enemy of the people, he invented it, and tried to blame the Chinese because he's a racist.
I think that's the PC answer.
Trump derangement syndrome derangement complex.
She's suffering from a social contagion that was spread with the viral contagion. The latter has evolved, but the former remains progressive, then mutates and diverges when politically congruent to partisan interests.
This panic was created by the Fake News and Dems and I will never forgive them for fhis.
Look at Sweden. No lockdowns. No masks. The virius is done in Sweden. Look at the stats.
"it isn't the virus causing my insomnia, it's the orange idiot."
With both "coronasomnia" and Trump Derangement, it's a steady diet of bullshit from the media that's the cause.
Like just about everything else these days -- how you view the police, whether you are pro-Israel or pro-Iran, whether or not you believe all whites are racist -- your reaction to COVID-19 seems to be determined by your worldview. Consequently, if somebody is petrified about the disease and lives her life accordingly, nothing can be done to change that. I have been much happier since I came to this realization. What it means is that people who hold what I consider to be abhorrent views are no longer enjoying life. On the other hand, the people with whom I interact at the gym and in restaurants and bars are likely not to hold those views. Moreover, these places are much less crowded than they used to be.
"It's just this war and that lying son of a bitch, Johnson! I would never hurt you. You know that."
Getting a little tiresome, isn't it?
The impulse to slam the guy -- first, last and always -- also blunts a person's willingness to listen to what other people might have to say about him or, indeed, any other topic. The radiating hatred mostly reflects self-gratifying narcissism.
It is also perverse in that it ascribes more power to the hated person than in fact he actually has.
The general level of frustration and anger over the pandemic certainly has exacerbated this tendency but does not excuse it. The people I admire are more concerned with the welfare of family and friends and less absorbed by their FEELINGS about any political candidate.
“For two terrifying weeks before Medicare kicked in, she had no health insurance”
Oh, dear. Two terrifying weeks, trapped in the hull of a capsized ocean lin...um, without health insurance.
That laughably unserious people are considered newsworthy is just a sign of how good we have it.
Whenever there's a big earthquake in California, there are always people who die from heart attacks even if nothing happens to their homes. Fear of the earthquake kills them, and not the earthquake itself.
Same thing is happening here. The MSM is saturated with depressing news about COVID, and it's inevitable that the precious little snowflakes will eventually head to their fainting couches.
They really need to read stories about the Spanish Flu, and get some perspective.
By the way, I personally know three people that have had Covid. They all were sick for two weeks, then got better, and went back to their jobs as front line workers in the medical field. My wife knows one person who THOUGHT he had Covid, but it turned out to be "just" influenza. Almost killed him too. The fact that he was over 300 pounds made his situation kind of, uh, "complicated".
"...hears the thump of the newspaper" is not designed to make the reader think, "Trump"?
The word I've heard for this is "doomscrolling."
The thing you have to realize about doomscrolling is that it is prompted by real events, but it's actually an anxiety phenomenon. (I want to say "disorder", but I don't think it's a recognized psychological disorder).
It's the WP...
There is a pretty good (for reviews) automobile site that is owned by a super leftie conglomerate.
The comments are nausea-inducing.
"Yeah, those dual-carbs are great if you get the fuel mixture right. But Trump can't get anything right. Fuck Trump!"
It's a disease, like transgenderism.
Seriously, what is wrong with these people? I mean, shit happens, we all face it at some time in our lives - the earlier the better - so we learn how to deal with it and overcome (and I don’t mean that in a motivational way - no one can solve your problems except you. Cheerleaders expressing empathy deserve a smack in the mouth. It’ll make you feel better).
Oh, and stop making ‘diseases’ up; quit that bullshit.
Do I worry about the dreaded covid? Nope, not one bit. I'm 65, in reasonably good health, with a Vitamin D blood level in the healthy range at 40 ng/ml. Chances of dying if I get it? Minuscule. The fact I've already been directly exposed to it at least twice- from 2 sons who've been diagnosed with it- makes me think I'm one of those who has T-cell immunity.
There is so much extreme Trump hating out there. I wonder if part of the reason that they focus on their Trump hatred so intensely is that they can't really get behind Biden. Biden is such a bad candidate that they have to make Trump look like the anti-Christ so that they can vote for Biden with a clear conscience.
I can't get past the paywall. How old is this woman? Does she have serious co-morbidities?
If she is under 50 and not morbidly obese I'd advise her to get out of the house and reclaim her life.
“For two terrifying weeks before Medicare kicked in, she had no health insurance”
The issue is affordability, availability, and health, not insurance. The diagnosis was progressive prices, not progressive costs, and dysfunctional choices. The treatment was a conventional placebo prescription of "shared responsibility" with a large dose of redistributive change and a not so novel indulgence of promissory notes.
The WAPO is owned by Bill Gates, Amazon's biggest shareholder.
What happened to Bezos?
For some reason, Democrats/Progressives need panic. Or at least widespread nervous uncertainty. Was it a coincidence that Black Lives Matter came along just when we were starting to take some comfort in the idea that, "We're all in this together..."?
I sure as hell don't worry about COVID anymore. I had it, 2 weeks ago. I'm still recovering -- very tired, sleeping a lot -- but basically: been there, done that. Didn't kill me, made me stronger. Now I'm invincible.
This is garden-variety menopause. Honey, all women past a certain age worry in the night. It's what low estrogen does to you. Say a rosary, watch a cooking show, play an online game with Europeans, enjoy the quiet of the night while the house is asleep. When all else fails wake your husband and ask for a hug. He's happy to help.
And if I die, I die, - which has been my attitude since the start.
And if everybody approached it that way, we never would've had the last six months of stupidity.
We're all going to die someday. Living in constant fear is no way to live at all.
What are they going to do when he is no longer president and they are still miserable?
I have written it many times- we have lost all perspective in this crisis, and it is almost all due to the media hyping this story as the next Black Death. The media never would have done that if Shelob had won the election in 2016. In that President Shelob alternate time line, the media treated the pandemic (and it is a pandemic by any reasonable definition) as something reasonably serious, but not so serious that you have to shutdown non-essential businesses or schools. In that alternate reality, the pandemic had one big wave in the Spring in the US that killed the same number of people as our reality, but was mostly over with by July.
I have written it many times now- the lockdowns only slowed the spread of the virus in the Western world. If we could have had a widely available vaccine in just three months time, then, perhaps the lockdowns were a reasonable reply to a disease that might kill 500,000 to 2,000,000 elderly or sick Americans (or proportional numbers of British, French, Italian, Spanish etc.). However, it was always obvious that an effective vaccine would not be widely available anywhere before early 2021, if then. Lockdowns of more than few weeks were never going to happen on broad scale anywhere in the Western world- it simply wasn't reasonable or practical. We can see this in the data everywhere now- as you reopen, even tentatively, the virus starts spreading again. Those same European and Asian countries that were lauded endlessly in the press for their hard lockdowns are now seeing the virus spread again, but they now have no choice but to mostly let it run its course since, again, the lockdowns can't be maintained without killing far more people than the virus will.
We used to have serious people in positions of authority, but, now, we largely don't. Trump should have followed his first instincts on lockdowns, but he decided to not make a stand against them and let the governors take the lead. I think a lot of those governors had learned the lesson, at least the Republican ones, by early May and most of them have not re-locked down and let the virus start burning itself out naturally across the Sunbelt. What I see in the data over and over is that the first wave (March-May) was probably a lot larger than is captured by the testing data, and that the first wave in most state killed the most vulnerable to the disease, which means the second wave in July-September didn't have nearly as much dry tinder to work with, and thus the case fatality rates never spiked that much anywhere.
Going into the Fall and Winter, I would just watch the European countries like France and Spain getting big second waves right now- I think will see the same thing you saw in places like Texas and Florida during the Summer- the fatality rates of Spring won't be repeated again anywhere that had a large outbreak in the Spring.
Depression in middle aged white women is epidemic, and it is expressed as Trump-panic.
In the past when the natural functions of ecology were more effective, as this woman pondered her predicament, a leopard would sneak up behind and drag her off making her existence at least valuable to some creature.
What she should worry about is that things like deadly diseases are specifically useful in eliminating members of a population like herself.
OK, that's cruel. Don't tell her that.
"What happened to Bezos?"
It might be classism to say, but to me, all billionaires look alike.
Perhaps we should create one or more Not USA Zones in the country where all the the TDS crowd can move to and enjoy their dystopia.
I'm calling bs on worries about "lost" retirement accounts. The stock market is doing fantastically well, even with the recent correction. If she didn't have her retirement accounts in the market, well, that's not really surprising, is it?
She was without health insurance for TWO WEEKS and she was terrified? Shoot, I was without it for TWO YEARS due to ObamaCare making health insurance unaffordable.
THEOLDMAN
“I have written it many times- we have lost all perspective in this crisis, and it is almost all due to the media hyping this story as the next Black Death. The media never would have done that if Shelob had won the election in 2016. In that President Shelob alternate time line, the media treated the pandemic (and it is a pandemic by any reasonable definition) as something reasonably serious, but not so serious that you have to shutdown non-essential businesses or schools. In that alternate reality, the pandemic had one big wave in the Spring in the US that killed the same number of people as our reality, but was mostly over with by July.”
Exactly right. There almost has to be some tie between the desire to destroy Trump, in the run up to the election, and the actions taken by the Dem governors of these states. It seems that they almost uniformly took the most brain dead approach that they could think of.
This person. This personality type, would be exactly the same without covid. It would be some other self imposed potential disaster. She has no interest in finding some peace and serinity. I could get her to peace and serenity, but not until she is willing to change. This is 100% her problem, and only she can fix herself.
Did you have another test, Roughcoat?
This person. This personality type, would be exactly the same without covid. It would be some other self imposed potential disaster.
Had one of these types in my squad of engineers. Always something about to end the world. After the sixth or seventh we-be-doooooomed episode I began quoting to him articles about hidden disease in the jungles of Africa or the latest asteroid near miss.
Good times.
It's just another example of how privileged women are never supposed to have Bad Feels and it's other people responsibility to make sure that doesn't happen.
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