Is anyone else getting stir crazy?

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Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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I just wanted to vent a bit and see how others are handling this.

Last year, as an example, I flew over 140,000 miles just on United. There were a few other flights on China Eastern Airlines and others as well. On average, I was on a plane once every five days.

I was commenting to Will yesterday that for the last 2-3 years I have come home from Taipei the morning of Halloween. It just feels strange.

For those outside of the US, there are very few places we can travel to due to COVID restrictions.

For this year, I was going to ramp up travel. I was even planning to go to all seven continents this year which is a big reason I did New Zealand for a weekend in January.

Now I am stuck at home with relatively few places I can go. I have flown twice in the US this year, the furthest was on a flight to Big Sky/ Bozeman MT. Those places are fun, and there are certainly differences between folks in different parts of the US. It still lacks a lot of the cultural perspective one gets from going outside the country.

Let us hope we can get back to going places soon.
 

amalurk

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Dec 16, 2016
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Different strokes for different folks. I have no desire to globe-trot, just an occasional vacation away from the kids. My wife and I were discussing the other day how we will likely look back fondly on this time being "trapped" at home with our kids and their distance learning, especially, when they are teenage plus and want nothing to do with us.
 
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sboesch

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Aug 3, 2012
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The first month or so was great. I got lots of things done around the house, upgraded my home network, caught up on some books. Now, well, I'm pretty much over it. All my favorite restaurants have gone by the wayside, I too had a big travel itinerary that's been nixed. I haven't seen my family in over a year now. No concerts, live music, or theater. These four walls have certainly become smaller. I don't see this changing anytime soon, I just hope corona at least becomes seasonal, preferably gone altogether.
 
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PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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Definitely over it. Can still work thanks to Zoom/etc., but trying to do design work or collaborate without getting i a room and hashing things out is just not the same. I miss travel, both personal and work. I’m blessed with a great house to work out of and a great garden to work outside. But I’m itching to get out of here.
 
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BlueFox

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Oct 26, 2015
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Certainly has gotten to be monotonous. We've been doing the best we can to keep the cabin fever at bay, but it's a struggle when you live in a highrise condo with limited space and no yard. It's rather demoralizing when there's no end in sight and that it has become a political issue.

While my spouse and I don't travel nearly as much as you, we average about a month out of the country in any given year and are disappointed that we had to forego this years trip. Even though I hold 3 passports and could visit Europe for example still, it feels rather irresponsible, so that's not happening (not to mention everything is getting locked down again). All of our domestic business travel has been canceled and that is generally something to look forward to as well (eg I have an annual NYC trip to a vendor and she'll tag along to explore the city during the week).

Telecommuting has been mostly a plus as I think very few like being stuck in traffic twice a day. I have a nicer setup at home than in the office and thanks to having a site-to-site tunnel back to the office and an IP phone, I don't even have to dial in every day from my workstation. It certainly seems that I'm working considerably more though and it's hard to maintain a good balance however. Wish upper management didn't plan on getting everyone back to the office after 95%+ of the entire company (offshore contractors aside) has been successfully telecommuting for the better part of a year.

At least I've gotten in more outdoor activities this year than I have in the past couple combined. Many 10-15 mile hikes in the nearby mountains.

Here's hoping this is all behind us soon, even though it doesn't seem likely.
 

edge

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Apr 22, 2013
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The year before 9/11, I did 180,000 miles on Continental - a lot of that between NYC and Redmond. I haven't topped 10,000 since. I missed it the first couple of years.
 

Stephan

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Apr 21, 2017
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Couple years ago I pulled a Joe Rogan and moved out to the country side. Not super super remote like some places in your Colorado but it is quiet, distraction free, much lower cost, basically zero crime (ubiquitous theft was really getting on my nerves in the city). I look out the window and see 200 year old trees. There is no emotional drain from living in a big city building with nothing to do but watch tv or browse the internet. Judging by the booked out moving businesses right now in US, it could be a trend. Germans call it "Landflucht", flight to the country side.

Sure there is always one more Taj Mahal to visit. Vaccine is only 6-9 months out though and after that, most things will normalize aka return to a mean. Sometimes things need to be taken from you for you to really keep appreciating them. Like a chair, in the sky, flying close to the speed of sound, with you sitting in it, looking at the clouds from above, sipping sparkling water from God knows where.
 

Dreece

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Jan 22, 2019
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Travelling wise, been everywhere (interesting), done everything (exhilarating), pretty much have been working remotely for a few years now anyway so doesn't really impact us per-se.

We're going to be under a second lock-down from Thursday onwards here in the UK, apparently only for a month though our politicians are advising that they are considering extending the second lockdown even longer.

All the usual places where we once used to congregate with friends and family, ie restaurants, closed, and those of which did open after the easing of first lockdown were required to take personal details of all customers for tracking purposes, which we do not agree with meaning we've kept away from restaurants since the first lockdown.

The digital tracking/tracing and compulsory-vaccinations required for travel will be the end of the old-world and the beginning of the New World. Once the 'miracle' vaccines are out, we will grant governments permission to stick needles into us for the privilege of travel and possibly even mingling at national public-venues (blatant extortion if you ask me). I shall not digress into my concerns regarding the weak-science behind vaccines nor the associated long-term health implications nor possible impacts on fertility/offspring... but looks like I won't be travelling anywhere ever again. Thank goodness I done what I had to do in my 20s-30s.

One of the beauties of living on the edge of metropolis with immediate access to the rural world is that we do have the ability to step into a forest and mingle with nature freely, so to be frank, people like us living a simple life outside of the busy city/town atmosphere tend to watch the news for entertainment value, because here where nobody can hear you scream, nothing has changed, nobody has died...

Plan for 2021 is to invest in a larger vegetable garden, self-sufficiency is now our moral agenda.
 

WANg

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Jun 10, 2018
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Well, for me, it’s a bit of a plus and a minus. I had to run the IT side of a large conference in New Orleans at the very beginning of the year (which went much smoother than originally anticipated), then followed by a week at Walt Disney World with the missus (which turned out to be much more stressful and less enjoyable due to how we seemingly outgrew Disney - should’ve done a trip to the Caribbean instead). I had business travel scheduled for Orlando in mid-March and NABShow Las Vegas in April.

There were plans of flying to Europe during Summer 2020 for planning/training at my company HQ, then followed by a week of R&R in Istanbul + Izmir with the missus.

All that definitely went on the wayside -
All trips were cancelled in mid-March. The big COVID shutdown happened in New York City a week after we made office attendance optional, and I was the person to manage the orderly shutdown of the office.

I caught the ’rhona two weeks later and that kept me home for 2 weeks (nasty cough, bit of fever and chills but nothing overly serious that OTC medication can’t deal with) - with the exception of the local supermarket 6 blocks away we didn’t venture anywhere for nearly 2 months...and it was surreal waiting on a line outside of a NYC supermarket like it was a Soviet bread line for produce that doubled in price seemingly overnight.

Me and the missus were home working off Zoom, Office 365 and our laptops, and via extended hours. My foyer became a de-facto Fedex depot receiving and dispatching IT equipment to remote work employees.
Fortunately right behind my apartment building there is a nice, wooded area that me and the missus stroll around once every week once the shelter-in-place orders were lifted at the end of May 2020, and our cats kept me relatively sane (stroking the fur of a cat snoozing in your lap is remarkably stress shedding).

To be quite honest, not traveling much this year made me and the missus appreciate the small things that are close to us. We tried out more local restaurants via delivery. We spent more time at home just talking or planning, and waste less time commuting. We rented cars over the weekends and discovered some interesting things outside the city - well, okay, we drove about 90 minutes east to avoid the crowds slamming the NYC Costcos, but we also discovered local notables like Stew Leonards, or visit farmstands for fresh fruits/vegetables grown in local hothouses (when the local stores back in the city will charge more for less selections). Hell, we have a better awareness of where to go (even via public transport) if we want to avoid the crowds.

My wife managed to develop a green thumb growing/tending to potted plants in the apartment, and I got better building plastic model kits from the Hobby Lobby (it doesn’t exist in NYC so every trip out east means a stopover at their locations to pick up a few kits) instead of the usual desire to sate our global wanderlust.

So while yes, I miss going to places (even if it’s nearby like DC, Toronto or Montreal), I didn’t get too stir crazy. I did probably got a little insane stirring up the little pots of Tamiya paint putting the correct colors on my 1/72 F/A-18E Super Hornet. It doesn’t mean I don’t want to travel - just not before this entire insanity works its way through the population (2022 at the earliest, I really don’t trust the vaccines entering phase 3 human testing would be free of side effects compared to say, some other vaccine that was given the usual FDA mandated 7 year test cycle).
 
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lostmind

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Jan 5, 2013
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I am going stir crazy as well. We have a small vacation property in the USA (I'm Canadian) and we typically spend spring break and summer holidays down there as the kid can play outdoors with other kids all the time. They shut the border down the night we were packed and leaving and thought covid was no big deal...

Since then, we've been pretty much shut in. I've only recently started going back to the gym and it now looks like that may be shut down soon. We've ordered in food just 5x and have not eaten out once since mar 11. We had hoped to be in Germany in september for a couple weeks. We had hoped to visit Japan next spring but even that is not looking good.

Oh and I can't even winterize my property in the USA... and I of course went down the weekend prior to the shut down and de-winterized for our spring break trip.

Lots of fun.
 
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Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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Almost a year without travel and living on an island 20km x 40kms it’s no fun at all. At least you guys in countries like the USA or UK can travel somewhere by road and see family etc.
We are stuck in a country with no family and no where to go :-/
At least Covid is not a big issue at all and virtually zero transmission.
 
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EffrafaxOfWug

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Feb 12, 2015
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I've never been much of a traveller (only even go back and see the family every 3 years or so) and don't really do much in the way of holidays (usually a couple of jaunts a year somewhere picturesque in europe), but it's just the unending monotony of the same four walls that's utterly doing my head in.

I'm luckier than most in London in that I'm not living in a shared house and I have a dedicated study room, so I'm not perched at the end of my bed with a laptop and my remote working environment is pretty much ideal. But... the work I did in an office has an off-switch. I stand up, leave, get on a train, half an hour to do the crossword and other puzzles. Kaboom, I'm home and not even considering about the possibility of work thinking about the chance of crossing my mind. On reflection, the commute on the train has been the start and endpoint to every one of my working days since I was a wee nipper and now that's gone I don't really feel I've adjusted.

But now? I've got no off switch. I wake up, log on at the same desk I do my hobbies at. When work supposedly finishes (N.B. - it doesn't) I've got no mental break to get out of the work mindset which means I've spent the last six months unable to effectively unplug from work and it's slowly but surely driving me bonkers. I've done pretty much no geeky work at home because I've just completely lost the appetite for it as a hobby when it seems to fill every waking moment through work, and in the same place.

Granted, I'm one of three people in the company that governs how the remote working happens; we were forced to scale from "we have an emergency remote working solution for maybe ten people" to "you've now got to make this work for over a thousand people" to "you've now got to make this much, much better for over a thousand people" so yeah, thanks, no pressure guys. Even if my bonus next year ends up being ****ing spectacular I'm not sure it's been worth the mental anguish.

I consider myself one of the lucky ones as far as objective factors are concerned - I live in south London (the best half to live in!) within spitting distance of several parks and woods that are great for relaxing walks (and having a walk around somewhere unknown or unexplored has been a tonic for me since I was five), have a lovely partner (who's been an absolute rock) and a very calming/annoying cat to help me cope; but I think the biggest problem is perception of time. The feeling of "you're doing work right now!" in my head never seems to end, I'll often get up and work on saturday thinking it's a thursday and wonder why no-one's online; things that happened yesterday were actually several weeks ago, things that happened months back were actually a week ago. Insomnia, banished over a decade ago through intense effort, has returned and if I'm lucky sleep is maybe 6hrs a night on a good day, 3hrs on a bad one.

I'm proper envious for those of you for whom working from home works - in my opinion you're very lucky. But I think it depends on the nature of your work and especially your mental state. I don't think everyone's cut out for it and I think I'm definitely not.
 
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WANg

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Singapore.
pretty Good place to be for sure but just not big. (Size size, it’s about 6m population)
Oh, 6 mil isn't that bad - at least the population is not shoved onto little valleys and crevices like Hong Kong.
 

lostmind

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Jan 5, 2013
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If I had to be trapped somewhere, Singapore would be high on my list. Primarily for food related reasons. :)

can't stop working when working from home
As a small biz owner who has been 100% remote for years, I can completely relate.

If you don't "own" the company, this seems to be much easier. I have several team members who are able to shut down at the end of their shift and move into hobbies and gaming without any issues.

Myself? I can barely watch a movie with the wife on the couch after working 12 hours straight without worrying I should be getting something productive done...
 

Sean Ho

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Nov 19, 2019
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I'm proper envious for those of you for whom working from home works - in my opinion you're very lucky. But I think it depends on the nature of your work and especially your mental state. I don't think everyone's cut out for it and I think I'm definitely not.
I can definitely empathise; I've been working from home for nearly ten years now, and it can be tough sometimes. Although I don't do this myself, one idea that has worked for some is to continue "commuting" to/from work, by taking a 5min walk around the block. Get up, get dressed, have a proper breakfast, leave the house, and when you come back, now you're "at work" and in work mode. Do the reverse at the end of the day.

What does help me is to allocate time at the end of each "working period" to document what I've done or am working on in-progress. Once it's recorded, it's easier for me to drop it from my mind and free up cycles for other things.

It also helps with the constant stress of feeling like I'm not being as productive as I should be -- by writing down my to-do list and breaking it down into feasible chunks, I see that the tasks I'm working on are actually enormous, several FTE worth, and I shouldn't at all feel bad about my apparent slow progress. The documentation is helpful in convincing managers/clients of this, as well!
 
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gregsachs

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Aug 14, 2018
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I can definitely empathise; I've been working from home for nearly ten years now, and it can be tough sometimes. Although I don't do this myself, one idea that has worked for some is to continue "commuting" to/from work, by taking a 5min walk around the block. Get up, get dressed, have a proper breakfast, leave the house, and when you come back, now you're "at work" and in work mode. Do the reverse at the end of the day.

What does help me is to allocate time at the end of each "working period" to document what I've done or am working on in-progress. Once it's recorded, it's easier for me to drop it from my mind and free up cycles for other things.

It also helps with the constant stress of feeling like I'm not being as productive as I should be -- by writing down my to-do list and breaking it down into feasible chunks, I see that the tasks I'm working on are actually enormous, several FTE worth, and I shouldn't at all feel bad about my apparent slow progress. The documentation is helpful in convincing managers/clients of this, as well!
Agree completely about enforced breaks. I make sure I block at least 30 minutes for lunch away from computers. I've also started doing conference calls of the type where i largely need to listen while walking on the treadmill, it makes them somewhat productive...