There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can't hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die
Charles Bukowski

During these quarantine days, I have been cleaning up some stuff, both real and digital. I ended up in an old post from June 2008 from one of my first blogs, where I was reviewing Charles Bukowski´s book "The captain is out to lunch".

Even if without all the scorn and resentment that Bukowski´s words bring with them, I started reflecting on how some people are not only, not taking advantage of this situation of social distancing and quarantine, but really throwing their life away in boredom and mindless activities.

Covid19 hit Italy way before Germany so I could experience the lockdown tales directly from my relatives and friends when we could still go to concerts, visit the gym or simply take strolls. And what everyone was saying was:

Thank God we are all fine, but it is hard to simply let another day pass, and what we do is just stay home and get bored.

Now that I have been home with my wife - both working remote - and kids - both with homeschooling / online courses - for 4 weeks, I still do not fully understand their complaints.

Don´t get me wrong. It is tough. If you are working it could be tough to find the balance between work and free time, if you have to entertain small kids, or help the older ones with homework, or with homeschooling, it could be challenging and time-consuming. If you are not working (being laid off, or forced to take unpaid leave) it might be scary thinking about your financial future. If you have a very small apartment and not even a small balcony it could be suffocating.

But... most people I was speaking to where not in such conditions.
They were home, with their family, within a certain degree of financial safety, with enough room at home for everyone.

Nevertheless, they spent every single day cooking and baking ( which is actually a very good activity to do with the entire family ), eating, drinking alcohol, smoking, watching and doing challenges on TikTok and binge-watching Netflix.

What´s weird in our case is that we actually have more time - since we are not going out, no gym, no courses, no commuting, no shopping - but I feel we have even less than before, so many are the things I want to do at home.
The quarantine can be suffocating and kill motivation, but there are lots of possibilities yet. Lots of things to do, train, study, renovate, learn something you always wanted to learn, try yoga, meditation, try writing poetry, open a blog, build a small balcony-veggie garden, go through all old boxes ( or folders on your old hard drive) of photos, and make all those memories and moments come back to life.

Even TikTok and Instagram can be a great source of creativity actually, but you need to be ready to grasp them and make it yours, not just consume them passively and forward them to your contacts.

True, some things might require spending some money buying stuff online, or enough space, which many don't have, but there are still lot's of opportunities and most of them are nearly free (and anyway less than one pack of cigarettes and a bottle of wine every day).

But the thing we normally lack the most is time, and right now, we have a lot of it. Let´s not waste it.

Do not waste your time. do not waste your life.

Everyone say opportunities are out there, in this case, are in there, exactly at your place.

Stay home, stay safe.