There’s a great SNL sketch that clarifies what a trip to Italy can and cannot do for you. Adam Sandler, playing the owner of an Italian tour company, reminds potential customers to maintain realistic expectations. You can get on a plane and go to Italy, but you’re still going to be the same person when you get there. If you’re sad now, you’ll be sad in Italy. The company can take you wine tasting, but they cannot change the reasons why you drink. The company can take you on a hike, but they can’t turn you into someone who likes being in the outdoors.
It’s a great sketch. And for me, it illustrates a common misconception that I’ve seen posted all over social media.
There’s been a lot of buzz from friends about how we can all learn new skills and new projects. But let’s be real. I haven’t done those things. You probably haven’t either. Sure, I signed up for a couple of Harvard classes through EdX because that was a thing for a while. And yes, I made scones once. But mostly I’ve binge watched Veep and scrapped the digital bottom of my podcast listening backlog.
Unless reciting all the lines of the new Fiona Apple album counts as a new skill, I haven’t learned one. I didn’t learn French before, and I’m certainly not going to do it now. And what’s with the cooking stuff? I’m not baking bread; I just learned to lower my expectations at the grocery store because bread was gone for a month.
I’m still the same person, just in quarantine. It’s not going to be a time that I reflect on too much later in life.
So let’s be clear, those of you who loved learning languages as a weird hobby probably learned a couple more. Most of us didn’t. If you were a self-starter before quarantine, you probably were apt to utilize your time. The rest of us just did a little more of the usual things we were already doing before being stuck in our houses.
I thought I’d quickly go over what I’ve learned about what quarantine can and cannot do. There seems to be a lot of confusion about these two things on social media, and I’d like to clear it up based on my own experience.
Quarantine Can / Quarantine Cannot
- Give you more time to cook at home / Make you stop ordering take-out every night
- Get you exercising outdoors / Make the weather cooperate for your outdoor workouts
- Offer more hours of productivity due to no commute / Force you to use your saved time wisely
- Give you a moment to examine yourself and your own mortality / Make you do the work to make significant life changes
- Keep us from eating inside restaurants / Stop us supporting said restaurants through take-out and delivery
It’s clear that COVID-19 has changed things, including the way we live. It has given us the opportunity to change as well. But just because we have the opportunity, it doesn’t guarantee that we will take advantage.
