It’s the End of the World as we Know It!
(And I Feel Fine)
That’s great, it starts with an earthquake
Birds and snakes, an aeroplane
Lenny Bruce is not afraid
When the COVID segregation started 10 weeks ago (Bloomr, like the majority of the Creative Central team from Mediacorp, was immediately segregated to WFH when the SG government increased the DORSCON level to Orange in mid-Feb), the first thought that crossed my mind was “I need to make sure my team is ready for what is about to happen”.
At the time, that thought was not foreign to me, as with everything that has happened with/& to Bloomr.SG in the past 3 years, a lot of curve balls have been thrown at us consistently enough for me to know that nothing is what it seems when it is “handed to you” or thrown at us.
For a lot of people, working from home can be a dream come true (I can tell you that last year I had a period of personal problems that working from home for a couple of months could have been extremely helpful, but alas, it was not to be)… you get to sleep in to right before you’re usually supposed to work (8:30am, guilty in the first week), you get to work in your boxers (guilty in the first 2 weeks), you get to have a 1h of total meditative food preparation halfway through the day (still guilty to this day) and you get to spend time doing the things you thought you’ve been avoiding around your house before all of this started happening…
What I quickly figured out though was, working from home is an exercise in patience & self-control, rather than anything else (an exercise in controlled insanity).
Team by team, reporters baffled, trumped, tethered, cropped
Look at that low plane, fine, then
Uh oh, overflow, population, common food
But it’ll do, save yourself, serve yourself.
World serves its own needs
Having to be online every day is troubling, especially when your job has to do with finding current trends in content, posts, conversations, ideas, etc… everything and anything to do with social in the past 3 months is and has been around COVID. Plain and Simple. And a lot of it is negative, which doesnt help when your job is to try to keep the spirits up of “those around you”.
I am by no means a positive motivator by heart (it only comes to me in times of necessity… which currently is a necessity) and a lot of the past few weeks has been complicated to handle, mostly because a lot of our futures is up in the balance, but what I’ve learned to do consistently is to think of the now, rather than to plan for the next 3 months ahead, when not a single (I REPEAT… A SINGLE) specialist around the world, has any idea/clue/inkling/expectation/view of what is about to happen to the world.
A tournament, a tournament, a tournament of lies
Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives, and I decline
So, I write this small entry to our Bloomr.SG Medium articles as a note of hope for all of us that are currently having to cope with a foreign reality to what your past decades have been training you to be.
I write it with the hope and unbridled respect for those that have to work outside of home and have to (on a daily basis) figure out ways (and prepare themselves) to face the reality of a world that is in chaos (sorry… but it is…).
But most of all, I write it to state that, even though I wasn’t prepared for the end of the world as we know it, and that tougher times may be even possible ahead, I do feel fine. And so should you. Even if what you’re doing isn’t perfect. Even if you haven’t gotten used to working from home, or especially if you’re in the frontlines of what our COVID riddled world has become. Even if you feel stressed, worried, bored, depressed, detached, fearful or darn-right silly for thinking this is a weird time. You’ll be fine. So. When things get slightly darker or there’s seemingly no way out of the hurricane, just go to the deepness of your thoughts and start singing:
It’s the End of the World as we Know It!
…. and I Feel Fine.
If you’re wondering, these are lyrics to the awesome R.E.M. song in link
