I really enjoyed this well-written and thoughtful comment that appeared in a thread on my Facebook page, and with the permission of the author, Emiliano Pardo Saguier, I'm posting it here.
Emiliano was responding to my downbeat remarks about the psychological toll that this extended period of national house arrest is taking on me.
(The title of the post is mine, and is a reference to Hillary Mantel's latest [and final] book in her trilogy on Thomas Cromwell.)
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These recommendations are not meant to make light of your intellectual acumen, nor are they made in jest. With the assumed proviso that you will take this with good cheer, I say:
Go outside. If you have a yard, or an open private space of any kind, sunbathe in the hours between 10-12 PM, or so. Expose as much unprotected skin as you can to maximize vitamin D production — to be frank, twenty-or-so minutes in the midday sun should prove more than sufficient if you're bone-white like me.
There are myriad unknown benefits to sun exposure. Many of the mechanisms of the benefits that are known are a mystery too, but it's been theorized that vitamin D (which is notably useless as a supplement) is not the cause of all the benefits from sun exposure, but rather one of its byproducts. It's indeed a marker that you're getting enough of it, but not the only net positive.
For one, you'll be in much better spirits, and have improved focus and concentration. Having increased vitamin D levels won't hurt either; there's pretty strong evidence to suggest that most in the Western industrialized world are lacking in it. Your immune level will improve by leaps and bounds, which you would want in any old year, but especially in 2020. There's solid epidemiological data that backs high vit D as one of the greatest barriers against COVID-19 complications.
These may seem like painfully obvious suggestions, and you may already be following them, but they've worked wonders for me. I've been soaking up more rays than I had ever gotten in my 36 years, and I've found sun exposure to be the silver bullet against an all-abiding state of dejection and depression. I've also been on more flights since this whole crisis started than I'd been in the past five years combined, and I haven't had more than a few sniffles, or a couple coughs back in March.
For human stupidity and irrationality, I have nothing. We're just a bunch of apes, too afraid to die, too afraid to live, it seems. The world is now stuck in this stupid, useless, deadly paralysis.
And while people blindly follow the official story, even revolutionaries and Bernie-bros, we continue to circle the drain, ever closer to the big gulp.
My only solace in this situation is the few contrarian, non-conspiratorial voices rising from the din and being reasonable. Maybe one day, voices like yours will be hailed as the actual heroes in all this mess.
Don't hold your breath, though. We know this is all the fault of Trump, global warming, the Left, the Right, the Pope, the Church, CO2 emissions, climate skeptics, climate believers, SJWs, alt-righters, and that guy who sneezed on me at LAX.
Never of the stupid, gullible asshole in the mirror.
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