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Rowan Mangan

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Pandemic babies, lockdown life

August 16, 2021 25 Comments

In some new parent spaces I visit online, I often hear some version of “OH NO! My pandemic baby has had an unnatural life in lockdown! He’s going to be socially stunted!”

It’s easy to get hooked by big fears like this, especially when you’re new to the parenting gig. So I spent some time thinking about it. I thought about how my own anxiety has been at an all-time low since the lockdown that began early in my pregnancy.

I thought about all the daily stresses that Lila has never experienced: the inevitable fraying of nerves that comes with tight schedules, with rushing in and out of the house, with the clashing of human energies that accompanies a life steeped in society.

And I thought about this cultural idea that we have to be exposed to discomfort so that we’re better at tolerating discomfort. Which, when you come right down to it, is a pretty whack idea.

I spent decades pushing myself into highly stimulating environments, believing that it was somehow “correct human behavior.” I thought that my hatred of it reflected poorly on my ability to be human—rather than exposing some core incompatibility.

Don’t get me wrong: I LOVE the human world. Like the saying goes, it’s a great place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there. The past 18 months has given me my first-ever taste of the complete opt-out. And I found it tasty indeed.

The pandemic has delivered its own heartbreaks to our household, of course, and I don’t want to romanticize this crisis. Lockdown itself is a lonely and desperate experience for many. But the fact is that it’s brought a sweet layer of peace into our home.

Over these months and months, the five of us have knitted our individual energies into a delicate lacework that lets us move among each other with harmony. It decorates our rituals and the maps of our days, together and apart.

A year of peace. Such an elusive experience in a 21st century life. And for Lila, I can only feel that if it stunts her development in some way, maybe that’s not a necessary development. We can teach her noise and movement later. For now I’m happy teaching her the gentle language of shifting afternoon sunlight.

This article originally appeared on Rowan’s Wild Inventures substack newsletter. To subscribe and get all Rowan’s posts in your inbox, head over to Wild Inventures on substack now. 

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Because if you do, then you continue to give your life for cannon fodder and give your labor for billionaires—you aren’t questioning the status quo. 

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Hey there, Bewildered Cahoot! We have a very speci Hey there, Bewildered Cahoot! We have a very special episode for you today as we’re talking with our friends and fellow creative revolutionaries, Amie McNee and James Winestock. 🎨

Amie is a writer, author, and creativity coach whose new book, We Need Your Art, is out now.
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There is a wonderful artist we love called Amie Mc There is a wonderful artist we love called Amie McNee (@inspiredtowrite), who recently wrote a very cool essay on her Substack about not wanting a job. She said that if you don’t want to have a conventional job in this society, you will be seen as weak or lazy. 🦥

For Amie, it’s a very different sort of thing—it’s about not having a high tolerance for suffering and not wanting to suffer. Here’s what she says in her essay:

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“Now I write, talk, paint, connect. I do it to make money. I do it because it lights me up. I do it because that is why I’m here on this earth. Life sparkles, yet I still feel like I'm getting away with something. I’ve snuck around a compulsory part of being a human being, which is doing work that sucks.”

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Our culture tells us to always put money in the mi Our culture tells us to always put money in the middle of our lives, and there’s a compulsiveness to this feeling of hoarding money and of making money. 🤑

In this episode of Bewildered, we’re talking about this compulsion and looking at what might fill our attention if we take money and jobs out of the middle.

Money is basically an abstract extrapolation of the barter system. 🪙🟰🐮

Our culture has turned it into something you can hoard when actually you can’t, not in any meaningful way, because on its own, money doesn’t mean anything. 🪙🟰🪙

We heard a quote in the context of addiction that said, “You can never get enough of something that almost works.” Money is an addictive thing that makes you want more and more and more of it because you’re trying to fill a differently shaped hole.

In this episode we’re challenging the idea that money should be at the center of our lives and proposing what kinds of things we could put there instead. Join us!

You can listen to Bewildered episode 98: Your Money or Your Life, access the show notes, and find links to resources on our website at the link in our bio—or on your favorite podcasting app. 🎧

** A note on this episode: We angered the technology gods somehow during the recording of this podcast, and they took away the video we faithfully recorded for you. We are making the appropriate offerings to those specific deities and we’ll be back in your visual field for the next episode! **
Our culture tells us that you need to put money… Our culture tells us that you need to put money…

💵 the making of money
🪙 the generating of money
🤑 the money-making-money-making-money

…at the very center of your attention, if not your entire life.

Now, it may be that at this moment, work and getting money has to fill a lot of our day, but it doesn’t have to fill our attention.

What we’re talking about today on Bewildered is what happens when you pluck the money/work cultural story from the center of your attention. 🎯

Let’s see what goes there instead. It’s kind of wild…

Join us!

You can listen to Bewildered episode 98: Your Money or Your Life, access the show notes, and find links to resources on our website at the link in our bio—or on your favorite podcasting app. 🎧

** A note on this episode: We angered the technology gods somehow during the recording of this podcast, and they took away the video we faithfully recorded for you. We are making the appropriate offerings to those specific deities and we’ll be back in your visual field for the next episode! **

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