Inspired by Austin Kleon, Omar created a one page zine, about living through quarantine in China during the Coronavirus outbreak. He has also been blogging regular updates about what the isolation has been like. The quarantine not only excludes contact with others, but for families, it tests your internal dynamics.
To answer the question of what people would do if stuck inside all day, Arsh Raziuddin from the Atlantic posits this:
The answer is far more familiar than the fearful conjecture forebodes. Many Americans would do the same thing they do now, mostly. Netflix has already fused us to our couches. For years, contemporary society has been bracing, and even longing, for quarantine.
He goes on further to point out that modern technology has been paving the way for discretionary, if not mandatory, isolation for some time.
If conditions get truly bad, a serious public-health lockdown would indeed upend ordinary life. Barring that extreme, efforts such as the ones just mentioned extend a process that was under way long before a novel virus threatened to go pandemic. In a way, “quarantine” is just a raw, surprising name for the condition that computer technologies have brought about over the last two decades: making almost everything possible from the quiet isolation of a desk or a chair illuminated by an internet-connected laptop or tablet.
While Raziuddin is skeptical of the notion that anyone could get bored or restless at home these days, the confinement diaries of Omar and others might tell us that it is indeed still possible.
