Grocery stores have been raided, streets empty, households disrupted and to top it all off I ran out of my last packet of milk Bikkis today. If milk Bikki withdrawal can be so terrible, I can’t imagine people who have to cut themselves forcibly off the hard stuff- cigarettes, alcohol, pot, bournvita or whatever the hell floats your boat or even worse worry where your next meal is going to come from.

So life mostly sucks right now, plain and simple. And if you, like me already suffer from anxiety. The last thing you need is to be slapped with “productivity hacks” on how to use your one bar of soap, to break the time-space continuum or some such nonsense. I don’t care if Shakespeare wrote King Lear while he was quarantined during the plague. How can I bake as a form of corona therapy when I’m scared to go grocery shopping at the risk of infecting myself or worse my family? And for the love of God, No! I don’t want to turn my living room into a home gym using water bottles for hand weights.

Productivity is, under normal circumstances, a value-agnostic term. Get work deliverables done, sure. Pace yourself, sure. But for the sake of your mental health don’t give in to “hustle culture” — the absurd notion that every nanosecond of our lives must be commodified and pointed toward profit and self-improvement.

This is a time to sustain. To be grateful. Turn self-criticism into self-compassion. To find ease where we can in a world rapidly plunging us into chaos. Surviving a quarantine is in itself a big deal, and you need to pat yourself on the back and be proud of making it through the regular motions of your day.