New Year's Resolution: Less Is More

1/4/2016

Needed: A Hefty Bag Day for the Soul

“Have you made a resolution?” my wife asked. Had not.

She said that rather than make grandiose plans – join a health club -- it is better to lighten the load, leaving more room and time for better things that come up.

She is consolidating some details – stuff that banks and companies don’t seem to know how to do anything, on automated phone hell. Made sense to me.

I hereby vow to write less in the new year about things I don’t care about – sports that vanished in my rear-view mirror years ago. Just because the web is an endless maw doesn’t mean we should try to fill it, minute by minute.

For a while, I’m going to lay off Donald Trump and Pete Rose (who may, in fact, be the same person.)

Plus, any web site that inserts 15-second video commercials is getting X’d out of my queue. That’s not why we learned to read and think, to watch stuff jump around.

I will write about stuff that excites me – like discovering a new Shakespeare play (for me, that is). But enough for today.

Alan Rubin link

1/5/2016 09:49:31 pm

George,

Reducing the load is an admirable beginning for the New Year. It is not about doing less, but being more selective.

Retirement is about doing what you want to, not what you have to.

I avoid breaking resolutions by never making any. Instead, I begin each year with an ever growing list of what I want to accomplish.

Each day it is reviewed, prioritized and modified. Much will remain undone and dropped as not being worth the time.

New items are added when applicable, but my overall goal is to have fewer activities and devote more time to each.

As I advance in age, I feel that I can continue forever. Since this is completely unrealistic, I focus on the things I enjoy doing and spending time with family and friends whom I love.

Most of my activities involve helping others of all ages.

I follow most of the craziness that exists in our world, both locally and abroad, but I do not obsess on things that I have no control over.

By focusing on what is truly important, it is easy to avoid most of the things that we could not live without.

Stick with it George, it will be very liberating.

George Vecsey

1/6/2016 08:27:02 am

Alan: something tells me the first thing I should give up (or cut back) is sitting at the laptop for hours, typing.
Then what? The abyss of having to get a life, or an alternate life.
So I peck away.
GV

Alan Rubin link

1/6/2016 12:08:49 pm

Keep pecking away as the computer is the portal to so much enjoyment. Just keep the back supported and the head up as much as possible.

I was advised to raise the laptop screen to just about eye level, so I use a wireless keyboard. This has the advantage of allowing you to position the screen further away and to look forward.

Life is just full of these little pleasures.

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QUOTES

Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online.
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal….

After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness.

The progress stems mostly from three factors:
First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot.
Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.)
Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year.
“Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.”

That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.”

That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data.

One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines.

Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks.

Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths.

The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions.

Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately
Republican and white.

Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.)
***

From the great Maureen Dowd:

As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop.
But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels."

--- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing.
***
"Putting out the paper," we called it.
Much more than nostalgia.
---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html

New Year's Resolution: Less Is More

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