My world has been shaken from the COVID-19 outbreak, from school shutting down to all non-essential businesses being affected. It took me around a week to comprehend the surreal experience that this has all become. I have always heard of events that shaped the world, like the Spanish Flu epidemic, but never thought I would experience such an event. I believed that events like a pandemic where possible but outside my lifespan.

I begin my day by waking up an hour early for school where I finish up any leftover homework, and I eat the same breakfast- Greek yogurt with granola- and promptly begin school at 9:30. I go thought my classes one by one trying to learn over the computer, but it all just seems pointless. After school, I walk the dog and workout for an hour anxiously waiting for my home gym to arrive as the gym is my temple, my place to think and let out stress.

I was lucky that the virus just hit after my wrestling season, and I had the opportunity to say I have no regrets in my primary sport. Still, I just had my rugby season cut, which digs deep. The harshest impact I had on my life can be defined by my freedom and friendships.

I am a very extroverted person meaning I genuinely enjoy being social with my friends and doing various things. Being cooped up inside makes me just feel like my world is closing into the boundaries of my house, and I hate this feeling. I finally received all of my college acceptance letters. Still, I sadly can’t visit my top 2 schools, how am I supposed to choose something that I have been preparing for my whole life without actually going there? On a positive note, technology helps me stay in touch with my friends, and that Is a blessing. Still, I fear I have created a lifeline to my technology that I previously didn’t have.

COVID-19 has proved to me that humans cannot sustain true connection with one another through the internet. Allegedly, we live in a world that has created the most interconnected international community in in world history – we can contact one another with the touch of a screen. COVID-19, through “shelter in place” requirements by local governments, has provided an excellent case study, providing insight to see how interconnected humans can truly be without seeing one another face to face.

My generation is mostly safe from the Coronavirus, as people with preexisting conditions and compromised immune systems are the ones who are truly susceptible to the fatal consequences of catching the disease. Yet, my generation, Generation Z, is plagued by loneliness. Even if I call my friends every single day, I still crave laughing with them and enjoying life with them. To me, COVID-19 has seemed like a forced depression.

However, many of us feel great guilt due to that feeling, as people suffering are from the loss of loved ones and medical professionals are sacrificing their health to save lives. While those losses and sacrifices are of much greater magnitude, they do not discount how my generation feels; yes, we are the iPhone generation and yet, we cannot live without one another. The emotional connection between two people is more powerful than anything that can manifest on a screen.

My typical day since the outbreak of COVID-19 has been painfully average. Where I live, there is a shelter-in-place in effect which bars (not to the point of encroaching upon our freedom) us from normative social environments. As a result, pretty much every coffee shop and restaurant in the area is closed or at the very least only allows for take-out/to-go-orders.

My school has been on virtual learning for about two weeks as of now. The challenging part of this situation has been focusing and turning in assignments on time, because as a second semester senior who has already been admitted to one of his top choices for college, I suffer from chronic senioritis. The nice part about this situation is my school has changed its schedule to ease up on our adjustment process: e.g. we now start at 9:15 instead of 8:15. Somehow, this has not resulted in me getting more sleep than usual. The school has also made classes end every other day an hour early at 13:45. This has allowed me to interact more with my family, as well as spend more time focusing on some of my personal hobbies like guitar, reading about philosophy, and learning French. My school volleyball season is also postponed indefinitely (most likely won’t happen), which sucks.

In terms of my hopes and concerns, the San Francisco Bay Area shut down pretty much everything and it doesn’t seem to be working. It raises the question for me of whether social distancing is just virtue signaling and theater. It’s possible infected individuals are like walking Chernobyl and the only way to stop their radiation is by identifying them early through mass testing and sealing them off from the rest of the world.

Since the recent outbreak of COVID-19, my daily routine has changed drastically. On a usual day, I would wake up around 7 in the morning to get ready for school. School would take up most of my day as I would spend time after school in the library to get my homework done. After school I would come home and finish whatever work needed to be done. Now that the shelter in place has happened, my days consist of constant electronic use throughout the day. I wake up around 8 to get ready for online classes. My screen time use has gone up since the quarantine because of the limited activities I can do nowadays.

I have a basketball hoop in my backyard which I play on every day now. Other than playing basketball, there is no other physical exercise I can do besides walk around the neighborhood. Walking around the neighborhood doesn’t seem to be the same just because of how judgmental some people can be about people especially during this time. Just being out in public nowadays feels like a crime. It still hasn’t hit me that the quarantine can last until the summer.

The future is so unpredictable to me because I don’t know what can happen next week. There is new news about the coronavirus that happens every week that affects so many different events and lives of people. It is hard for people to find a source of income because of how jobs have been temporally shut down. I am not used spending a lot of time with my brother and my dad, but my mother still has work during this time. So, the one positive thing I can take out of this is spending quality time with my brother and dad.