Limiting Impressions

I'll keep today's post short for impact.

The next few weeks are going to be very bad from a media and social media standpoint. I'd take steps today (and invest in the tools needed) to significantly reduce your daily social media exposure. It will be tempting during the self-quarantine to get sucked into twitter / facebook / insta / etc. rabbit holes, but I'm worried the stories to come are going to have a cumulative disastrous impact on many people's mental health.

Soldiers experience the "fog of war" and it's led to unprecedented levels of PTSD in the soldiers that have returned home from combat. Civilians in the west especially, have never experienced anything like this en masse (New Yorkers during 9/11 and mass shooting survivors have lived through localized incidents), yet social media ensures the war against the virus will be live-tweeted and live-streamed 24/7...with no CCP to censor it.

Based on the data we've seen so far, and our slow responses to date, I expect hospitals in many major cities in the West will be overrun in the weeks ahead. We can't let tragedy or despair consume us, though.

For my part, I'll be limiting my twitter exposure to fixed windows in the days ahead. If you want to catch me live, I'll be blocking off specific hours for social media, and otherwise tuning out of online chatter in order to play with my kids, eat dinner and watch netflix with my wife, and otherwise focus on business tasks at hand for Messari.

I'd recommend you think about implementing a similar system yourselves and sticking to it. Before the slow motion train wreck sucks you in.

As I've said for the past six weeks, I hope I'm wrong, but fear I'm not.

-TBI