original
Nature and Health, or How Not to Let Technology Ruin Your Life
Looking for balance
With the exception of COVID-19, which I caught 4 years after the breakout in Wuhan, I've hardly been sick since my early teens. I remember getting stomach-poisoned in Switzerland once (like many others in the same hotel, Grand Hotel Zermatterhof), but aside from that I was mostly healthy for about 30 years. COVID-19 didn't stop me from working, I just slept more and upped my tolerance threshold to some nerve pain in the lower torso and hips; it went away entirely after 1 or 1.5 days. Those were considered mild symptoms. I got lucky. A mild migraine at the "endemic" phase of coronavirus was considered "dodging the bullet". After that I was inoculated. I still wear a face mask in congested place.
Health was always very important to me and I wrote many pages about this in my personal site before I focused more on tech writings. Nowadays I take many computer breaks and spend time with animals, plants, sometimes just snoozing in the Sun. Everything starts inside the mind.
In the world of tech, which is very stressful on average (very demanding jobs where workers are subjected to reach-outs even after work and before working hours), many people simply neglect their health and convince themselves they can catch up "later" (with sleep, weight loss, healthy diet, even mental health) and that can lead to silent burnout, even nervous breakdown.
Japan's work culture lacks compassion for workers, so the government - seeing a rise in fatal collapses and suicides - needed to step in and pass new laws to curb communications outside of workplaces/working hours. Productivity or not, regardless of availability of "knowledge workers" (24/7 access), the economy will die if the people who run the economy die.
Go out. Touch grass. Life is about more than keyboards and mice. █
Image source: A stunning swan i saw gracefully swimming in a water pool