How To Be A Winner During The Global Pandemic

This is a story about a man named Jim.

Jim’s a warehouse worker. He works at the local beer distributor picking kegs and sending them on trucks out to restaurants and bars.

Recently Jim’s entire world got turned upside down. The global pandemic of 2020 broke out, shit literally hit the fan, and now Jim’s life is one huge tumultuous cocktail of fear, panic, confusion, wonder and truth seeking.

Jim’s wife was told to stay at home – she has a disease that’s normally not a problem, but since the virus came, she has to stay at home, because contracting this damn thing could kill her.

His 2 kids are going to school online now, but since the internet providers are slowing down their internet due to the influx of internet users online during the pandemic, that’s barely working…now his babies can barely do their lessons properly while they’re stuck at home.

Not only that, but Jim is afraid of getting laid off. He knows if he does, he’ll have to file for unemployment, because he can’t handle the drop in pay.

He’s not broke, and he’s never in a deficit, but he and his family live right at their means; they have a tiny bit of extra money each month and that’s it.

Up until now, Jim didn’t know what it took be be a winner during a global pandemic.

Jim’s a proud man. It would kill his pride and make him suffer internally to file for unemployment, strike a serious blow to his ego and diminish his faith in himself as a provider and protector of his family...but he’d do it if he had to.

Not only that, but the pittance of stored food they had saved in the basement has already run out. Needless to say, Jim is having a lot of sleepless nights.

With about 2 fingers of Jack Daniel’s in a short round glass, staring at a dim lamp shade in his den, he finally snapped.

Enough of this – the time had come to make a serious change. Regardless of the world outside, he would never allow himself to get caught off guard like this again…

In the same way that warming the body with hot tea can help us withstand the frigid winter temperatures, so did Jim realize that his external circumstances were irrelevant if he was always prepared internally.

Below is Jim’s plan to not only survive the global pandemic, but thrive during all the hard times that would come in the future.

You need to make more money

By the end of March 2020, nearly 4 million people in the United states were unemployed solely because of the effects of the national shutdown.

In the first few days of April, that number jumped to 10 million. The fact is, you’re not as safe at your job as you thought you were.

Which brings us to Jim’s first idea – he needs to make more money, and so do you. Actually, not necessarily more money, but money coming from different places.

Having more than one source of income is a good idea in general because:

• Its fun, to be honest
• It’s safer than one. 2 is 1 and 1 is none
• Much easier to have several smaller sources of income than one HUGE source
• When one fails you, you have others to fall back on

My personal pick for the easiest and best source of income is passive income. Even further, online passive income, and even further than that…starting a blog. 

There are many ways to make money online, but starting a blog is by far the easiest, and with the way social media is now, you can start making money pretty much right away.

I made my first sale blogging in my first month.

The best thing about online income is that you can’t be laid off, and after you’ve created your second source, you can move on to a third and a fourth, until you can safely lose one of them due to unforeseen circumstances and still be alright.

Regardless of what you choose to do, make steps now that ensure you will be better off in the future when a stream of income is threatened.

Decide which kool aid to drink – who to listen to, which philosophy to follow

In other words, whose kool aid are you drinking?

Yes, you must choose.

In Bhagavad Gita it says “In the battle between good and evil, everyone must pick a side.”

The point here being that, in order to move forward in life, you must have convictions. Faith is an animating principle – and I’m not talking about faith in a higher power, although that does count.

I’m talking about having an ultimate perspective through which you see everything in life. It’s the lens by which you judge your experience.

What is the topmost reality that influences all lesser realities?

Because if you try to live thinking it’s all a government ploy, while also thinking that it’s a process of humanity “purging” and “healing” you’re just gonna get mixed up and not know what to do at all.

I hope that made sense to you, because after writing it, I’m like… “Wtf did I just write?..”

Anway…:)

We know our convictions are not always right, but still, we must have them to move forward in life, because suspicion only leads to suspension.

The natural ebb and flow of life

No matter how you look at things, life happens in cycles…it’s a natural law of the cosmos, and for several reasons.

One of the most obvious reasons being that a natural law of the universe is entropy…all things degrade overtime.

Since we are progress oriented beings, we naturally prevent that degradation by adding energy back into the system. When something breaks, we fix it.

When the economy tanks, we do what we have to to improve it again. When our health decreases, we do what we have to to make ourselves brand new again.

Unless it’s the end of the world, it’s not the end of the world.

Don’t get me wrong, you might suffer tremendously during the downswing, but having the knowledge that life happens in cycles can provide some philosophical, or intellectual relief…whatever that’s worth to you.

The thing you need to concern yourself with, is how are you going to grow and expand during the upward trend, and how are you going to prepare yourself for the recession that inevitably occurs at the peak.

Growth on your way up – shelter in and chill on the way down. That’s the most painless way.

Preparation happens before shit hits the fan

Wouldn’t it have been nice to have the money, food and other resources necessary to stay inside for the next couple of minds back in February?

Preparation happens before the thing happens, not right before and certainly not during.

I realize that nobody could have predicted this would occur. Like, who in the hell could sit down and say “ya know, I think we should prepare for a global pandemic” – super random at best.

However, preparation for specific situations is not the point. The point is to prepare for your basic needs not being as easily accessible as they are when things are going fine. Things like:

• Food
• Water
• Shelter
• Electricity
• Toiletries
• Basic civilian medicines
• Blankets 

You look at your basic needs, and then you analyze how you procure them.

Then ask yourself “what would happen if this supply chain were disrupted to the point where I couldn’t get them?”

The easiest way to prepare for that, is to store those basic needs in your house, or wherever you reside.

Then you decide how much preparation is necessary.

How long are you trying to be prepared for the supply to be disrupted?

The simplest way to do this is to say to yourself “If I need more than this amount for this amount of time, we all have much bigger problems than just the supply chain being disrupted…”

For example: you might prepare for a situation like this and have 6-8 months worth of supplies in your basement…but then decide that any longer then that, and the situation is probably much more severe than merely having extra supplies can remedy.

This is not about hoarding – remember you can stock up on extra before the deal happens. The market can’t handle 100 people buying 100 things in one weekend. That’s when store shelves go empty for a while…

…It can, however, handle 100 people buying 2 extra things over the course of a year.

You don’t need to be a capricorn to understand this – have extra just to have it. Smart.

How to stay positive but not have your head in the clouds

There’s a camp of morons out there who think the world consists of three groups:

1. Pessimists
2. Optimists
3. And realists

Their intellectual boners get hard feeling intellectually superior for being in the camp of “realists” who don’t have their head in the clouds, but also aren’t overly negative about their circumstances.

To them, optimists are fanciful thinkers – faeries wearing too-toos who whimsically disregard the now and delude themselves into thinking things are better than they are.

They look at pessimists like depressed homeless people with their heads always sunken in.

The fact is, all three of those groups are wrong, for one reason: they think it’s one, the other or the third.

The reality is quite different.

Optimism and pessimism are future oriented perspectives, and being a realist is a present oriented perspective.

The smart way to live life is to be conscious that your inputs affect your outputs (realist) and behave accordingly while choosing either a positive or negative viewpoint of your potential in the future (optimism vs pessimism).

Regardless of what a person thinks in their mind (positive or negative) they tend to manifest that in one way or another…What you think in your mind tends to translate into behavior and become reality.

When you understand that by staying positive, you’re not actually sacrificing any ability to be real right now, and knowing that negativity is more likely to produce a negative outcome, why on earth would you not simply choose to be present and aware, but also hopeful for good things to come?

The answer to that question is called brain damage. Dare to be different.

Believing in something great – maslow’s pyramid

Believing in something greater than mere survival is what it takes to thrive in a circumstance where your survival is threatened.

In time’s of war, it used to be common to control POW’s with covert mind control. They would feed the prisoners stories and fake news about how their home country was losing the war and attempt to break their spirit. 

Once they were successful in breaking a person mentally, it was said that a mere 72 hours would pass before that person would give up and die.

For those who kept a mental image that was worth living for fresh in their hearts, they could outlast nerely all torture as well as starvation.

Human beings exist (individually) on a spectrum between being a pristine and superior quality human and being an animal. When the lower aspects of human life are compromised (your survival) it’s the higher levels of human life that will keep you from turning into a beast.

In other words, when you go through times of suffering, you must have a mental image of the future that makes the suffering worth it.

A good example would be how a gym goer keeps a mental image of the body they will soon possess and the help, endurance, and vitality they’ll enjoy, making them able to handle how much it sucks to feel your muscles burn and be out of breath while working out.

The way to accomplish this, is to create a life plan, set meaningful goals, and work toward achieving those goals.

If all you have in your life is survival, when that’s threatened, you’re entire existence goes up in flames. For those who have more in their lives than mere survival, life is challenging right now, but by no means over.

Decide right now what kind of human you really are – know yourself

Dave Chapelle tells a story about how, before getting into comedy, show business and hollywood, his father told him to decide what his price was now, before he got deep into the thick of it.

The point being, “These people you work for and with, they’ll pay you money and ask for something in return. Decide how far you’re willing to go right now, because the glitter and gold that comes in the future might cast a glaze over your principles and make it difficult for you to decide in the future.”

What’s fascinating about this is that (whether he was aware or not) Dave Chapelle’s father was actually talking about something called Hot and Cold Empathy Gap, a cognitive bias that affects our ability to make good decisions for ourselves.

Hot and cold empathy gap means you judge your ability to perform in a compromised state based on who you are, what you’re capable of, and how you feel when you’re in an optimum state.

In other words: a person might agree to helping a friend move later on this evening around 8pm, because right now they feel great. They’re full of energy, just had breakfast and in a good mood.

But what they don’t realize is that they won’t feel this way at 8pm.

They’ll be tired from a whole day’s work, it will be dark and almost time for bed.

Their physical, mental, psychological and intellectual resources will be basically depleted…and they’ll have to perform in that context.

Ever get home after work and feel a bit more bitchy than normal?

Of course, you’re tired. Your resources have been depleted throughout the day. That’s what we mean here.

Dave’s father knew this, and he adapted it to Dave’s circumstance.

Dave might know who he is right now, but in the future the circumstances will be different, so make the choice who you are right now when everything is good, because when the stakes are higher, when the circumstance is different, you might not be able to make wise decisions for yourself.

What does that mean for you and me? It means that we decide who we are and who we choose to be before the times get rough, because when the times DO get rough, our vision will be clouded.

In order to accomplish this we need to:

• Know what are values are
• Know the direction we want our life to go in
• Have our priorities fresh and firmly cemented in our minds

So when the time comes for you to push an old lady over at the grocery store to steal her lucky charms and steal 22 packages of toilet paper from an orphanage, you’ll have who you are on automatic, and in the haze of your transforming into a survival driven werewolf, you’ll have a moment of clarity and be able to make a good decision for yourself.

Stop being a “domesticated human”

If humans ceased to exist, what would happen to your chihuahua? 

I’m sure their wonderful animals, I have no issue with that, but in the grand scheme of survival of the most fit, your shih tzu is basically a glorified rat.

It’s going to get eaten. It’s a domesticated animal, with no ability to survive outside the context of it being domesticated by humans.

Similarly, there’s a large group of humans who are the domesticated version of our species – they’re basically useless and clueless if our present system breaks down.

I remember when I was a kid, my father used to take me into the woods and we would make long bows from tree branches and take small game that way.

I’m from PA, and in PA you’re either a farmer, or a hunter. My family were hunters.

There are skills that come from a former era of the human species, they’re called primitive, but really they’re just from a different period in our development.

• They’re more primal
• More primitive
• Very basic
• And utterly useless
• …unless

Unless you find yourself in a situation where our present advancement for some reason breaks down (say a global pandemic) and you find yourself in a situation where you might need to start a fire with two sticks or else you’re going to freeze.

Don’t be a domesticated human. Don’t be someone who’s fucked every time the current system breaks down. Be a smart person who spends some time practicing how to thrive in other systems of living.

Ask yourself: 

• if all of our first world shit broke, how well off would I be? 
• Can I skin an animal? 
• Can I even hunt and kill that animal to eat? 
• How do you process unsafe water from a river to drink?
• How do I fire a weapon at someone who wishes me harm?
• If I lose my job, how will I provide for my basic needs?
• If the stores run out of food for a week, how will I eat? Can I hunt?

Bill Burr has a joke about the apocalypse: if you don’t have a gun, you’re just hoarding supplies for the strongest guy on the block.

We’re not talking about the apocalypse here, we’re just talking about being prepared for something like covid19.

But his joke has merit – if you’re unable to operate within other systems of living (like what happens when a crisis occurs) you’re basically just food for someone who can.

How to be prepared for a global crisis: summary

• Make sure you have enough money coming in from different sources, and saved to outlast the crisis
• Learn the skills of your ancestors, if you cant hunt your garden, you starve instead
• Get clear on your values, you don’t want to be faced with a virus outbreak and finally realize you’re actually the terrible person you hate
• Even if it’s calm right now, be a smart person and prepare for when the calm fades and the storm comes
• Decide on the topmost oritentation you’ll have to life. What is the highest law in the land? Otherwise, too many different philosophies will confuse you
• expand and make progress during the upswings of life, shelter in like a turtle during the down swings
• Believe in something greater than mere survival – or you’ll lose your humanit and become a beast during the crisis
• Stay positive, negativity kills people (pessmism) and so does limiting your options (being a “realist”)

When was the last pandemic?

“In the spring of 2009, a novel influenza A (H1N1) virus emerged. It was detected first in the United States and spread quickly across the United States and the world. This new H1N1 virus contained a unique combination of influenza genes not previously identified in animals or people. This virus was designated as influenza A (H1N1)pdm09 virus. Ten years later work continues to better understand influenza, prevent disease, and prepare for the next pandemic.”

All credit for the above information goes to https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/2009-h1n1-pandemic.html

Epidemic vs Pandemic

In general, an epidemic is smaller in scope than a pandemic. An epidemic can technically be confined within a community, county, or state, whereas a pandemic spreads across the world and affects human society at a global scale.

List of Pandemics in History

Antonine Plague	165-180	Believed to be either smallpox or measles	5M
Japanese smallpox epidemic	735-737	Variola major virus	1M
Plague of Justinian	541-542	Yersinia pestis bacteria / Rats, fleas	30-50M
Black Death	1347-1351	Yersinia pestis bacteria / Rats, fleas	200M
New World Smallpox Outbreak	1520 – onwards	Variola major virus	56M
Great Plague of London	1665	Yersinia pestis bacteria / Rats, fleas	100,000
Italian plague	1629-1631	Yersinia pestis bacteria / Rats, fleas	1M
Cholera Pandemics 1-6	1817-1923	V. cholerae bacteria	1M+
Third Plague	1885	Yersinia pestis bacteria / Rats, fleas	12M (China and India)
Yellow Fever	Late 1800s	Virus / Mosquitoes	100,000-150,000 (U.S.)
Russian Flu	1889-1890	Believed to be H2N2 (avian origin)	1M
Spanish Flu	1918-1919	H1N1 virus / Pigs	40-50M
Asian Flu	1957-1958	H2N2 virus	1.1M
Hong Kong Flu	1968-1970	H3N2 virus	1M
HIV/AIDS	1981-present	Virus / Chimpanzees	25-35M
Swine Flu	2009-2010	H1N1 virus / Pigs	200,000
SARS	2002-2003	Coronavirus / Bats, Civets	770
Ebola	2014-2016	Ebolavirus / Wild animals	11,000
MERS	2015-Present	Coronavirus / Bats, camels	850
COVID-19	2019-Present	Coronavirus – Unknown (possibly pangolins)	121,700 (Johns Hopkins University estimate as of 7:41am PT, April 14)