Spaceship You

Pandemic season. This is not the first, nor will it be the last time you lock yourself down and we isolate from each other to protect ourselves and to protect those more vulnerable than ourselves. The practical effect of this isolation on you is that your home is no longer your home, but has transformed into a vessel that, along with many others, has left Earth to orbit around her. Alone, together.

Those remaining on Earth have their mission, to mitigate the dangers of the outside. And while here inside, it may seem like you have naught to do but watch and wait, aboard this ship, isolated for a season with length unknown, there are dangers too. What can start as a break from life will, unchecked, become something much worse. Darkness and disorder and a slow drift into abyss, where, out here, no one can physically help you. So, you cannot just wait. Like those below, you above have things to do.

Eventually, Earth will need people to return to help spin back up the wheels of the human world. Your mission: return better than you left. To accomplish this, you must maintain the vessel. Welcome aboard Spaceship You. The core generator of Spaceship You is your health, with two parts: the physical and the mental. For the ship to stay functional, this generator must spin. Arriving in orbit, it starts with some momentum to keep things going at first, to afford a little time to adjust.

But as with all motion, the passive forces of the universe work to slow that which is active, to bring darkness and disorder. If the core slows too much, if it all drifts too far and becomes too dark, recovery on your own is increasingly unlikely. So, how to prime the core, and keep it running during this journey? The mental and physical are halves of a whole, so accelerating one accelerates the other. Each adds to the total momentum, making additional pushing easier, priming the core, creating motion, making light and order.

While you could start with either side, if the core is low, prime with the physical half. It has sturdier grips. The mental half, while vital for the higher operations of the ship, is a slipperier place to start. You are on your own. Your brain and how it thinks are all you have. And brains, when dangerously apathetic or agitated, usually can't just think themselves better.

Brains are complicated messes, but physical activity is simple and brings brains back to baseline. When the ship is in trouble, prime with the physical. OK, now what? Back in the before time, you may not have noticed how much your physical environment determined what you did. The library helped you study. The office helped you work. The vacation helped you relax. The couch helped you… couch.

Then, as now, getting yourself to the right physical space at the right time is a big part of the job of existing. Yet, here you are, in one all-room. Thus, the first task is to divide your physical space. No matter how small your vessel, there will be at least four sides to create four vital stations to operate the ship. The first is for exercise. Something… beyond the bare minimum to survive. So that priming the core is easier when you need to.

Create this simplest station first. It doesn't need to be big. It doesn't need equipment to start. It just needs to be empty. Your communicator contains more than enough body weight exercises you can start today. From this point on, crossing this border is how you mentally and physically decide to do the exercise.

Now, depending on the kind of person you are, exercise will feel like bitter medicine at first, speaking from deep experience here. But you are on a solo mission in space. The generator your life depends on requires physical effort to operate. Exercise is non-optional. While Spaceship You is isolated, there are resupplies available. A small amount of equipment, after decontamination, can make a big difference.

If your ship is lucky enough to have access to a biosphere, be sure to use that as well. Your exercise station is a vital part of returning better than before, whatever else might happen on this journey. The next station to create is sleep. Unlike exercise, it's not simple to just lie down and one, two, three… [fingers snap] …sleep. So to help this process you create and respect, even sanctify, the sleep station boundaries as where you go to sleep only.

If you use the sleep station to keep up with social media, or watch stuff, or eat, or all at once, you degrade the station. Degrade your ability to sleep. Degrade mission success. Maintaining hygiene out here is important. And the hygiene of the stations is part of that. With sleep hygiene often the most difficult. Even if you respect the area, your brain may chatter away, not cooperating.

You can distract it with a sleepy novel. Or maybe a sleepy listen. But if it does not yield within thirty minutes, leave. Try again later. This is where you go to sleep, not to linger, worrying about how you can’t. It will be hard at first. But like exercise, the more you do only the sanctified activity within the sanctified borders, the more the sanctified station can help you accomplish what you want.

And you must get a handle on sleep. Without the constraints of Earth, you will drift into a random sleep schedule. Which will make it harder to sleep. Which drains the core. Which makes everything else harder. Keep your sleep connected to Earth with an alarm for getting up. Again, bitter medicine. But, out here, you must create your own structure to accomplish the mission.

And you can set the alarm for whatever feels right. It is the consistent waking time that matters. That acts as the psychological anchor point across the coming days. Your mission clock now has a start time, with sleep and exercise. But that leaves a lot of open hours. What to do? Well, you're probably watching this from your default station: couch, which comes pre-installed on all vessels. It's pretty comfy, and NetMeTube+ does have a tetra-trillion hours of streaming video, much of which is amazing.

And you do have a lot of time. [with emphasis] But, but... You will burn through the list of things you truly enjoy surprisingly fast. The stream of streaming looks infinite, but it isn't. And getting to the effective end of things worth watching is a mixed achievement get. You’ll then have stuff just on, half watching, slumping down, not really paying attention.

Perhaps along with some games that can easily eat into the hours and hide the current state of the core. Such that you don’t notice until too late, you’ve started to drift. Couch contains twin dangers. This lapse into lethargy, along with the amping of anxiety. When things are bad on Earth, it's natural to want to follow every development, every detail, which can descend into a self-irradiation with novel anxieties and angers over that which you cannot affect.

This unactionable agitation de-baselines the brain and drains the core. Look around you. This is your actionable environment. So, take action from couch. Tidy it and sanctify the boundaries of a new recreation station where you will engage with entertainment you enjoy, when actually giving it your full attention, or fun that’s really fun, or leisure where you feel better for having done it.

This is also a good spot to have communicator coffee chats. Not quite the same as the real thing, but palliative and, others in their ships are more open to them than you might expect. When it's recreation time, see who is around. This station should be a refreshing place, but it does have a tendency to become a bit blah and spread out more than the others if left unchecked.

So, while with sleep, you want to schedule consistent time, with exercise you need to make sure you’re spending a minimum of time, with recreation keep an eye on the maximum and the quality of time. Now, taking action within your radius brings us to the final station: creation. Before discussing the inside of this border, recognize you’ve already done creation outside, creating the environment around yourself to be useful to yourself.

Starting a feedback loop where you affect the environment positively and the environment positively affects you. So while creation station will have borders like the others, the ultimate scope of your potential creation is everything you have the power to affect, which includes yourself. It is here where, through work, you can create things humans value.

Through study and research… knowledge. Through practice… skills. Depending on what your Earth work is, you might be able to continue that up here. If so, you’re remotely helping keep the wheels of the world turning by creating or doing what others value. If a student, continue learning and expanding and demonstrating your ability to accomplish what is required, creating, improving your future self.

But if your work or studies can’t be done in isolation, you’re still going to create something. You have all the hours you need to pursue new skills to become better at something than you were before. Which is how this station keeps the mental half of the core in top shape. This station will be the most different depending on who you are and what you want to do or achieve. Crafts are creation. Coding is creation. So is cooking.

This station is up to you, which can be a bit daunting. But one suggestion. In a funny way, this station is like sleep. One, two, three… [fingers snap] …work. Doesn’t work. So, just like sleep, keep this station especially hygienic. Clear of everything except what to focus on. Crossing the border only to create, not to consume.

Do not watch NetMeTube+ here! You have a place for that. If you’re too tempted, get up and leave. That’s ok. It’s better to be honest and keep the borders strict. Don’t even consume food during creation. Go when you need that break. Return when you’re ready. Like with sleep, this doesn’t happen instantly. So allow yourself to be a bit bored at the start before slipping into it.

So, these are the four stations of the ship. Make them feel like truly different spaces. Then as the only crew, maintain the stations, and the stations will maintain you. Each Spaceship You is different, and figuring out how to best run it over the course of the day, the week, or longer isn’t easy. At times you will fail and things will get worse. That happens.

But there is no point in berating yourself. There is only one thing to do: keep the core spinning. Complete the mission. Come back better than before. See you on Earth, Captain. [wistful ambient music fades slowly]