It’s Sunday evening, January 2nd and I finally made myself to start writing this blog post. It was on my plate for more than four weeks: I guess it’s hard to write when you don’t have the frame. I did not really know what I want to achieve with this writing: new year sounded like a great excuse.

This is my first blog post with no technical content. We’ll see if one of many going forward.

2021

2021 was wild and demanding. So much has happened in the world, in the Czech Republic, at Red Hat, in my personal life (got engaged! \o/), on the Internet, in Packit and source-git, in Fedora, …

My biggest frustration is the fatigue I have from working from home and being in our apartment so much. At first I thought how awesome it is to work from my home office, but… I have days when I feel demotivated, drained and depressed. There are many others who experience fatigue due to various other reasons. I am grateful for finding “a cure” which consists of spending time in nature and doing manual work while keeping away from computers and my sofa & TV. Also reading and absorbing wisdom (mostly from Jordan Peterson) is challenging my brain.

The pandemic

It’s buffling to me that we “haven’t figured out” the pandemic yet: the promises of the vaccine exterminating the virus have not been fulfilled. I do not invalidate the effectivness of the vaccines - I think they are one of the more efficient tools we have to fight the pandemic.

I sincerely struggle with the marketing and the misinformation inflicted by media, social networks and conspiracy theorists. Especially in the age where marketing campaigns are so well done to sell products and companies. Why the vaccines haven’t received the same marketing treatment?

The damage has already been done. There is no easy way to heal the wounds - thousands of people pay the price every day by suffering from covid in hospitals (if they get there).

This has been on my mind for a few months. I struggled how to approach the vaxx/anti-vaxx conflict. Took me a lot of time to realize that the best solution is…

Empathy

You can fight, you can cite the facts, or pressure, beg, negotiate, yell but the best way in my opinion is to be empathetic. People who are not vaccinated are mostly scared. They read so many negative articles about the vaccine and are being pressured to take it even though they don’t fully understand why, so they are just upset, scared and feeling betrayed. But I was scared too! I’m anxious to take the 3rd shot in a few months. I know 100% I’m going to take it because I believe it’s the most easiest and efficient way to protect myself and the people around me.

2022

I wish everyone to have a good year of 2022: let the things go better than in the last one.

P.S. if you could use more empathy in 2022, that would be lovely of you. We would live in a much better place if we treated each other with more compassion and dignity.