A Pandemic of Apathy

And F Words

Sarah Mock
5 min readJul 23, 2021
Photo by Rick Harris

I write for a living. I’ve been trying to get back into writing the kind of essays here that I get really jazzed about, the kind that I sit down to work on for like half an hour and when I look up five have gone by. This one comes to mind. Or this one.

But for whatever reason, it’s just not happening. I don’t really subscribe to the idea of writers block (I’ve never really been *unable* to write, this email being a case in point), and the thing is, what I’m feeling is 100% not linked directly to writing at all. It’s linked to any and all kinds of work, even some work that I pretend is leisure. I just don’t want to do it. Any of it. And this is not a passing “meh.” This is a “my bones are made of lead and my essence has committed to doing nothing, regardless of the consequences.”

The good news is, it doesn’t seem like it’s just me. In an effort to combat these feelings (that honestly have been persistent for weeks if not months at this point) I’ve scheduled a lot of calls and lunches with friends and colleagues this week. And it sounds like *a lot* of people besides me are looking around at their late-pandemic life thinking:

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Sarah Mock

Author of Farm (and Other F Words), buy now: https://tinyurl.com/4sp2a5tb. Rural issues and agriculture writer/researcher. Not a cheerleader, not the enemy.