As you may have heard in the first podcast on Journal writing, the Skeptic’s 2nd experiment is all about social connection. Now to say that the Skeptic is a loner (he prefers “lone wolf”) would be a underselling it. He is 100% happy to spend his days building something or reading a book or just cruising through the internet or Reddit. He is also just the worst at keeping in touch with his friends and family. Historically, his friends have reached out to me in order to get in touch with him because his text message box is a black hole in which messages get stuck.
Now don’t get me wrong, if some event causes him to be among others, he shines. Most find him witty and pretty fun to be around. Give him a few minutes with his high school, college, work friends, or neighbors and he will likely have the room engaged and laughing. He has a crazy memory, so he know random facts about so many topics, that he is able to carry on a conversation with almost anyone about their interests.
When our government asked us to stay home due to the quick spreading virus, the Skeptic is one of the people who’s life didn’t really change. He has always worked from home, so that’s no different. The only thing different is that I cannot convince him to go out into the world with me to interact with people. In this vein, our friends in another state wanted to try to stay mentally, physically, and socially healthy during our stay at home orders, so we set up a little diet, exercise, mental health challenge. In this challenge, someone made their mental health goal an objective to physically talk to someone outside of their house every day. I loved this idea as a way to increase health and decided to put it on our list (along with several others – meditation, outside time, etc).
When our random number generator hit on this one (on the second try 🙂 ), I was quite excited to see the Skeptic’s reaction to reaching out and talking to people he has not seen or heard from in ages!
