The thread's title is: how you feel.
How do I feel? Hmm... I'm officially panicking.
I'm thinking over and over: how am I supposed to survive in the months/years to come?
Up til now my approach to surviving was to (to cut a long story short):
1. take very small jobs that provide me with some pathetic money, enough to survive
(NOW (during corona outbreak) there will be no such small jobs because they will have all the manpower they want and they don't have to deal with someone like me)
I also tried to reduce living costs accordingly to these pathetic earnings - beyond what is considered "normal": for example, instead of buying a new washing machine I repaired old one myself (using youtube videos); I recently installed infrared sensors to switch the lights on/off in the rooms which have two advantages: I can save half a dollar a day (possibly even a dollar a day) and I don't have to lift my arm to switch the lights on/off because there are days where it actually may hurt to do so. I even plan to install a small wind turbine to provide some additional heating during winter. But these are plans and dreams... considering that I can work 2 hours a day and I consider that "quite a good condition".
2. live off my savings what I managed to do for the last 5 years - when I couldn't get any small jobs at times. I guess I could continue that for another 5 years or even longer
(NOW I will have to live entirely off savings; so these will go fast; and it gets even worse - these savings may lose its value even faster because of inflation or even a total collapse of the economy)
3. I never could get any social benefit - the reason given by doctors and advisors: I look too well, I am too young to be sick (but NOW you can't even get to any doctor...)
I am kind of outside of system, can't get any help whatsoever, kind of treated as a person who simply doesn't want to work so not viable for any benefits.
4. I could never get any diagnosis (but NOW, similarly as above, you can't even get to any doctor... or do any blood test)
5. up till now when I felt really bad my now 76-year-old father used to help me; he drove me to town for example (but when he gets coronavirus he will die almost for sure because his health is deteriorating)
6. I will die too given my range of inflammatory conditions. Corona really makes it hard for those who have inflammatory conditions. That's why I always wear a gas mask and glasses when shopping.
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Of course, these few problems might have happened to me at any time and still may. But not all at once, and not without any way out as it seems to be now.
For example:
1. If my current company wouldn't give me any job I could try to find another company (now: next to impossible because there are no companies hiring and nobody will want me the way I am if they have so many healthy and willing employees).
For many years I've tried to return to working as a programmer - but sth always stood in the way: in 2002 (I was still studying back then) there was the dot com bubble so I could never get any job. Then there was 2008: I told myself: now I have to get back to programming. Nope - real estate/financial crisis hit. Couldn't get any remote job (it had to be remote back then). Then there was 2012 and another crisis. And after that my condition got so bad that I stopped thinking about it.
And now I'm wondering whether it is even worth considering at all if all of these programmers are going to be laid off soon. There would be a lot of catching up for me to do after so many years. The problem in a broader sense is also that I actually wanted to work with hardware (like programming wind turbines) but to do that you have to be there (ie. at a factory), you can't do it remotely. If I want to work remotely, I have to do web programming, for example. And I seriously hate web programming. But I love to work with algorithms, squeezing every bit of efficiency out of hardware. So that is another problem.
2. I should have secured my savings in some way - I am not that good in these matters - so what should I do now when everything is falling apart? Financial advice needed... For the last 2 months, instead of dealing with finances, I've been gathering supplies (I have 1,5 cubic meters of frozen food, for example, drugs for 6 months, many facemasks, etc.) and I tried to improve my condition even further but I failed (some of you might have read elsewhere that I improved almost completely but that lasted only for like 2 weeks and now I'm back to my old "normal").
There are so many ridiculous hints out there... like investing in stock right now to save the value of your savings because the stock is sure to go up (but which one and when - that's another problem, US stock exchange will surely go down, considering that it's only a beginning of corona outbreak)
4. Actually, I hate to visit doctors anyway. Been there, done that - so many times. And it always backfired.
The only way out of this whole mess would be to actually get much better.... without doctors' involvement.
And so the question remains: how to get diagnosed or generally get better in the times of corona outbreak when even without this outbreak it's simply impossible. Needless to say I tried like all the supplements that I could think of...
Any thoughts on any of the above items?
