When I was younger, I had more incentive to thwart my own sloth and return to the productive world; I had ambitions yet to achieve. But I’ve since achieved a lot of those ambitions, and in the past year, they have all evaporated, as if they’d never happened. I know from experience that I can, with great effort and discipline, claw my way back to a baseline. Let’s say I do—I get off the couch, turn off the TV, start writing again, apply for teaching jobs, get another book contract. What Couch Guy wants to know is: What’s my reward for all of that? What’s the big payoff? Will it be as good as lying on the couch watching TV? Sometime in this past year, I just stopped caring, and now I can’t quite remember how you trick yourself into starting again. You lure yourself into any major undertaking—a vocation, a marriage, life—with certain hubristic delusions: I will be rich and famous. We will be happy forever. This all means something. And once you’re disabused of those, you need to find truer, more enduring motives to go on. If you can. Quarantine has given us all time and solitude to think—a risk for any individual, and a threat to any status quo. People have gotten to have the experience—some of them for the first time in their life—of being left alone, a luxury usually unavailable even to the wealthy.