LOCKDOWN: Mindset & Why I'm Rarely Using That Word

I had two very different interactions online this morning about "Lockdown" and I've been pondering both of them for hours. Why? Because in Thailand, in my Thai and business circles, we almost never use that actual term.

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Lockdown. Locally, here in Chang Mai, people mostly use the terms "Stay At Home" and "Work From Home", both reflecting a whole different underlying vibe of community and shared commitment to a greater good. When they're talking rules and whatnot, most Thai people refer to them as "Covid Restrictions" and "Covid Closures". Yes, they are imposed by a military government that few people currently approve of. Indeed, we have almost daily anti-government demonstrations, many of them violent, and a C**p is widely tipped. And yet STILL the daily language I hear doesn't reflect the sense of hard-done-by-ness that I picked up from the first interaction today.

My formerly Thai-dwelling, now Australian-residing Australian friend posted this:


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Not just lockdown, but Hard Lockdown.

Now my half-a-lifetime living in Melbourne means I have LOADS of friends and family experiencing those same "hard" conditions. Just how brutal are they? An hour a day outside for walking and exercise. The luxury of shopping. Social bubbles and the ability to physically be with others. Exemptions for many types of employment. Delivery services. Access to vaccines if you choose them. Sweet Goddess Forbid, even the option to NOT wear a mask because it stresses you. And social services, pensions, unemployment benefits and stimulus packages.

Contrast that with my Hive blogging buddy @Gooddream who has just entered REAL lockdown in Vietnam this week.

gooddream81MEMBER ~ ASEAN HIVE VIP - GOLD2 hours ago
oh i didn't address your main question. We can not get food delivered and were meant to stock up. If you didn't stock up I suppose you are just going to have to eat whatever people will give you. Read his post here

A few days later, despite being shut in an apartment building with no exercise outside the building options with his little dog, he retains his optimism:

I say day 4 of 7 in a hopeful manner because the way things have been here lately it's tough to tell what the government is going to decide to do next. Just like they were with other lockdowns or restrictions they have a tendency to get extended and I have my beliefs that this will always be the case until the world admits that the complete eradication of a virus isn't possible no matter how much you keep people apart. I'll leave that discussion to the angry people on FB though.
Anyhow, our time here has been pretty great and Nadi spends most of her day on our new balcony, which is something we didn't have at our old place. Total lockdown day 4 of 7

The mindsets are poles apart. In Vietnam, as in Thailand, "work from home" is a luxury for the 5%. Internet services are as dodgy as the electric when rainy season storms roll through. Life IS brutal in so many ways, whether you are in a Food Queue trying to get enough for your family to eat for that day, or whether you (like me) are 15 months down the road of online schooling whilst scratching out enough of a living to keep food on the table. In the last 15 months, I think Ploi has been physically in a classroom for not more than 10 weeks. I have no respite, no assistance and no relief, and neither does she. It's certainly not ideal for any final year high school student trying to contemplate a future course of study which would involve overseas travel. Nor is it ideal for her single entrepreneurial mama, who feels like one more plastic zoom meeting might send her completely over the edge.

And yet there is no obvious trace of hard-done-by-ness here in my immediate Thai world. No one likes it, but people are just getting on.

If anything, there's a sense of it being something that's happening everywhere, an underlying comradeship, a working together to get through it, and a sense of Su Su (which is Thai for "stay strong"). Comradeship is an interesting choice of word, no? In a socialized military dictatorship. But I digress. Shared humanity prevails and there are more social media shares about generosity and What Can I Do to Help? than there are overt complaints.

People, even Thai people, have wildly divergent opinions here about the vaxx programs and whether the restrictions actually help. And yet, mostly, they get on with doing whatever it is that they can to collectively move forward.

Pondering my friend's perception of "hard lockdown" and @gooddream's "our time here has been pretty great", I have decided that mindset is everything and language creates our reality.

And so I have decided to consciously choose to use the terms "Work from home" and "Covid restrictions" instead of "Lockdown". Because calling it "Lockdown" gives all my personal sovereignty away and draws me into a victim-blame scenario which is spectacularly unhelpful, depressing and self-defeating.

Do I AGREE with Work from Home? Heck no. My personal take is to simply open everything, globally, and let everyone take personal responsibility for their own natural health. Yup - I am utterly & unashamedly Dutch that way. 😆 So the vulnerable ones could die? I'm ok with that. THEY could and should socially distance and accept the natural consequences. The rest of us need to get on with living differently and more healthfully. Overweight, high blood pressure and heart disease? Take better care of yourself please.

But my personal viewpoint matters little in a wider social and global structure. In the end, the greater good is better served by optimism than gloom, even when the Stay A Home orders aren't well founded in science or immunology. I do the minimum to be obviously legal and not arrested. I still hug people. I pull my mask up when people approach and am seen to have one on when required. That's it. I still meet people for coffee and allow my daughter to hang out at her friends' houses. I don't believe in Covid tests or the whole vaxx regime, but my personal freedom to travel may mean that I have to compromise that, if I can't find a grey vaxx passport option.

Ultimately, my personal choice to be optimistic changes more in life than the need to blame, count the days or view everything as something done personally unto me.

I've decided that I believe in democracy more than most western people I know. And by that I mean when I am on the 49% losing team, I definitely don't concede my personal values, but I stop working actively & publicly against the decisions I disagree with. And I try to find a way to live positively and constructively within the frameworks that other people believe will take society forward. In practice, it means I largely withdraw from mainstream society, and that feels OK.

I'm happily watching the whole vaxx mandate thing collapse as data is gathered and the risks being exposed. I've never had a flu vaxx, EVER, and I hope to avoid this Covid vaxx requirement if I can.

But mostly I'm disconnecting from a negative narrative which has taken over our society, and putting my time into working on positive things that I can control: my natural products business, putting great information into the public arena that empowers people, and connecting with the changemakers and the leaders in my world.

Bracing for a barrage of comments 🤣 and feeling better about the dichotomies in my world for having examined and shared them.




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It's great how the Thai people are helping each other and this way they might come out of this nonsense better then most places.

I'm finding more humanity and common sense here than most places. Economic hardship notwithstanding, it's a great place to be riding out any disaster.

Hope all is well in your world. !ENGAGE 15

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Your attitude towards the measures is the right one. All this will pass, one way or another. I still have hope that in the end, everything will be OK. It's a time of rethinking and rediscovering the real values in your life...

@tipu curate

All this will pass, one way or another.

Well said. In this internet age it's gonna be VERY hard to sustain the total vaxx program once the next variant breaks through and the data is collated and published about decreased immunity during stay at home, long term vaxx side effects etc etc.

I LOVE that Hive has a unique role to play in enabling this kind of reporting and discussion.

I love that people here still THINK. And yes, it's a time of rediscovery.

Thanks so much for dropping by. 😊

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Reading about you watching the vax narrative collapse makes me feel really optimistic. At the same time, I would have assumed that by now the ineffectiveness of masks, or the unreliability of tests would have become obvious to the greater public. But far from it! Especially countries where the counterproductivity of vaccines should be obvious, are the ones that never even had their first wave of Covid UNTIL the majority has been double vaxxed. But instead of putting two and two together, their reaction is: gotta get a third jab!

It's going to be like thalidomide and fats being bad for your heart and all take some time. Big Pharma's interests are HUGE and they fund a lot of the research. But I DO believe that we have reached an age of transparency, sort of, and even though we persecute them (a la Julian) they CAN (sort of) speak out. It is growing slowly.

So I'm going to quietly watch the vaxx narrative continue collapsing... and connect with the change makers and talk about natural immunity and DNA changes and the need for medical sovereignty. And just keep on being me.

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Agreed, life is all about perspective. My daughter mentioned Yeonmi Park to me this morning and told me to look up her interview with Joe Rogan. It's certainly given me a whole new perspective on things and reminded me to be grateful for a lot more than I often am.

Yes, perspective from other cultures and places is a serious game-changer to our myopic view of the world, usually. I'm tempted to re-download spotify to be able to listen to that interview... 😆

Any response to a post is good, whichever "hat" you accidentally left on.

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Oops, wrong account. That's what I get for trying to respond before bedtime. 😅

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I really appreciate reading about the situation in Thailand. Also very valuable what your friend shared in Vietnam. Really put things in perspective for me and that was very helpful today.

I don't want to get vaccinated either but I feel quite the pressure here. Many people don't want to meet with me if I'm not vaccinated. But I share your point of view.

Thanks for sharing 💚

It's tough being in a place where the diversity of opinion and choice is not allowed. My favorite Thai saying? "Up to you!" Because it is UNDERSTOOD, culturally, that people have choice and individual karma, which is sacred.

I hope you're enjoying Sweden in Summer... take each moment and savor it and allow the unfolding... who knows where we will be in 12 months time??

Hugs. !ENGAGE 25

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While I do agree that lockdowns are really bad and they destroy our routine life and fun, what other options did the state and central Governments have really to curb the pandemic and save people's life. They gave some clear instructions about social distancing and personal hygiene but when people didn't agree, they had no option but to impose lockdown.


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I disagree with that, but understand it's the easy and popular way forward. What about only asking for social isolation from the vulnerable ones and asking all the rest of us to step up our natural health 100000%??

Just a thought. Natural immunity is NOT served by stay at home orders (in fact, natural immunity decreases), and vaxxing does not stop the spread. As the world is now learning.

Hope you are all doing well at your end.

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