What I Got Wrong About “Pandemic Math”

An Apology to Everyone Who Tried to Make the Equation Work

I thought I had found the formula. For a while, it helped — until it didn’t. Until something heavier kept pulling at the edge of the equation, impossible to ignore.

Here’s the original math:

T = (B × E) / R

Where:

• T = Total energy cost of a task or event

• B = Baseline burden (your current level of exhaustion, stress, health, etc.)

• E = Effort required (logistical, emotional, physical, social)

• R = Recovery factor (quality and quantity of recovery support available afterward)

When I first introduced this equation in November of 2024, it felt clarifying. It helped me plan. It made the invisible visible. We discussed it during live calls, applying it to everything from grocery shopping at the store to holiday travel. I focused on what we could control: how we recover, how we prepare, how we pace ourselves. And yes — it helped. I’ve seen it help others as well.

But maybe you felt what I did: that the more I used it, the more I noticed a kind of weight the equation couldn’t hold. Something just under the surface — something heavy, complex, and constant.

I finally uncovered the word for it last week while reading an essay by Kyla Scanlon titled ‘The Most Valuable Commodity in the World Is Friction,’ which I strongly recommend.”

IT’S FRICTION…the awareness hit me like a brick wall.

“Because while the digital world has removed all friction, the physical world is where the friction still lives. Not the good kind, the effort of doing something hard, the kinetic potential of possibility, but the bad kind: the exhaustion of trying to hold together systems that no one’s willing to invest in anymore.”- Kyla Scanlan

We are the ones trying to hold together so many systems —health, education, and communal life — that no one is willing to invest in anymore. The world “returned to normal”, but we journeyed into the unknown to build something that could still function in the dark. We sourced, shared, created, and reimagined life. We made new ways to work, parent, learn, and care.

And still, we are cast as the ones who turned the lights off. Blamed for the distance others chose rather than agree to meet our requests for safety in the face of a novel virus with over 500,000 studies on its consequences, and still, not one cure. Misunderstood as rigid or fearful, when in fact, we are doing what institutions refused to do: create the conditions to sustain life, not gamble repeatedly with its existence.

So, it probably won’t surprise you to hear that I’m working on a new equation, a new frame for this deepened understanding, and a series of related essays and live calls to accompany it, mainly because that’s what I need most right now, and I assume that maybe some of you do too.

But for now, I know this: the original math wasn’t wrong. But it missed a layer — the kind of existential tax that warps everything it touches: the unmeasured residue of friction, not the kind that generates growth, but the kind that wears you down.
So even when the math adds up, the experience doesn’t feel resolved. It drags — not on the task, but on the soul.

The original equation, although shaped by the reality of living in a liminal space, still assumed agency: that with planning and care, we could at least balance it somewhat.

And to some degree, we could. I used the equation to plan my family’s time and energy more effectively over the last six months, and things did go more smoothly.

But that didn’t change the exhaustion underneath. It didn’t move the dial on demoralization.

What the Equation Couldn’t Hold

1. Calculating accurately doesn’t save you from the aftermath of friction.

You plan, recover, and account for every variable. But the act of having to do that math at all — to justify your safety, to opt out again — creates its own internal grind. Our resistance to forced infection creates social, systemic, and existential drag—friction that the system pretends doesn’t exist. Meanwhile, the friction is the hidden toll of doing all the right things in a collapsing infrastructure that was already inequitable before the pandemic.

2. Friction is relational and invisible (and it’s often used by systems in manipulative ways)

It isn’t just emotional labor — it’s a corrosive force:

• The tension in the group chat when you ask about ventilation..

• The social capital lost with every “no”…

• The loneliness of being the only one who cares about the air…

So even when T (total energy) = manageable, the isolation is not.

3. Friction undermines future motivation

You complete the task, but you feel hollow and hesitant to try again. Because:

• Friction fractures trust

• Friction flattens hope

• Friction turns resilience into resignation

• Friction isn’t just social or emotional — it’s systemic entropy

• We are shaped by our cultural and institutional patterns to personalize collapse by calling it burnout, when it's actually structural decay manifesting in our bodies.

In the end, it’s not failure that breaks us. It’s doing everything right and still being blamed, or worse, erased.

It’s like trying to drive a well-tuned car through a road that’s crumbling. The car is fine. The road is gone.

So in some small way, I owe you an apology. My intention was never to cause harm. I didn’t mean to suggest you should carry a notebook and calculate every Still Coviding move you make. But if I ever gave the impression that doing the math should have made things balance out somehow, I’m sorry. I suppose I did hope that it would. But I’m not offering ideas from a distance. I’m living through this in real time, too — eyes wide open, willing to name what’s working and to admit what isn’t.

I’ve learned that even when perfectly executed, the intentional application of the pandemic math equation can still leave us reeling if the impact of friction isn’t acknowledged.

We’re not just recovering from excessive effort; we’re recovering from ongoing disillusionment. We’ve been doing logistics inside collapse—patching holes while the roof caves in.

So if you’re tired even after an “easy” day...
If you feel fractured even when the plan worked...
If you don’t want to plan at all...

It’s not your fault.

It’s FRICTION (the corrosive kind).

A New Kind of Space

Kyla Scanlon writes about the loss of friction in digital life and its overabundance in the real world — and how, in response, we create third spaces: curated zones that soften the hard edges of reality.

She’s rightly wary of how those spaces can become aestheticized or escapist. But what I realized reading her piece is that many of us have already been building something like that, not to escape friction, but to reshape it.

Not stylized friction.
Shared friction.
A space where the drag of holding systems together is acknowledged, not denied.

If it’s true that you can’t heal what you’re still being wounded by — and recovery (R) can’t always “balance” the equation because of ongoing injury and corrosive friction — then being in an intentional space becomes critical.

Not a space of perfection— but presence.
Not certainty — but courageous reflection.
Not control — but connection.

And that’s the heart of what I hope The Room of Return will be.

A space where effort is met with care.
Where recovery is possible, because the conditions are different.
Where caring about the air isn’t an experience of solitary confinement.

It’s not about getting back to who we were.
It’s about gathering — inside what we’ve learned —
making space for each other’s hopes and fears, wins and losses,
and finding the language that can alchemize our pain.

I recently opened a space for paid subscribers, and over the next few weeks, I will be hosting live calls and chats in that room, where we will share words that matter to us and delve deeper into the impact of a friction-aware equation.

As always, I’ll continue to share reflections and core content here freely.
But I’m confident we need somewhere to return to —
Somewhere where your choices aren’t treated as threats.
Somewhere where the math makes sense again.
Somewhere where recovery is more than a line on the page.

I’m so very grateful to those of you who have already pulled up a seat around the table
to hold these deep conversations,
to write our way through the friction.

We didn’t opt out.
We built out — from the margins.
And what we’ve built deserves a place to return to.

Let’s build it together.
Let’s keep returning.

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