In Wisconsin a teenage girl was threatened with arrest for disorderly conduct if she didn’t remove an Instagram post about her COVID-19 status.

https://reason.com/2020/04/17/a-teenager-posted-about-her-covid-19-infection-on-instagram-a-deputy-threatened-to-arrest-her-if-she-didnt-delete-it/

The family with the assistance of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty is aiding the family in a lawsuit against the Sheriff’s Department for violating First and 14th Amendment rights. The Sheriff responded:

Sam Hall, an attorney for the sheriff, said the teenager “caused distress and panic” among other parents by claiming she had contracted the coronavirus despite getting a negative test result.

“This case is nothing more than a 2020 version of screaming fire in a crowded theater,” he said, referring to speech that is not protected by the First Amendment.

— Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Doesn’t the media regularly cause “distress and panic”? (e.g. Corona virus is going to kill us all, climate change is going to kill us all) Why isn’t the sheriff threatening the media with arrest for disorderly conduct?

While watching YouTube it’s easy to get caught up in all the things everyone else does and begin to feel pathetic about your own existence. You need to remind yourself that you’re amalgamating the lives of many people into one fictional super person who does all kinds of interesting things. The reality is that you are watching many people who each individually probably aren’t all that exiting.

This person can amazing at the piano, that person is visiting desert islands while sailing across the Pacific, this other person is building amazing machines with their 3d printer. They are all different people. If you look at the pianist, they spend thousands of hours to get there, it’d be pretty boring to watch them practice. The sailor spends days staring at vacant ocean, which would be boring to watch, the person building amazing machines spends many hours designing the machine (unless they’re lazy and download it).

Each of them lives a pretty boring life while they’re putting in the prep work for the highlight reel that you get to watch on YouTube. Then you take the highlight reels of many people and mush together in your brain and feel inadequate.

You are not inadequate though. If you are using your talents and abilities as best you can in the circumstances that you find yourself then you are making the world a better place.

To leisurely walk around and look at things.