Why Life is So Stressful in Hawaii During the Pandemic

all right so originally i was gonna make this video it's gonna be scripted and probably some jokes in there but i decided that it just i don't know it didn't really seem right at the time so i'm here at the beach because i don't know about you but i am pretty stressed out if you're familiar with my youtube channel you know that most of my videos are done indoors and i would have made this video indoors if i had that opportunity but i was so i was feeling so stressed out that i just had to go outside and you'll notice that i'm by myself and that's because right now you can't go to the beach with anyone else so i can't go to the beach with my wife i can't go to the beach with my son so it's just me for now so i'm just glad that i'm able to at least get away for a little bit i started making videos about the pandemic in hawaii back in march and it's already september it's going to be october and it's really hard to imagine that this has been going on for so long and there's so many things that worry people but in this video i want to talk about the things that have really been stressing me out about this whole thing i'm hoping that things will get better the state will be able to open up safely and that the economy will get back on track all right so the first thing that's been stressing me out is dealing with people who are either too careful or not careful enough so you got the two careful people and these are people that they wear gloves when they go outside and they touch the crosswalk they wear gloves when they touch every doorknob they always wash their hands and there's nothing wrong with being safe but i notice that these are the people who when they go to the crosswalk you know it's okay to you know maybe you use your elbow to hit the button but why why are you using your foot it just makes it dirty for the rest of us for me i'm comfortable just touching the crosstalk with my finger and then later on i'll wash my hands but for some reason these people they they think that they have to kick it and they don't realize that they're just making the the button dirty for the rest of us then there's also the people that are opening the door in weird ways i know they want to be careful and they have little door things that you can kind of open the door with but they open it like in such an awkward way that i almost just want to open the door for them because it'd be a lot easier and then i just wash my hands after that but i think if they're really that concerned about touching surfaces that other people have touched it's okay to just wash your hands after you don't have to open the door with your elbow or the you know it just it's just weird now on the other hand you have the people who are seem to be care free they don't think anything is different and a great example is coming here to the beach if you look around a lot of people aren't really wearing masks and i get it you know you're outdoors there's certain rules in place and frankly it's pretty uncomfortable but over the past few weeks i've learned to run with a mask on because i figure if they ever put a mask rule like a permanent mandatory mask rule outside cigarette i might as well get used to it now rather than try to adjust to it later but coming to the beach there's definitely a lot of people not wearing masks but the worst thing is the people who are walking around and they're coughing and they're sneezing and for some reason they pull their mask down off their face it's like i guess they don't want to get their masks dirty but when they do that it just makes it a little more awkward for everyone there there was this time where we were walking uh outside and this guy was coming towards us on the sidewalk and you know if you know hawaii the sidewalks are so narrow it's ridiculous and all of a sudden he starts just coughing and so he pulls down his mask and he just goes like that and doesn't cover his mouth or anything and i just thought that's a pretty strange thing to do like shouldn't you wear your mask so pandemic or not you should probably just cover your mouth anyway all right number two is trusting people and it's hard because in hawaii we are very community based we're very friendly people you sit at the bus stop you just talk to whoever you want but lately because of how things are it's actually you have to put up kind of a guard right they say to assume everyone is sick and if you assume everyone is sick that means you don't trust them and it's really hard in this culture to trust people when potentially they could get you sick the hardest thing is you have to trust people that you don't know or you don't see what they do throughout the rest of their day so you don't know if they're going to follow the rules you don't know if they're going to do social distancing or wear a mask or if they went out to a party that weekend you just have to assume that they're doing it and that assumption is really hard sometimes so for example if i go to longs and i want to buy something like let's say i want to buy some juice when i go into the store i have to assume that not only the cashier and the stock person are all abiding by these rules outside of work not just inside of work but outside of work but i also have to assume that every customer that walks into that store who has ever walked into that store up until it was cleaned also followed those rules and that's a lot of people but where i think this is hardest is where you lose that trust with relationships that require trust relationships with people like family co-workers friends if you have to assume that they are all sick you don't want to really spend time with them and that makes it very difficult to build those relationships so if i were to go out and have lunch with my parents i have to assume that they're taking care of themselves and that they also have to assume the same about us that we are also taking care of ourselves and that it does put a strain on the relationship and so it's especially hard on those types of relationships and i don't not want to trust them i want to trust them because without that trust you don't have love and you don't have aloha but now it's so tough to do that all right next one is government fighting i don't know about where you're from but there's probably about a month or so back where it seemed like the government within the government different levels of government different agencies departments they're all blaming each other and as a normal person i can tell you that's pretty hard to watch and i get it it's politics but it feels like while the adults are all arguing us children are just standing around watching them fight and nothing is really getting done but things have changed recently in leadership and department heads so hopefully that means that things will start to change in the future but i can tell you that when the government officials are bickering and fighting especially publicly i think it hurts the public confidence in what they can do and that tension that fighting that conflict i think it trickles down to everyone else where if the leaders are the ones fighting each other normal people in their own households will start to fight with each other as well it seems like the estate plan is always changing and i get it it has to be adaptive and it has to be fluid because things are always changing cases go up you know different situations happen so totally understandable but in hawaii the plan for reopening the state and just the general rules has changed so much that it's caused so much confusion and stress first there was a reopening date which they said would open up back in august and that was they said that in june that it would open up in august and then they pushed it back to september and here we are in september and now it looks like they're going to push it back even further to october and it's like if they keep pushing it back further and further it's just going to stress everyone out not just the visitors who are coming here who have to then cancel or or postpone their trip but all the people who are working who then rely on these visitors to come like if they expect to come back to work in two weeks and then they don't it's really frustrating so if i'm a business why would i trust the government and saying oh yeah don't worry we're going to open up in two weeks or don't worry we're going to open up in a month when that date has been pushed back over and over and over again then there was also the issue about contact tracing and what that actually meant in the beginning they said that they were contact racing and then they discovered that they weren't doing contact tracing and now they're trying to beef up that program and then make it a whole lot better i think some people thought that contact racing wasn't that important and other people thought it was the most important thing and when you have that conflict it makes it very difficult for people to agree to get along and to get the information i think that the public needs and then there's the quarantine requirement and this has been really really bad i think it's been tough it's not easy to enforce but there just seems to be no real plan in place they've definitely improved that and they've given out a lot of tickets a lot of citations which makes me even nervous being here because of the citations that they've been giving to regular people but i'm by myself there's nobody within six feet of me so i should be safe i'm on the beach so i'm i'm okay um and as soon as i get off the beach i'll wear my masks again but it's just it's it's been tough to enforce that and i would hope that they find better ways to enforce that quarantine requirement if they ever do come up with a plan for the pre-testing to come into hawaii that would be great for a lot of visitors but still you're going to run across a lot of problems because that testing would be voluntary so i hope that they consider just figuring out a good way that's safe that's easy for people to follow but also easy to enforce all right and the last thing that's been stressing me out this one's a big one it's the media when this thing started you know i would watch the news almost every day trying to hear what the the new count was what the development is what unemployment's going on all that good stuff and after a while it just became really stressful it became where it was a lot of bad news because if you watch the news here locally you'll notice that a lot of the stories particularly the six o'clock news maybe like the first three stories pretty much about coronavirus and pretty much about what's been going on in the state about that usually case counts usually interviewing some doctor or testing or just talking about how bad the economy is and after watching that over and over and over again it gets really stressful and i just needed a break from social media that had to deal with that from newspapers from tv just all of it and it's been pretty nice i will say to take a break from that i do look at how many cases there are each day i'm just curious to know if the numbers have been going up or down but i try not to look too much into it and just sort of just wait for some of the big news like when is the trans-pacific traveler going to start when can people start coming back to work or when certain rules will be lifted or enforced and so those are some of the things that are stressing me out here and i'd love to know if especially if you live here locally what are some things that are stressing you out i'm sure it's been really really hard and it's something where i hope that they eventually figure out if you're not in hawaii and you are thinking about coming to hawaii these are just some of the things that we've had to deal with as we are trying to figure out how to adjust to this new normal in hawaii it's not easy it's particularly challenging when you have people coming from the mainland you have people coming from international travel and they're all coming to this one location this place is so isolated that if anything were to happen it would be extremely dangerous so i understand the stakes are very high the economy is also not doing so great anyway hope you're staying safe thanks for watching and aloha

Channel: Hello From Hawaii

Views: 34,961

Keywords: living in hawaii, Life in hawaii, what is it like in Hawaii, Moving to hawaii, hello from hawaii, hawaii, oahu, honolulu, hawaii life, life on hawaii, hawaiian life, life in hawaii pandemic, stressful life in hawaii, stress in hawaii, hawaii summer 2020, living in hawaii during the pandemic, stress in paradise, hawaii during pandemic, stressed out in hawaii, stressed in hawaii

Id: VFOLZmaqMMU

Length: 11min 29sec (689 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 17 2020