If you are having thoughts of suicide, please know that you are not alone. If you are in danger of acting on suicidal thoughts, call 911. For support and resources, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or text 741-741 for the Crisis Text Line.

In March 2020, my partner, Amie; our 2-year-old son, Ratna; and I, who usually live in Kansas City, Missouri, were visiting Kerala, India, about to be in the throes of the country’s first COVID outbreak. When it became clear that Kerala was going to be locked down, we drove up the coast as fast as we could and boarded a flight to Delhi. From there we set out for the most remote place we knew—a small village in the Himalayan foothills called Bir.

On our way there we were nearly turned around at a series of police checkpoints. To go where? That was never clear. Hotels and Airbnbs were sending foreigners away. On WhatsApp, we heard from fellow expats who were being rounded up into camps.

An initially reluctant Airbnb host took us in only a few days before a nationwide lockdown went into effect. “Really I should never have let you stay,” he told me. “But now you can’t leave.”

[Jeffrey Ruoff: Between not wanting to live and not wanting to die]

For the next four months, my family and I lived in a place that saw outsiders like us as the source of the virus. On the rare occasions when I went out for supplies (diapers couldn’t wait), I was cursed at and, once, spat on. Another time, while waiting for produce, I was thrown out of the line and told that rations were for locals only. I worried constantly that I wouldn’t be able to feed my wife and son or that we would be taken by the police to some refugee camp.

I have attempted suicide more than 10 times in my life, and the desire to kill myself is among my earliest memories. My adult life has been an ongoing struggle with addiction, depression, anxiety, chronic suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts. And yet in Bir, despite the fretful uncertainty of our time there, I never thought seriously about suicide. I was scared, but I was not depressed. I was panicking about the outside world, but my inside world—so often a source of misery—was relatively calm. My next serious bout of depression didn’t come until a year after we returned home. Judging by my mental health, the start of the coronavirus pandemic was one of the better times in my life. Apparently, I’m not the only one who feels this way.

During 2020—in the U.S. and in many other countries—suicide rates modestly declined, reversing a decades-long trend. We are learning that this is a pattern: Suicide rates typically go down in times of crisis. The sharpest decrease in U.S. suicide rates ever measured was during World War II; terrorist attacks and other catastrophes have also tended to reduce rates of suicide.

But now they’re rising again. This, too, is part of the pattern. In the months immediately following the Japanese earthquake of 2011, for example, suicide rates dropped compared with the rates in the years preceding the earthquake, and then spiked significantly.

I should note that during the coronavirus pandemic, suicide rates did not go down everywhere. Worldwide, suicide rates were generally lower than expected, and suicide rates went down in many countries, but often more so among men and only slightly among women. Some countries saw female suicide increase. A study from Japan showed that suicide rates among 10-to-19-year-olds rose during the early months of the pandemic. In Maryland, a study found that suicide rates decreased by 45 percent for white people during the first few months of the pandemic but increased by 94 percent among Black residents. Suicide rates appear to have risen among minority groups in the U.S.—especially in Black, Hispanic, and Asian communities—that were already experiencing alarming increases before the pandemic.

Though uneven, the overall dip in suicide rates in 2020, the first year of COVID, offers important lessons about how to deal with suicide, both in individual cases and at the policy level. The key to learning those lessons is figuring out why suicide rates went down in the first place.

Maria A. Oquendo, a former president of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, has offered three hypotheses for why suicide rates decline after public catastrophes. The first: Crises foster “community cohesion,” which mitigates suicidality. The second: “Individuals become more externally focused.” The third: “Community suffering makes personal suffering more tolerable.” These aren’t mutually exclusive, and they each have evidence to recommend them. All three resonate with my own experience.

I’ll begin with the idea of community cohesion. At least since Emile Durkheim’s 1897 masterpiece Suicide, we’ve recognized that one of the best ways to reduce suicide is to create a sense of belonging in our communities. Many studies have confirmed this fact, as well as its inverse: Living without a spouse, having few social networks, and engaging in few social activities all correspond with high rates of suicidal ideation, suicide attempts, and deaths by suicide. The reason middle-aged and older men tend to be at greater risk for suicide seems to be loneliness and a lack of social connections.

[Read: The millennial mental-health crisis]

The suicidologist Craig Bryan posited that suicide rates may have gone down during the pandemic because, in staying home, many people wound up spending more time with loved ones. Even for people who didn’t have loved ones nearby, there was a sense of collective suffering that seemed to provide many of us with a kind of belonging. As Albert Camus wrote in his novel about a different pandemic, “Plague was the concern of all of us.” Our isolation was, ironically, shared.

My wife, my son, and I certainly didn’t feel we belonged in Bir, but when we explained our fears in an email to one of the community’s leaders, he immediately wrote back: “Don’t worry, we will all take care of each other.” That’s what happened, once the initial shock wore off. The owner of a hotel we’d stayed at the year before drove cartons of canned milk to us; a friend of a friend brought us food from his garden and honey from his bees; another friend found us a house to stay at higher in the mountains, where we could roam freely outside.

This caring extended well beyond Bir. I felt especially close to my students at Ashoka University and at the University of Missouri, in Kansas City, even though our classes were on Zoom. I was talking and texting with my daughters back in the U.S. much more frequently than I did pre-pandemic, when I was constantly traveling for work. We all knew that we needed one another; we were scared, and didn’t know what was going to happen next. Needing others—and being needed—was a source of profound meaning and consolation.

Now the “externally focused” thesis: For many, the pandemic forced us to turn our gaze outward. I should say here that suicide is not the result of navel-gazing. On the contrary, one of the effective treatments for suicidal thinking—dialectical behavior therapy—presupposes that self-reflection is a remedy, not a cause. That said, the fact that the pandemic forced us to collectively face an external threat seems to me to be one of the best explanations for why suicide rates went down. Many of the most dangerous nations in the world have comparatively low suicide rates: The annual suicide rate in Afghanistan is six suicides per 100,000 people; in Turkey, 2.3; in Honduras, 2.6. In 2021, America’s was 14.5.

By focusing my attention on the outside world during the pandemic, I realized and came to accept that I could not control what was going to happen next. Because we were living in a state of unpredictable crisis, I had to let go of my usual anxious desire to determine (or miserably fail to determine) the course of my future. In some sense, my life wasn’t my life at all anymore; it was whatever life COVID decided to give me. Life was looking me in the face and saying, “I’m running things now. What are you going to do about it?” If I had been faced with that alone, I might have turned to my standard recourse: Well, I’ll just try to exit life. But because we were all facing the question together, I felt more up to the challenge.

This leads to the thesis that the community suffering caused by the pandemic made individual suffering more tolerable. I was freed from the usual dark foreboding I have, the certainty that I am somehow going to mess everything up or that I’ll accidentally inflict some ghastly terror on myself and the people I love. Whatever was going to happen probably wasn’t going to be my fault; it was happening to most or all of us. So I had to—well, to be more accurate, I found I could—simply wait and see what happened next. I was forced to learn a particular kind of patience. It was not that I became a patient person (I could only wish), but that one kind of impatience—my impatience with myself and how I relate to my life—was no longer tenable or even psychologically relevant.

I can’t overestimate how helpful learning this sort of patience can be for someone who is chronically suicidal. The inability to wait, or the suspicion that waiting won’t do any good, is at the center of the suicidal impulse. I’m not the first to notice this. The suicidologist James Hillman called suicide the “the urge for hasty transformation.” The musician Alison Mosshart said of her friend Anthony Bourdain: “His impatience was fucking hilarious … When you’re a big figure like that … any time you do have to wait, your brain explodes.” Édouard Levé adds in his novel Suicide, which he gave to his publisher immediately before killing himself, “Your impatience deprived you of the art of succeeding by being bored.”

The fact that suicide rates are now rising again, especially among young people and in Black communities, should not surprise us. Trauma is known to deteriorate mental health and cause rates of suicide attempts and deaths by suicide to increase. And whatever the pandemic’s short-term benefits, its enduring legacy is something resembling a global post-traumatic stress disorder. Mental Health America, an organization that supplies free, voluntary mental-health screening, reported that the number of people taking its questionnaires tripled from 2019 to 2020. Fifty-one percent of 11-to-17-year-olds who took the screening in 2020 reported frequent suicidal ideation.

Other factors are also relevant: Post-pandemic, we are naturally receding back into the habits that changed when we were all in the crisis together. Community cohesion, external focus, and a sense of community suffering are all dissipating. Additionally, suicides that might otherwise have taken place during the pandemic could be happening now. Whatever the causes, the need for mental-health care is abundant and obvious.

Happily, we can learn some simple lessons from the surprisingly salutary mental-health effects of the pandemic. Now is a good time to work on building community cohesion, especially among vulnerable populations. The Bandana Project, which develops peer-to-peer mental-health counseling among college students, is one excellent example. For those of us, like me, who experience chronic suicidal ideation, we can remember that turning our attention outward, toward the benefit of others—by something as simple as volunteering at a local homeless shelter or a community garden—may have profound mental-health benefits. And simply being willing to be open with the people in your own life about your mental-health struggles, to let them know that they can also speak honestly and safely with you about their own challenges, benefits both your own mental health and that of the people you care for. When we know that we are suffering together and not alone, we fight stigma, reduce shame, and lighten the pressure of often-isolating psychological distress.

Dealing with the mental-health fallout from the pandemic will require the kinds of resources we needed in order to fight the virus itself: above all, money and training for health professionals. Many teenagers who attempt suicide have to wait days or even weeks for help, if they receive it at all. Many teens who end up in emergency rooms sit for 24 or 48 hours without seeing a trained mental-health-care professional.

Addressing this will require massive commitments at governmental and institutional levels. But I think COVID helped remind me that we can also help as individuals. One of the most effective treatments for suicidal ideation is simply talking with people who are struggling. Ask a person you’re worried about how they are feeling. Don’t try to solve the problem. Let them talk it out. Talking about suicide doesn’t plant the seed; it provides relief. And for those of us who frequently have suicidal ideation, we can also help ourselves (though you should also always reach out for help, if you can). For me, that means continually trying to put into practice the lessons the pandemic forced me to learn.

And the most important one wasn’t really a lesson at all. It was a question. The pandemic showed me that life has been asking me, asking all of us, one question above all: Will you stick around? Will you wait and see, with the rest of us? As John Donne wrote, one year before an outbreak of a plague that devastated Britain: “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.” The person who did not die by suicide during the coronavirus pandemic was one more person who survived it. They helped the rest of us make it through. And they can be proud of that fact.

Why Hollywood A-listers who have taken Wrexham to the brink of promotion wanted to remain covert.

Barry Benson tightened his grip on his steering wheel. The federal wildlife-damage-abatement officer had handled bears, coyotes, and wolves. But now he was on a bigger hunt. And he was not alone. At an utterly unassuming, otherwise-bucolic intersection just outside the 280-acre Schmeeckle Reserve in rural Wisconsin, dozens of cars—Benson’s among them—idled in the predawn darkness of 5 a.m., all tuned into the same local radio station, 90 FM, waiting for instructions.

[Read: Wisconsin: Images of the badger state]

Suddenly a voice crackled into the night air: “From where you are now, go past the walking people. Now turn left. Careful, the lane ends. Go past the large cat, the show hosted by David Letterman, the French explorer, the white star, and the printed word seven. Turn left after the protected plastic yellow sleeves. Go past the red arrow. Now turn right. Continue down the road … You have 45 minutes.”

Cars screeched and sped off. The chase was on.

The cryptic announcement was one of hundreds of clues in Trivia Weekend, billed as “the world’s largest trivia contest,” which annually floods the college town of Stevens Point, Wisconsin, with about 10,000 players (the town’s population is just 26,000). For 54 nonstop hours, the college radio station asks more than 400 questions, waiting only the length of a song or two for the answer. The more teams that answer a question correctly, the less it’s worth. There are also scavenger hunts and music scrambles, where eight songs are spliced into 11 seconds and must each be identified.

The morning at Schmeeckle Reserve was in April 2019, in what has been nostalgically called the “before times.” Before COVID-19, of course. But also before mask and vaccine mandates. Before working from home. Before using Zoom for everything from school to funerals. Before toilet paper and flour and baby formula and eggs became hot commodities. Before George Floyd’s murder. Before the insurrection. Before Redditors made bank from GameStop stock.

Trivia Weekend celebrated its 50th anniversary that year (the mayor’s 44th year playing). There was a kickoff parade, which sometimes includes weddings. That year, the parade ended with Governor Tony Evers issuing a proclamation enshrining that weekend as Trivia Weekend statewide.

Over the years, nothing had stopped it. Not a 20-inch blizzard in 2018. Or even the miracle of childbirth (Anne Frederiksen played throughout the Friday night of trivia in 1991 and gave birth that Saturday to a girl who was almost named Trivianna—she went with Lauren instead; her team came in first that year). One year in the 1990s, a local woman fell into a coma in November and awoke in December to doctors warning her she would be hospital-bound for life. “But I have to play trivia in April,” she told them—and she did, sending the quizmaster a thank-you T-shirt afterward embroidered with a needlepoint poem. Even the town’s police, firefighters, and EMTs played on a team called the Choir Boys. The Jeopardy superstar Ken Jennings’s best-selling book on trivia, Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs, has a chapter about Stevens Point. Trivia Weekend was a way of life. One year, local merchants reported that the only holiday that stimulated the town’s economy more was Thanksgiving. Trivia Weekend was bigger than Christmas.

Then came COVID.

“There is a cloud overhead,” wrote Trivia Weekend’s quizmaster, known as Oz, in an email on March 12, 2020. “Many of you have heard about the announcement by the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point concerning extension of spring break and suspension of in-person classes until April 15th. This is presuming that things don’t get worse, which there is no promise of that … So, I like to avoid the problem. At this time ‘Raid on Trivia 51’ is being postponed until the weekend of October 23, 24, 25, 2020.”

Like many proms and weddings and funerals and office meetings that could’ve been emails, Trivia Weekend in October 2020 was largely confined to Zoom. The marathon took breaks from midnight to 8 a.m., and a lack of human-run phone banks meant that answers were submitted through web forms that hadn’t shaken out all of their flaws. It didn’t return to being in person until last year.

Trivia Weekend was a kind of annual rumspringa, a time when mild-mannered midwesterners could stop living Wisconsinbly and become sleep-deprived zombies animated in equal parts by book smarts, beer smarts, and Google. At the core of the festivities is Network, a team of Pointers (as people from Stevens Point are called) who have been playing every year since 1976, when many of them were in ninth grade—they’ve taken the first-place prize 22 times and placed in the top 10 in all but their first two years (including the pandemic years). They are known as the Dark Lords of Trivia. Their mascot is George Leroy Tirebiter, a long-lost pet tarantula from a member’s childhood. Once, in the 1980s, amid a four-hour perfect run, they debated purposely answering a question wrong to quell suspicion that they were cheating.

Even if you’ve never heard of Network, you may have played against them. One member, Ray Hamel, a quizmaster at Slate, has published more than 2,000 crossword puzzles, including one for every day of the week for The New York Times. Since 1980, he has been taking notes on the movies he watches, and has logged about 11,000 flicks; in 2018, he beat his annual record with 454, but by Trivia Weekend 2019 he was already on track for 650 (he hit 635, which still stands as his record). Another Network member, Jim Newman, has written questions for NPR’s Ask Me Another, runs pub trivia in bars across Los Angeles, has directed a stage adaptation of the old television quiz show What’s My Line?, and created a podcast—Go Fact Yourself—that tests celebrities on their nerdy realms of interest. He went on Jeopardy in 1993 and was beaten by the eventual Tournament of Champions winner the following year.

[Adriana E. Ramírez: Everyone loses on Jeopardy eventually]

Network’s core is Barry Heck, whose mother’s basement hosted the team continuously from  1980 through 2019. When the Heck family moved neighborhoods in 1988, they engineered their new basement specifically for trivia, building bookshelves customized to the exact size of, say, a huge collection of Big Little Books or every World Almanac since 1868 (unlike many trivia contests, outside references are allowed). The prize of the collection, housed in a glass cabinet, is a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica bought by Heck’s grandfather in 1918. The overall collection is so large—extending even to vintage board games (Leave It to Beaver Ambush Game! Nancy Drew! Stick the IRS!) and limited-run cereal boxes (Addams Family cereal! Nickelodeon Green Slime cereal! Sugar Jets!)—that the basement has its own card catalog and a 1,200-page printout from 1999 dubbed the Megadex. Network plays with a dedicated Slack channel running on two large monitors. Amid the clutter are the team’s dozens of trophies.

In 2019, Heck’s trove came particularly in handy. In a complicated question about the Explorer Scout Manual, Heck, himself a Life Scout, sauntered over to his vintage manual, flipped to page 155—“backwoods engineering”—and found the answer. It was worth 400 points, which means only one other team knew it. But he also had secret weapons in his nieces, 15-year-old Emma and 10-year-old Renee, who were well versed in Disney shows and cartoons (about which there are a disproportionate number of questions for an adult contest).

When I asked why he has stuck with Trivia Weekend over the decades, Heck shrugged: “It’s something we do for ourselves, not for the neighbors or the internet or anyone else.” His mother, Mary Ann, now 90, made doughnuts for the team every Sunday morning during the tournament for almost half a century. She loves the group, whom she still calls “kids,” and the feeling is very mutual. When her husband and Barry’s father, Ron, died in 2013, most of the team came back to Stevens Point for the funeral, where the pastor began the eulogy with three biblical-trivia questions, which the team solemnly answered.

From a lonely apartment in Brooklyn (with a cat), then a lonelier one in San Francisco—no roommate, no paramour, no pet—I writhed through much of 2020, including an 18-day fever of 103 degrees Fahrenheit with coughs that led to diminished lung capacity that I developed after reporting on the unfolding pandemic for The Washington Post.

My saving grace was a weekly Sunday-night Zoom session with a motley cohort of L.A. industry strangers—producers, musicians, actors, designers, and writers of all types (one of whom had sent me an invitation). For two hours every week, we could retreat into a carnival of knowledge and know-how (some challenges involved drawing or doing impressions or silently mouthing a catchphrase). I was not alone. We were not alone. Pub-style trivia took off in a big way that year, despite being handicapped by the pandemic. “It’s not a question of being smart. It’s just a neurological quirk where we remember things,” a trivia columnist told The New York Times in a November 2020 trend story. Another trivia leader chimed in: “It’s testing knowledge, but it’s not testing anything important.” The beloved Jeopardy host Alex Trebek had died a few weeks earlier, making us all keenly aware of the power and promise of trivia done well.

[Read: How Alex Trebek made a mundane game show brilliant]

My own trivia night worked so well because it happened every Sunday, rain or shine, whether the Super Bowl or the Oscars or Valentine’s Day. Every week brought fresh pandemic chaos and insanity, and was so heightened—so optimized and maximalized for madness—that it turned trivia night into a capstone cleansing ritual, a baptism in which we reasserted our internal weirdness over anything external. No trophies or prizes. Each week the top scorer gave an improvised assignment—usually an impression—to the low scorer.

It helped us not lose track of the paradoxical power of pointlessness, of genuine free time (monetized hobbies or activities motivated by “self-care” don’t count). In a world desperate to normalize everything, we reclaimed the bravery of our weirdness. It helped that we were strangers enjoying one another’s strangeness. Having lost so much time and momentum, and with so many folks consequently demanding that we not allow another minute to go by without advancing our best selves, here we were goofing around in every week’s crucial final psychic round, in which we guessed people’s names prompted only by their photo.

One week I won by correctly identifying Dick Fiddler (the same week I also scored the most Shark Tank–style investors for my company Bones ‘N’ Things. The pitch: “We got all kinds of bones. Femurs! Clavicles! Skulls! And then also on the side we have, y’know, some things. Some things you probably want. Pretty good things.”). Another week, I correctly identified the 19th-century British General Manley Power and compelled that week’s lowest scorer to do an impression of Captain Crunch’s supervisor explaining why the cereal mascot was being passed up for a promotion yet again.

Trivia has a magic; it encourages a flow state through a multiverse of memories—of possibilities. Every ping everywhere all at once. The wonder of it all, and its refusal to be optimized, maximalized, or otherwise scaled toward mechanization compels us to own our own mystery in ways that are inexplicably human, free from the artifice of imposed or supposed intelligence.

While everyone else was prioritizing the tedium of life hacks or the contrivance of TikTok trends, we were frolicking in the serendipity of rabbit holes and a convoluted extrapolation of Truth or Dare.

One question from pandemic Zoom trivia still resonates with me frequently: In the eighth century, the Venerable Bede determined the exact duration of a moment; how long was it? The answer was 90 seconds. Knowing this has given so many minutes since added momentum.  Any moment, however feral or frenzied, has a life span of just 90 seconds. Now is never forever.

We were and still are definitively in a historic moment of flux—in all the big ways, sure, but also a redefining era for what counts as marginal, incidental, and trivial. We are not back to normal and never will be. Anyone calling for that might as well be asking to “Make America normal again.” Instead, we are tasked with rebuilding a new normal out of hope but also out of memory, which is why it’s so important to remember how we spent those pre-pandemic days.

In the Network basement, Kayla Nelson—the sonographer daughter of a stenographer and one of the team’s many younger-generation women—was brought to tears by finally discovering the source of a mysterious bird image. It was on an obscure backgammon board from 1975. On a whim, because it was the 11th hour of the tournament and no board-game questions had been asked yet, she had googled vintage board-game swan (although most Network players thought it was a dove or a sparrow). She composed herself enough to call in the answer when the time came, to a round of applause.

Later, Thom Aylesworth, a lawyer from Boston who had co-founded the group with Heck, was filing the team’s final quibbles to the complaint line. No one was picking up. “Hang up,” said Nick Pionek, Network’s IT guy, from behind his three computer screens. Aylesworth hung up the landline and Pionek tapped his keyboard. “Okay,” he said, “I’ve changed that phone’s number. Try now.” Dark Lords of Trivia indeed.

At last, the final question came: “A literary character and his two sons were in town to get 10 bags of feed at the store. The store owner informed them that a prisoner had escaped and was out to kill all three of them. As they were leaving the store, the youngest brother accidently bumped into a young man, knocking him into the street. The young brother tried to apologize but the young man jumped up, pulling his gun, putting it in the brother’s stomach and pulling the trigger. Luckily, nothing happened and the young brother proceeded to give the young man a closed right fist, which caused the young man to collapse. What is the complete name of the young man who collapsed on the street?”

Heck stood up. “That’s gotta be a Big Little Book,” he said, and began pulling them off the shelves by the armful, onto the conference table covered by laptops and snacks, each book the size of an overstuffed wallet. The whole team descended on the books like locusts, turning the old pages so briskly that some of them tore or crumbled. “Check all the Westerns! Anything with a cowboy on it! It’s gotta be—”

Too late.

“Phones down in the back; that is it for question eight of hour 54, Trivia 5-0,” said the DJ before announcing the answer: the Bubble Gum Kid.

Network hadn’t even called in a guess. They stood there, at the game’s ungracious finale, amid the chaos of books that now seemed like the flotsam of their sunken hopes. Is this what it felt like to be in the ashes of Alexandria or the rubble of Babel? The silence was deafening. Then they did what all Pointers do at the end of a party: They cleaned up and drank after-party beers in the garage.

This is the unifying thread among COVID, the insurrection, the Great Resignation, and inflation: stakes. Across the board, the stakes are high. But what matters is how we respond to these stakes. In most conflicts, especially zero-sum scenarios, the response is some form of brinkmanship—threats and other bullying or imposing tactics. Give us the White House or we’ll storm the Capitol. Give us the Supreme Court or we’ll expand it in our favor. Give us promotions or we’ll quit. Give us raises or we’ll strike. Give us liberty or give us death. The result too often is a kind of gerrymandering of the soul, a parceling of principles for the sake of pragmatism, which only works in theory. By its nature, trivia is not that deep.

[Read: The link between happiness and a sense of humor]

These stakes are traumatic, though, and one of the best-kept secrets in trauma response is to engage in something trivial: a silly game like my own go-to, Candy Crush (a National Institutes of Health study focused on Tetris, which caused hippocampal increases in the brain, reducing anxiety, depression, and PTSD). Something that can absorb attention in a way that mops up panic or pain. It’s a response that literally blocks traumatic memories from forming. Similarly, trivia contests flex your brain’s frontal cortex. “That’s the first thing to go with injury or with age if we don’t use it,” a psychologist who specializes in neurotherapy explained in a Healthline article about the health benefits of trivia.

All of our progress over the past few years is admirable, but also exhausting. Our lives would be far more comfortable if they were just a little more trivial.

On the 55th hour of Trivia Weekend 2019, Network drove to the radio station to collect their trophy. Even at 1:30 a.m., the station was packed with trivia zombies, including babies, elderly women, men in kilts or Princess Leia cosplay, and at least one person in a panda costume (presumably a member of the team Trivial Fursuit). Strangers recognized Heck and asked to shake his hand.

Network came in sixth place in the tournament, up from seventh the year before but far from their regular spot in first. Their standing was out of 341 total teams. Fifth place in 2020, fifth again in 2021, and sixth in 2022. Not quite winners, but not quite losers either. They are Pointers. And we could all use a few Pointers in our lives every now and then. But especially now.

In-person work is largely dependent on real-time communication, but replicating that culture in a virtual environment brought a range of challenges, including Zoom fatigue, meeting overload, and constant disruptions that make it extra challenging to get work done.

Read more...