Many people have taken aggressive steps to limit their social interaction in order to slow the spread of COVID-19. As a result of social distancing, many problems have arisen. Here are some tips on how to deal with uncomfortable situations.

【小题1】Before completely calling off an event, you may consider downsizing it a bit following the guidelines. In fact, the smaller the party is, the more of an opportunity there is to personalize the event. However, if you have to cancel the event, reach all of your guests and inform them that the event has been canceled.【小题2】

How to decline invitations. If you're invited to an event but you don't feel comfortable leaving home, decline as you typically would【小题3】 You don't have to go into too much detail since people would normally understand and respect your choices at a special time like this. However, if it's a birthday party or another kind of celebration, it would be good to still send a gift. An e-gift card can be a good option.【小题4】 To make it seem less impersonal, you can include a message to send your best wishes.

How to socialize online.【小题5】 For example, you may set up a regular time to contact your family members over webcam (网络摄像头)，and set up phone dates as an alternative to in-person dates. It's also a good idea to play a video game with your loved ones online, or watch the same movie and report back to each other.

Waste not, Want not

Today, I live in Manhattan with my husband, Alex. I’m an IT specialist and Alex is a lawyer. Life’s good, but sometimes I look at the way we live it and think of Ellie, my grandmother. Her favorite saying was “Waste not, want not.” 【小题1】. Ellie carefully folded the paper from parcels and washed glass jars to use again. Frank, my grandfather, used old socks and pullovers (套头毛衣) to protect the plants in winter. Nowadays, we go to a garden center to buy special felt for that purpose. Have we all gone mad?

Such economy seems strange, even ridiculous, in our modern throwaway society, where everything is sold in boxes. 【小题2】, but as a selling feature to make us want to buy them. Ellie and Frank would have seen the very idea of a “gift pack” as a cheat.

【小题3】. The United States produces about 180 million metric tons of waste per year, 70% of which is packaging materials. The average American family uses up six trees’ worth of paper a year. 【小题4】, they would reach to the moon and back twelve times. “We can’t go on like this,” I said to Alex. “Let’s start at home. If everybody starts at home, then this madness will stop.”

【小题5】. Of course, this meant that we produced a lot of waste, but I was shocked to find that this came to over six kilos per week. “Your grandma Ellie with her ‘Waste not, want not’ was really modern, wasn’t she?” “Not really,” I said. “Ellie and their neighbors were just ordinary, traditional New Englanders. We’ve all gone mad since then.”

At university, when I told people I was studying for a history degree, the response was almost always the same, “You want to be a teacher?” No, a journalist. “Oh. But you’re not majoring in communications?”

In the days when a university education was a privilege, perhaps there wasn’t the assumption that a degree had to be a springboard directly into a career. Those days are long gone. Today, a degree is all but a necessity for the job market, one that more than halves your chances of being unemployed. Still, that alone is no guarantee of a job—and yet we’re paying more and more for one.

Given those costs, most of us want to maximize that investment — and that can lead to a plug-and-play type of approach to higher education. Want to be a journalist? Study journalism, we’re told. A lawyer? Pursue pre-law. Not totally sure? Go into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineer and Maths) — you can become an engineer or an IT expert. And no matter what you do, forget the humanities, such as history, philosophy and languages.

It’s true that the humanities come with a higher risk of unemployment, but the risk is slighter than you would imagine. For young people in the U.S. , the unemployment rate of those with humanities degrees is four percent, just a little more than that of engineering degree holders. Lower salaries may not be caused by the degree itself either. The gender pay gap persists in the humanities, whose graduates are more likely to be female. Is it any wonder then that language teachers tend to make less than engineers?

According to LinkedIn’s research on the most sought-after job skills by employers for 2019, the ability to communicate and get along with people, to understand what’s on other people’s minds, and to do full-strength critical analysis were all valued and appreciated. It goes without saying that you can be an excellent communicator and critical thinker without a humanities degree. And any good university education, not just one in English or psychology, should sharpen these abilities further. But few courses of study are quite as heavy on reading, writing, speaking and critical thinking as the humanities — whether that’s by debating other students in a seminar, writing a thesis paper or analyzing poetry.

The whole question of whether a student should choose STEM versus the humanities might be misguided to begin with. The headlines most of us see don’t help. Whatever a student pursues in university, it must be something that they are not only good at, but interested in. Even if it means pursuing a “useless” degree — like one in humanities.