# Two Weeks of Flu > I caught the flu two weeks ago and I am still not over it. Two weeks on a couch is a long time to think about how I had been living. Number: № 033 Published: 2026-09-27 Tags: personal Canonical: https://yihanzhu.com/blog/two-weeks-of-flu/ Author: Yihan Zhu --- I caught the flu about two weeks ago and I am still not over it. Runny nose, coughing, sneezing, and a tiredness where getting from the bed to the couch is the day's project. For the first few days I could not look at a screen for more than a few minutes. This is the first thing I have written since. At first I put it down to bad luck. There had been a company get-together the week before, a lot of people in one room, and someone always has it first. I sat there with the tissues and did not think much more about it. But two weeks is a long time to lie on a couch, and somewhere in the second week I started to wonder whether the party was really the whole story. ## The news I could not follow The first thing I noticed, once I could notice anything, was how much I was missing. I follow the AI space closely, or I did until this month: the model releases, the arguments about each one, the tools people ship every week. Lying there, I could feel it going past. Somewhere a model was coming out and I was not reading about it. For the first few days that bothered me almost as much as the cough. Then I got well enough to look, and I went through what I had missed. There was a lot of it. There was also nothing I had needed on the day it happened. Everything that mattered was still there when I arrived, and by then other people had already sorted out which parts were worth reading. Two weeks of missing everything had cost me nothing I could point to. That raised a question I had never asked while I was well. If none of it needed me on the day, what had I been doing checking it every hour? The honest answer is that I was afraid of being the one who did not know. The work never required it. I kept up because stopping felt like falling behind, and that feeling had never once been tested, because I had never once stopped. The flu tested it. Nothing fell. ## Looking at the routine again Having caught myself once, I went looking for the same thing elsewhere, and the obvious place to look was the routine I was proudest of. For the last year my weekdays have run on a fixed pattern. Up at six, thirty minutes of cardio, work, then forty-five minutes at the gym after work. Five days a week. Weekends are for family and I stay off the computer. If someone had asked me a month ago whether I took care of my body, I would have said yes without hesitating, and I would have pointed at that. What I saw this time was what the routine was for. I had built it so I could work harder. The morning cardio was there so I could sit at a desk for ten hours without fading. The evening gym was there so the desk hours did not turn into a bad back. I never thought of either one as rest, and I was right about that: they were work of a different kind, scheduled and measured, and they made more work possible. The routine was a way of holding up, and holding up is what I asked of it. That is the same shape as the news. In both cases I had taken something that felt like care, keeping informed, keeping fit, and used it to run harder. The hour at the gym had the same job as the hourly check of the feed. Both of them kept me in motion. ## The weeks before the party With that in mind, the weeks before the get-together looked different. I had been saying yes to more at work for a while. More projects than my own, more of the things that sit between teams and that nobody is quite assigned, and a company event I had volunteered to organize on top of it. I wanted all of it, and I would say yes again. But all of it together meant that the end of the work day stopped being the end of anything. I would finish at the desk, go to the gym, come home, have dinner, and keep turning some piece of it over in my head, a question from one project or the schedule for the event. I was not at a desk, and I was working. The gap between one day and the next got very thin, and it stayed thin for about a month. The routine held through all of it. I never missed a morning. And that is what I find hardest to look at now, because the routine holding was the problem. It kept me strong enough to keep going, and going was exactly the thing I needed to stop doing. An immune system that had been on shift for a month walked into a room full of people, and someone sneezed. The party is where the flu found me, and by then it had a month of help. ## What I had left off the list So the thing I had called health turned out to be two-thirds of it. I had the exercise and I mostly had the sleep. What I did not have, anywhere in the week, was time when nothing was being worked on. Not the news, not the event, not a side project. An hour with no task in it. I think I know why that hour was missing. Everything else on the list produces something. Cardio produces endurance, the gym produces strength, the feed produces the feeling of knowing. Doing nothing produces nothing, by definition, and I have spent years organizing my days around what they produce. An hour of nothing never made the list because it had nothing to show for itself, and so the part of health that cannot be measured was the part I quietly dropped. The body kept its own count of those hours, and it counted the missing ones. ## The off switch The change I am making is small, and it is about stopping rather than adding. When the work day ends, it ends. The laptop closes at a set time, and the harder part is that the work has to close in my head too. Thinking about a problem on the couch at nine is still working on it, only without any of the tools. Breaks during the day count as well. I have no trouble keeping a workout on the calendar and a lot of trouble keeping ten minutes of nothing there, so the ten minutes go on the calendar too, and I will skip them exactly as often as I skip the gym, which is never. I want to keep saying yes to things at work. Stopping at the end of the day is how I get to keep doing that.