In my case there's a goal. I'm putting together enough money for a house deposit in another country when we emigrate later in the year.

When I'm tired as all hell and wishing I could just go back to bed, that's what keeps me going. When I'm not tired as all hell I actually still enjoy the work, so that helps.

Out of curiosity, where are you planning to go? I am planning to leave the UK too and would like to know some options. So far my plan is to end up somewhere in Eastern Europe. Cost of living is low enough that I can actually afford a property instead of burning piles of cash for a shitty London flat.

Western Australia. I lived there for a couple of years about 10 years ago as a skilled migrant, then came back to the UK. I was (really, really unexpectedly) lucky enough that when I applied to reinstate my long-expired visa they said "sure, you have a one-year window to get back over here".

Cost of living is pretty high, salaries are pretty OK (better than a lot of UK perm, not as good as UK fintech contracting AFAICT), houses are big if you live out of the city centres, the sun shines and the beaches go on forever :)

I guess I don't know what the alternative would be. I miss travel/events and getting together with people socially. But it's not like those would exist if I weren't working either. I almost certainly have more personal contact than if I weren't working. Plus I'm fairly close to retirement so I might as well put some more money away.

The part of me that isn't horrified by the death toll or frustrated by the inconveniences in my own life has thought about a million times, "man, I bet we're getting so much interesting data out of this pandemic."

Beyond the bucket of cash dumped onto new vaccine technologies, the international DiRT for all of our emergency preparedness, the data on pandemic spread and transmission reduction strategies, we're also getting all sorts of psych and social data on how people respond to a crisis, to government orders and to isolation. A thousand dissertations and new departments of study will spring from this.