Outbreak Over Break: Mysterious Virus Prevented All Your Friends From Being Productive

I swore this break would be different…

Iowa student body, we regret to inform you that a virus has been lying latent in the student body for the last winter, undetected, and that almost the entire student body has been infected for the past week. Though, considering that you’ve been infected, you probably already know that.

Over break, across colleges, university students experienced extreme motivational issues. The scenario is probably familiar: you swore you were going to catch up on those readings, or study for your next midterm, or finish that art piece you’ve been working on for like two years at this point, but everything else is just far too appealing. Scientists have found that the phenomenon has actually been caused by a rare disease, which they’re calling “Breakitis”.

Scientists, who have been procrastinating on studying the disease since symptoms began appearing and are only now catching up on it, have dubbed the disease “Breakitis”. Breakitis is an airborne virus with some special properties that allow it to hang in cold air for long periods of time until it enters the body, at which point it stays in its frozen state until the environment around the infected individual begins to warm up, typically coinciding with the coming of spring.

An otherwise rare virus, Breakitis is thought to thrive in areas saturated with fermented drinks and animal urine, making Iowa City a prime candidate for epidemic. The St. Patrick’s Day bar crawl, combined with annoying cold weather, is thought to have exacerbated the spread of the virus.

Symptoms include an increasing period of optimism, during which infected individuals exhibit an intense desire for personal and professional productivity, followed by a week-long period of motivational drought and self-loathing, during which infected individuals are compelled to spend most of their time scrolling on TikTok and watching YouTube video essays about things they barely care about.

Breakitis is not a new phenomenon, the scientists claim. A retroactive look at history has revealed similar epidemics across time. Numerous old Norse sources point to a phenomenon roughly translating to “war fever”, in which Viking groups would get continuously hyped up to go on a raid, only to all back out at the last minute to have a feast instead. Breakitis is also thought to have contributed to the fall of Rome, as reflected in penultimate emperor Julius Nepos’s much less famous quote “veni, vidi, sleepy”. 

Scientists are, however, anticipating an end to Breakitis. “Now that we’re aware of the disease, we’ll study it… at some point,” a spokesperson for the research team told us, “We’ll get to it, we swear! It’s really gonna be better next year!”