COVID quarantine chronicles.
Lockdown life.
This is a series that I was never expecting to make.
[…] Some of the themes that I pull out of this: one is this idea of isolation, this dystopian isolation.
Even in the best of times, in ordinary times, there’s so much isolation in the modern world.
Everybody is so atomized and individualized and separate, and there’s a lot of missing community and family and friends and support, and there’s a lot of loneliness and isolation in the modern world.
And this is accelerating that to a new degree.
[…] When this first started, there was this sense of being plugged in, this like, you know, the war room, the situation room, and there’s a sense of excitement about big world events unfolding, and almost like it acts like a drug in its own way, just being plugged into the news and getting excited over every little development, and just the excitement of being in unknown times and not knowing what’s going to happen.
And that can kind of like seize attention and become a focus, just like reading news obsessively and following and wondering what’s going to happen and talking about it.
But then it always eventually reaches a saturation point, and it’s long past that now, where OK, what else are you going to say about the lockdown, about the disease and about the situation? It just eventually becomes an endless repeat, and novelty wears off fast.
So trying to find satisfaction in life through novelty, through this excitement about new things, it’s always very limited.
We can also see how a dangerous side of this is that we can see how we really love scapegoats.
Everybody, we’re very tempted to find somebody to hate, and we can sort of project all our darkness, all our undesired features, onto another person, and we just need to find a convenient target that we can morally justify that “Oh, they deserve our hate.” And we can see this with the people who break quarantine, who break isolation.
And it’s very easy to turn somebody who gets too close, doesn’t wear the mask, doesn’t follow the protocols, it’s easy to see them as really somebody who deserves hate.
And so there is this kind of feeling of being ready to hate somebody, that it’s amazing how it comes out so easily in this situation.
As long as we have a moral justification, “Oh, they deserve it because they’re bad for this reason”, we can then feel justified to hate them.
So that’s always a disturbing trend that we can see, and this is just one new manifestation of it.
And when it comes to the whole lockdown, there’s the whole issue of the trade-off of security.
Security is always a trade-off, because you never have perfect safety.
There’s always risk in anything in life.
The only perfect safety is in not living at all, and just being dead, and you know, nothing can hurt you because you’re already dead.
So as long as we’re alive there’s going to be a trade-off of security.
And this lockdown is a trade-off, shutting all these things down in order to reduce the risk of catching the disease.
But it is always a trade, and we are trading a lot for this reduced spread of the disease, giving up all kinds of things with the lockdown, and possibly shutting down the livelihood of many people, shutting down the way that we have lived life in the past.
And I think it’s an open question whether it is a justified trade-off, for as bad as the disease can be and the harm to those people who contract it, the trade-off in order to reduce this risk and harm of the disease I believe will eventually outweigh the disease itself, because this shutdown this lockdown and world shutdown of so much of human behaviour, is so extensive that it seems like it can only cause very significant effects that could be bigger than the disease.
But only time will tell, and everything is a trade-off.
And with security, it’s hard to know what is the correct trade-off.
Because if something bad happens, then everyone will say “Well, why weren’t you more secure?” But then if nothing bad happens, they’ll say “Why are you doing all these precautions? You’re overreacting. There’s no threat.” So you never know until after the threat, after the damage happens.
Then you can attempt to retroactively judge the security trade-off.
And in the end, my final thought about all this is: I can go into analyzing the world situation and trying to figure out what’s going on, predict what’s going to happen, get into that whole state of mind, but ultimately, at some point, I just have to do what I can myself.
I have to step back from trying to figure out the whole world and just ask myself “What can I do?” And that hasn’t changed.
No matter how much has changed in recent months, and will change, there’s still the basic question of “What can I do myself?” And then, regardless of what’s going on elsewhere in the world and overall in the general situation, within my sphere, within what I can control, now it’s time to do what I can.
#lockdownlife #quarantinelife #covid19life