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Er, yeah, I've been saying this for months. We are social animals. Literally just existing is stressful at the moment for most of us, because there's a constan

Er, yeah, I've been saying this for months. We are social animals. Literally just existing is stressful at the moment for most of us, because there's a constant urge that is not being satisfied. Not only for socialisation but simply the low-level stress of constantly having to 'check yourself' when you realise literally everything you'd normally be doing is either disabled or handicapped in some way. To me, lockdowns feel like some sort of irrational loss aversion strategy. If you gave me the option in, say, 2017, of halving my mortality rate for a year, but the cost was that I had to endure relatively strong anxiety for that year, there's no way I'd take that bet regardless of my age. Mucking around with your mental health is not wise. Add on top of that all of the economic effects, the political effects of dividing populations, domestic abuse, "non-essential" healthcare like dentistry, and so on and so forth, and honestly I reckon it's been a net negative.

null0pointer 6y ago
We should definitely be beginning to examine the mental health toll the lockdowns are having on people. Changing our behaviour for the sole purpose of extending our life expectancies as long as possible is not living at all.
daveFNbuck 6y ago
There are also mental health consequences to large-scale death and hospitals being over capacity. Would you choose a year of watching your friends and family randomly die over a year of staying home most of the time?
- esotericn 6y ago
  I believe my comment about halving mortality addresses this. They're already likely to arbitrarily die - if in 2017 I could reduce that probability by half (coronavirus roughly doubles mortality across all age groups) by having everyone stay inside or perform the various rituals like standing far apart, wearing masks etc I wouldn't do it. If instead of decreasing life expectancy by less than a year it were something like 10 (and so we went full hazmat, disallowing things like even entering a supermarket in favour of MRE deliveries) then the calculus would be different. The main inescapable issue, which exists lockdown or not, is visiting elderly or immunocompromised relatives, not because of the absolute risk, but because of the impact that being able to say "my visit probably killed Grandma" would have.
  - daveFNbuck 6y ago
    Coronavirus may only double overall mortality, but having no hospital capacity would cause a further increase in deaths. We'd probably just end up in a real lockdown (shelter in place orders are not a lockdown) and have a bunch of extra dead people.
- burnout41 6y ago
  You could always get both. I haven't seen another human other than through zoom since march 15th. Meanwhile, my extended family, people I love, are ignoring isolation mandates and out and about, hosting gatherings, like normal. Many of them are seniors with chronic conditions that put them at high risk for covid complications / mortality. I'm depressed as fuck staying home all the time and waiting for the inevitable as covid reaps my loved ones.
  - vmception 6y ago
    yeah I did maybe a little after march 15th till late may. around early may I found myself pacing around my apartment saying "this is bullshit" more than once per day. referring to the scenario itself, not the utility of the lockdown mandates - yet. but I can definitely go two months without physical human interaction! video conferences, video dates, video for sake of video? CALL OF DUTY: WARZONE? all of those are chores to me.
retsibsi 6y ago
Mortality isn't everything. You don't seem to be taking into account the suffering of people who survive -- but are often very sick for quite a long time, and may never fully recover -- and the extra anxiety caused by an unchecked deadly pandemic. (Or if you are, you don't seem to think it is very significant?) In this comment you also seem to ignore that the trade-off isn't just about increasing your risk, but everyone's, including the people you care about -- though I think you acknowledge it in another reply. Even if I got lucky enough that nobody close to me died and I suffered no permanent damage myself, personally I would feel immense anxiety knowing that the virus was likely to affect many of the people I care about (and also that I had limited but non-zero control over this, so I could neither try to ignore it nor bring the odds down far enough to feel optimistic), watching some of them suffer and wondering whether they would make it, possibly suffering myself and wondering how bad it would get and how fully I would recover, and so on. That's aside from the effect of empathising with strangers suffering and dying at a much higher rate than usual, too. (I'm in Australia, where so far our measures have kept the infection rate very low. Maybe you feel like you've experienced something closer to the worst of both worlds?)
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  I'm in Tasmania, the State and the people here have done a very reasonable job. Tasmania: 13 deaths, 228 confirmed cases, zero new cases in the past 24hrs, 33,000 test conducted. Active cases in Tasmania: 2 The restrictions here have certainly had an impact on our lives, and I can hardly imagine how it would feel to be in an area with many more cases and more strict restrictions.
WhompingWindows 6y ago
The problem with your analysis is that you're not considering just how much "loss" we were averting via lockdowns. Do you think those negative effects of our partial lockdowns outweigh 5X more COVID casualties, including many from preventable deaths that have nothing to do with COVID? We need a functional healthcare system, we could not allow it to become overwhelmed and collapse. There's also the ethical issue of allowing a disease to run rampant and ravage our elderly population - could we recover morally and ethically if we allowed 100's of thousands of older folks to die long, painful deaths so our economy was a tad stronger?
- Wh1zz 6y ago
  On that last part, I will confess it's unclear to me what the greater moral failing is between the 100s of thousands of elderly deaths, and lost economic growth. It comes down to how much is actually lost of course, and while I do believe what we're collectively going for is a good middle ground, I think also a lot of people don't really understand the magnitude of effects of economic growth over long periods of time. The difference between growth of 2% and 3% are enormous 50 years down the line, and may very well translate in many more deaths due to poverty and disease, as well as a great quality of life difference for billions of people (among many other effects).
fyfy18 6y ago
I've found this period has had an overall positive effect on my mental health. At first I was rather depressed, religiously following the news and subreddits about what was happening, but after a couple of weeks of that I realised I couldn't continue living like that forever. I started introspecting and tried to figure out what was causing the stress and low level anxiety I've been experiencing for a few years. During this period I feel like I have figured a lot of things out, and overall feel more relaxed now than I did before quarantine. I realised that I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to achieve things, and I don't need to - at first I used the pandemic situation as an excuse to myself to not have to do these things, but now I just feel naturally relaxed. Also as a newish (1 year old) father I found talks by Gabor Maté resonated a lot with me. (And I've somehow lost 6kg - even though I've been cooking whatever tasty deserts I've found on YouTube - probably from not eating out)
- esotericn 6y ago
  This is totally ad hominem but I'm just going to go for it, because I think you've missed the point of what 'social isolation' is - "Also as a newish (1 year old) father I found talks by Gabor Maté resonated a lot with me." I assume your child (and partner) haven't been 200 miles away for 3 months, inaccessible because taking a train is pseudo-illegal or frowned upon by society at the moment. I assume you've been cuddling them without thinking that every journey, every interaction point, is some 'vector' bullshit. If I'm making the wrong assumptions here, and you're actually watching your child's formative years through a video link, I feel for you, but I can't believe that's the case because there's no way that a normal human would claim that were a superior state of affairs. Come on, man. Please think before posting.
danybittel 6y ago
"We are social animals." Are we though? We're not like a flock of fish, herd of sheep, pack of wolves not even like apes. Or when was the last time you met a silverback human? If we keep indoctrinate that, we may miss the real solutions.

null0pointer 6y ago

We should definitely be beginning to examine the mental health toll the lockdowns are having on people. Changing our behaviour for the sole purpose of extending our life expectancies as long as possible is not living at all.

daveFNbuck 6y ago

There are also mental health consequences to large-scale death and hospitals being over capacity. Would you choose a year of watching your friends and family randomly die over a year of staying home most of the time?

esotericn 6y ago
I believe my comment about halving mortality addresses this. They're already likely to arbitrarily die - if in 2017 I could reduce that probability by half (coronavirus roughly doubles mortality across all age groups) by having everyone stay inside or perform the various rituals like standing far apart, wearing masks etc I wouldn't do it. If instead of decreasing life expectancy by less than a year it were something like 10 (and so we went full hazmat, disallowing things like even entering a supermarket in favour of MRE deliveries) then the calculus would be different. The main inescapable issue, which exists lockdown or not, is visiting elderly or immunocompromised relatives, not because of the absolute risk, but because of the impact that being able to say "my visit probably killed Grandma" would have.
- daveFNbuck 6y ago
  Coronavirus may only double overall mortality, but having no hospital capacity would cause a further increase in deaths. We'd probably just end up in a real lockdown (shelter in place orders are not a lockdown) and have a bunch of extra dead people.
burnout41 6y ago
You could always get both. I haven't seen another human other than through zoom since march 15th. Meanwhile, my extended family, people I love, are ignoring isolation mandates and out and about, hosting gatherings, like normal. Many of them are seniors with chronic conditions that put them at high risk for covid complications / mortality. I'm depressed as fuck staying home all the time and waiting for the inevitable as covid reaps my loved ones.
- vmception 6y ago
  yeah I did maybe a little after march 15th till late may. around early may I found myself pacing around my apartment saying "this is bullshit" more than once per day. referring to the scenario itself, not the utility of the lockdown mandates - yet. but I can definitely go two months without physical human interaction! video conferences, video dates, video for sake of video? CALL OF DUTY: WARZONE? all of those are chores to me.

retsibsi 6y ago

Mortality isn't everything. You don't seem to be taking into account the suffering of people who survive -- but are often very sick for quite a long time, and may never fully recover -- and the extra anxiety caused by an unchecked deadly pandemic. (Or if you are, you don't seem to think it is very significant?) In this comment you also seem to ignore that the trade-off isn't just about increasing your risk, but everyone's, including the people you care about -- though I think you acknowledge it in another reply. Even if I got lucky enough that nobody close to me died and I suffered no permanent damage myself, personally I would feel immense anxiety knowing that the virus was likely to affect many of the people I care about (and also that I had limited but non-zero control over this, so I could neither try to ignore it nor bring the odds down far enough to feel optimistic), watching some of them suffer and wondering whether they would make it, possibly suffering myself and wondering how bad it would get and how fully I would recover, and so on. That's aside from the effect of empathising with strangers suffering and dying at a much higher rate than usual, too. (I'm in Australia, where so far our measures have kept the infection rate very low. Maybe you feel like you've experienced something closer to the worst of both worlds?)

TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
I'm in Tasmania, the State and the people here have done a very reasonable job. Tasmania: 13 deaths, 228 confirmed cases, zero new cases in the past 24hrs, 33,000 test conducted. Active cases in Tasmania: 2 The restrictions here have certainly had an impact on our lives, and I can hardly imagine how it would feel to be in an area with many more cases and more strict restrictions.

WhompingWindows 6y ago

The problem with your analysis is that you're not considering just how much "loss" we were averting via lockdowns. Do you think those negative effects of our partial lockdowns outweigh 5X more COVID casualties, including many from preventable deaths that have nothing to do with COVID? We need a functional healthcare system, we could not allow it to become overwhelmed and collapse. There's also the ethical issue of allowing a disease to run rampant and ravage our elderly population - could we recover morally and ethically if we allowed 100's of thousands of older folks to die long, painful deaths so our economy was a tad stronger?

Wh1zz 6y ago
On that last part, I will confess it's unclear to me what the greater moral failing is between the 100s of thousands of elderly deaths, and lost economic growth. It comes down to how much is actually lost of course, and while I do believe what we're collectively going for is a good middle ground, I think also a lot of people don't really understand the magnitude of effects of economic growth over long periods of time. The difference between growth of 2% and 3% are enormous 50 years down the line, and may very well translate in many more deaths due to poverty and disease, as well as a great quality of life difference for billions of people (among many other effects).

fyfy18 6y ago

I've found this period has had an overall positive effect on my mental health. At first I was rather depressed, religiously following the news and subreddits about what was happening, but after a couple of weeks of that I realised I couldn't continue living like that forever. I started introspecting and tried to figure out what was causing the stress and low level anxiety I've been experiencing for a few years. During this period I feel like I have figured a lot of things out, and overall feel more relaxed now than I did before quarantine. I realised that I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to achieve things, and I don't need to - at first I used the pandemic situation as an excuse to myself to not have to do these things, but now I just feel naturally relaxed. Also as a newish (1 year old) father I found talks by Gabor Maté resonated a lot with me. (And I've somehow lost 6kg - even though I've been cooking whatever tasty deserts I've found on YouTube - probably from not eating out)

esotericn 6y ago
This is totally ad hominem but I'm just going to go for it, because I think you've missed the point of what 'social isolation' is - "Also as a newish (1 year old) father I found talks by Gabor Maté resonated a lot with me." I assume your child (and partner) haven't been 200 miles away for 3 months, inaccessible because taking a train is pseudo-illegal or frowned upon by society at the moment. I assume you've been cuddling them without thinking that every journey, every interaction point, is some 'vector' bullshit. If I'm making the wrong assumptions here, and you're actually watching your child's formative years through a video link, I feel for you, but I can't believe that's the case because there's no way that a normal human would claim that were a superior state of affairs. Come on, man. Please think before posting.

danybittel 6y ago

"We are social animals." Are we though? We're not like a flock of fish, herd of sheep, pack of wolves not even like apes. Or when was the last time you met a silverback human? If we keep indoctrinate that, we may miss the real solutions.