5 ms·

As a freelancer who always lived like that (but ironically had to work with people throughtout the whole pandemic): I thought it was kind of curious what toll t

by atoav 3y ago

As a freelancer who always lived like that (but ironically had to work with people throughtout the whole pandemic): I thought it was kind of curious what toll that livestyle change took on people. Granted I did choose that life voluntarily and it naturally feels different if something is forced on you — but the pandemic was really revealing in many ways. I was surprised how afraid many people are of being left to themselves in their own flats and what a big topic this was for them. Many people don't seem to have any other interest than meeting other people. On top of they couldn't take it that a governmental body mandated some reasonable rules binding them within a global pandemic of a (back then: unknown) virus. So they priorized their hurt feelings over the literal existence of hundreds of their peers, whom they ironically longed to see. As if they were leeches who miss their hosts. It also revealed some interesting things about social contracts, about who is really essential for the functioning of a society and how little we value them. A friens of mine is kindergardener, and he came close to quitting, as his illusions of what his job is were utterly shattered, as it became clear that many parents did not care about the safety of their own and other kids or about the staff. People just wanted to get rid of their kids and they hated being alone with them as much as they hated being alone with themselves. Mow I am of course underlining all the bad actors and not the many heroic, reasonable, strong and caring people who volunteered to help others. But the number of bad actors shocked me. If anything, the whole episode left me with the feeling that I am a stable adult person with a good moral compass and that many people of whom I had assumed the same are neither.

firstplacelast 3y ago
That is a lot and while I agree somewhat it is lacking empathy, I think. I'm an introvert, I remember craving friendly interaction 6-months in and then being worried about my extrovert friends. If I am feeling crazy about the lack of human interaction, I KNEW some friends that must be having a hard time. I made it a point to call those people to catch up. I do agree about the weird "hero/essential workers", the same "salt of the earth" BS that has been spouted for decades. Essential people that we want to pay like crap to keep our society running. They should all stop, be willing to die, until they are paid enough to buy a crappy home. Essential means they have big negotiating power, organize/unionize and stick the screws to society. Think like a CEO. Also saw all the crazy bad actors, the insane takes on social media (on both sides- though more so on one side), the insanity, the lack of nuance, the shit throwing...I lost a lot of respect for humanity. As a person that was working in biotech in an R&D department at the time, something in my brain broke. Could not care anymore about making the world better, helping people live longer, contributing to coffers of multi-millionaires bc I was "making the world better". Just done with it. There's no global moral compass, otherwise you would jump off a bridge, just a local one, as far as I'm concerned.
- atoav 3y ago
  > That is a lot and while I agree somewhat it is lacking empathy, I think. Don't get me wrong here, I am a very (sometimes overly) empathic person, I am the guy people run to for advice when they want to know how to talk to other people, because I can put myself into other people's shoes. But that doesn't necessarily mean I like what I see when I put myself into thoes shoes. So if my post sounds unempathic, it does so because it is the pure distilled cycism of someone who really has it up to here with a certain unempathic, egomanic type of person — call it a enritled, vocal, screaming minority if you will. I understand how horrible the whole thing felt to them. To a certain degree I even subscribe to Schopenhauer's notion of: "A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants", so I am not even sure they can be blamed that they felt that way. But because I understand a feeling doesn't mean I have to approve with the actions and words they derived from those feelings. That doesn't mean that in my view we gave those people way to much area on the stage of the pandemic as opposed to all the pressing social issues that actually emerged.
  - peteradio 3y ago
    It seems like its important to you to act correctly at every moment of every day and remove obstacles which may impede this perfection. I think the problem that others may see is that we have competing interests and even behaving in concert can yield dangerous non-linear outcomes in society. You seem very very confident in your views but that does not make them correct.
    - mikub 3y ago
      The problem is with people behaving like children. I mean it was/is a fucking pandemic, and people where acting like wearing a mask would be the end of the world, or that trying a lockdown and don't leave your bloody home after 8p.m. for a few weeks will get you a totalitarian regime. What the actual fuck? Really, just say, "Ok let's try it for a few weeks, if it's not working and the government doen't have good arguments to extend it, then I see what I can do about it.". But all this childish behaviour that still goes on in this world is really something else. With climate change slamming the doors currently people will soon see that the pandemic was just the start, then they can stand outside screaming at the weather how unfair everything is.
galangalalgol 3y ago
Also it seems like once people had all this revealed to them, the anti-social behavior didn't revert. I share with some of those people a dramatic mistrust and inherent irreverence, perhaps even blind hatred for authorities who are telling me to do anything. That makes me inclined to do the opposite I am told in any given situation. I wore a mask and limited contact for the same reason I signal before changing lanes, or place garbage in receptacles designed for it. I agree with the reasoning behind these rules and they simply seem polite. The politeness is what I think actually changes for people. They got stressed and decided to only consider their own needs drawing the circle of us/them tighter about them, and they haven't loosened it since. All that said, consensus from news sources biased left and right, from nations where masks and vaccines were championed by opposite political sides, seems to be that we did a whole generation a great disservice by making young child education virtual for any length of time at all. Many nations reopened bars before kindergarten because think of the children. When we could have all drank water and let our children and their teachers lay the foundation for our future in the best way possible.
- logicchains 3y ago
  Considering the lockdowns were completely ineffective at reducing mortality ( https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hec.4737?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hec.4737?ut... ), it was absolutely a bone-headed measure by authorities and they deserve the loss of trust. Especially given that lockdowns went against what was previously considered best-practices in epidemic management.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    Lockdowns were never tried, at least in the USA. What the USA did was obviously going to be ineffective. "Stay At Home Suggestions" that were routinely ignored, business "closures" that were unenforced, mask "mandates" that you could ignore by simply being belligerent with a shopkeeper. There's no way to know whether actually staying at home and keeping distance from people would have worked, because nowhere was it tried.
bitcurious 3y ago
> A friens of mine is kindergardener, and he came close to quitting, as his illusions of what his job is were utterly shattered, as it became clear that many parents did not care about the safety of their own and other kids or about the staff. This framing assumes that the teaches had an accurate risk assessment, and the parents didn’t, but in retrospect we have seen that depriving kids of socialization was much more damaging to the kids than covid exposure was. This conclusion was reached by the majority of developed nations, whose schools either didn’t shut down or reopened months before schools in the US.
- the_gipsy 3y ago
  That was not the motivation the teacher is talking about, and it's more something we can now understand better. During lockdown, parents just wanting to get rid of their kids part-time was the issue.
  - tivert 3y ago
    >>> It also revealed some interesting things about social contracts, about who is really essential for the functioning of a society and how little we value them. A friens of mine is kindergardener, and he came close to quitting, as his illusions of what his job is were utterly shattered, as it became clear that many parents did not care about the safety of their own and other kids or about the staff. People just wanted to get rid of their kids and they hated being alone with them as much as they hated being alone with themselves. > That was not the motivation the teacher is talking about, and it's more something we can now understand better. During lockdown, parents just wanting to get rid of their kids part-time was the issue. The framing in this thread is pretty uncharitable. Kids, especially young kids, need a lot of attention. It's a full time job, and most parents weren't in a position to quit their jobs in order to focus on it. As I understand it, pandemic parenting was basically trying to do two full-time jobs at once. Most parents want do do right by their kids, but their capitalist bosses were unlikely to accept a major drop in job performance. Basically, they were stuck between a rock an a hard place. Our two income household society is setup to so parents absolutely require childcare. It's unfair to change that into a moral failing of parents.
logicchains 3y ago
[flagged]
- exo-pla-net 3y ago
  You're transparent, buddy. The study you're spamming supports vaccine mandates. Not too eager to mention that, are you?
logicchains 3y ago
[flagged]
- exo-pla-net 3y ago
  You seem strangely gleeful about the deaths of so many Americans, despite the efforts of the conscientious minority. Regarding the study, policies != practice. Many Americans defied public policy, negating the sacrifice of others. I'm at 95% confidence that you're among those who refused to wear a mask or shelter in place. I imagine if we sacrificed you, we would have had a measure of greater success.
logicchains 3y ago
It seems like you follow a utilitarian morality system, treating morality as some big calculation, and are unable to conceive that not everybody does. Many people, especially in America, follow deontological moral systems, in which some things are inherently wrong. E.g. people who believe in a fundamental right to freedom of movement or bodily autonomy (or the right to bear arms) do not accept it's morally just to violate those rights in the name of some emergency.
- bawolff 3y ago
  This hardly seems like a deontology vs utilitarianism thing. You can justify both those positions and their opposites under both systems. E.g. i'm pretty sure every traditional rule system recognizes "inter arma enim silent leges" to some extent or another. I suspect those who claim they don't at all aren't really following a rule system so much as making things up as they go and doing whatever is convinent.
- SantalBlush 3y ago
  Do those people also believe in abolishing prisons, or arming murderers? We can find circumstances under which they'll make exceptions to their rules in the name of utility. I'm not convinced about this deontological vs. utilitarian binary you suggest.
- pixl97 3y ago
  At the end of the day everyone follows a utilitarian moral system... If your moral system gets you killed because of an impedance mismatch with reality.
- atoav 3y ago
  I totally can understand that not everybody has the good of humanity, their country, their friends or even their own family in mind. I would have to be either ignorant or naive to see this any different. You can read my post as a complaint about precisely that lack of utilitarian spirit and if you were to have a longer discussion with me I am convinced that you would see that I have rational reasons for why I think we all would fare better if didn't act under the illusion that we're all independent islands that have no overlap with others and our environment. Now you can also overshoot into the other direction and submit everything to the whole, which can produce great horrors, but so do moste mental frameworks if they are deiven to the extreme (e.g. like individualism in the US).
dfxm12 3y ago
I was surprised how afraid many people are... This fear was exploited by many media outlets and politicians. It's important to remember who these people were, vote them out/disregard them as honest.
- spondylosaurus 3y ago
  You cut off the rest of the quote, which is "afraid [...] of being left to themselves in their own flats." I don't think this type of fear has anything to do with media fearmongering. People just hate being left alone with their thoughts.
ryandrake 3y ago
> If anything, the whole episode left me with the feeling that I am a stable adult person with a good moral compass and that many people of whom I had assumed the same are neither. To me, one of the most shocking results of the pandemic was learning how many people I considered friends, good people, who I respected, ended up being those bad actors. Truly sad, and eye opening.
anon25783 3y ago
> I was surprised how afraid many people are of being left to themselves in their own flats and what a big topic this was for them. Many people don't seem to have any other interest than meeting other people. You were surprised by that? Humans are extremely social animals, you know. Borderline eusocial, even. Social isolation is a major risk factor for a variety of psychological issues. I'm sure those people do have interests other than meeting people, but in the same way a person deprived of food has an unwavering focus on eating, a person who is all alone can be expected to have a keen interest on socializing. I agree with you that the measures that were taken to try to mitigate the pandemic were very reasonable, in fact I think that masks and vaccines should be pushed a lot harder. But it shouldn't come as a surprise that people are fearful and uncomfortable about being required to isolate themselves from the social sphere. A pragmatic strategy for countering the pandemic should take that as an expectation and must have some way to account for it. The unemployment benefits and stimulus checks we got early on were a really good step in that direction imo: it really helps alleviate people's fear and discomfort if their financial anxieties are reduced.

by atoav 3y ago

firstplacelast 3y ago

That is a lot and while I agree somewhat it is lacking empathy, I think. I'm an introvert, I remember craving friendly interaction 6-months in and then being worried about my extrovert friends. If I am feeling crazy about the lack of human interaction, I KNEW some friends that must be having a hard time. I made it a point to call those people to catch up. I do agree about the weird "hero/essential workers", the same "salt of the earth" BS that has been spouted for decades. Essential people that we want to pay like crap to keep our society running. They should all stop, be willing to die, until they are paid enough to buy a crappy home. Essential means they have big negotiating power, organize/unionize and stick the screws to society. Think like a CEO. Also saw all the crazy bad actors, the insane takes on social media (on both sides- though more so on one side), the insanity, the lack of nuance, the shit throwing...I lost a lot of respect for humanity. As a person that was working in biotech in an R&D department at the time, something in my brain broke. Could not care anymore about making the world better, helping people live longer, contributing to coffers of multi-millionaires bc I was "making the world better". Just done with it. There's no global moral compass, otherwise you would jump off a bridge, just a local one, as far as I'm concerned.

atoav 3y ago
> That is a lot and while I agree somewhat it is lacking empathy, I think. Don't get me wrong here, I am a very (sometimes overly) empathic person, I am the guy people run to for advice when they want to know how to talk to other people, because I can put myself into other people's shoes. But that doesn't necessarily mean I like what I see when I put myself into thoes shoes. So if my post sounds unempathic, it does so because it is the pure distilled cycism of someone who really has it up to here with a certain unempathic, egomanic type of person — call it a enritled, vocal, screaming minority if you will. I understand how horrible the whole thing felt to them. To a certain degree I even subscribe to Schopenhauer's notion of: "A man can do what he wants, but not want what he wants", so I am not even sure they can be blamed that they felt that way. But because I understand a feeling doesn't mean I have to approve with the actions and words they derived from those feelings. That doesn't mean that in my view we gave those people way to much area on the stage of the pandemic as opposed to all the pressing social issues that actually emerged.
- peteradio 3y ago
  It seems like its important to you to act correctly at every moment of every day and remove obstacles which may impede this perfection. I think the problem that others may see is that we have competing interests and even behaving in concert can yield dangerous non-linear outcomes in society. You seem very very confident in your views but that does not make them correct.
  - mikub 3y ago
    The problem is with people behaving like children. I mean it was/is a fucking pandemic, and people where acting like wearing a mask would be the end of the world, or that trying a lockdown and don't leave your bloody home after 8p.m. for a few weeks will get you a totalitarian regime. What the actual fuck? Really, just say, "Ok let's try it for a few weeks, if it's not working and the government doen't have good arguments to extend it, then I see what I can do about it.". But all this childish behaviour that still goes on in this world is really something else. With climate change slamming the doors currently people will soon see that the pandemic was just the start, then they can stand outside screaming at the weather how unfair everything is.

galangalalgol 3y ago

Also it seems like once people had all this revealed to them, the anti-social behavior didn't revert. I share with some of those people a dramatic mistrust and inherent irreverence, perhaps even blind hatred for authorities who are telling me to do anything. That makes me inclined to do the opposite I am told in any given situation. I wore a mask and limited contact for the same reason I signal before changing lanes, or place garbage in receptacles designed for it. I agree with the reasoning behind these rules and they simply seem polite. The politeness is what I think actually changes for people. They got stressed and decided to only consider their own needs drawing the circle of us/them tighter about them, and they haven't loosened it since. All that said, consensus from news sources biased left and right, from nations where masks and vaccines were championed by opposite political sides, seems to be that we did a whole generation a great disservice by making young child education virtual for any length of time at all. Many nations reopened bars before kindergarten because think of the children. When we could have all drank water and let our children and their teachers lay the foundation for our future in the best way possible.

logicchains 3y ago
Considering the lockdowns were completely ineffective at reducing mortality ( https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hec.4737?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hec.4737?ut... ), it was absolutely a bone-headed measure by authorities and they deserve the loss of trust. Especially given that lockdowns went against what was previously considered best-practices in epidemic management.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Lockdowns were never tried, at least in the USA. What the USA did was obviously going to be ineffective. "Stay At Home Suggestions" that were routinely ignored, business "closures" that were unenforced, mask "mandates" that you could ignore by simply being belligerent with a shopkeeper. There's no way to know whether actually staying at home and keeping distance from people would have worked, because nowhere was it tried.

bitcurious 3y ago

> A friens of mine is kindergardener, and he came close to quitting, as his illusions of what his job is were utterly shattered, as it became clear that many parents did not care about the safety of their own and other kids or about the staff. This framing assumes that the teaches had an accurate risk assessment, and the parents didn’t, but in retrospect we have seen that depriving kids of socialization was much more damaging to the kids than covid exposure was. This conclusion was reached by the majority of developed nations, whose schools either didn’t shut down or reopened months before schools in the US.

the_gipsy 3y ago
That was not the motivation the teacher is talking about, and it's more something we can now understand better. During lockdown, parents just wanting to get rid of their kids part-time was the issue.
- tivert 3y ago
  >>> It also revealed some interesting things about social contracts, about who is really essential for the functioning of a society and how little we value them. A friens of mine is kindergardener, and he came close to quitting, as his illusions of what his job is were utterly shattered, as it became clear that many parents did not care about the safety of their own and other kids or about the staff. People just wanted to get rid of their kids and they hated being alone with them as much as they hated being alone with themselves. > That was not the motivation the teacher is talking about, and it's more something we can now understand better. During lockdown, parents just wanting to get rid of their kids part-time was the issue. The framing in this thread is pretty uncharitable. Kids, especially young kids, need a lot of attention. It's a full time job, and most parents weren't in a position to quit their jobs in order to focus on it. As I understand it, pandemic parenting was basically trying to do two full-time jobs at once. Most parents want do do right by their kids, but their capitalist bosses were unlikely to accept a major drop in job performance. Basically, they were stuck between a rock an a hard place. Our two income household society is setup to so parents absolutely require childcare. It's unfair to change that into a moral failing of parents.

logicchains 3y ago

[flagged]

exo-pla-net 3y ago
You're transparent, buddy. The study you're spamming supports vaccine mandates. Not too eager to mention that, are you?

logicchains 3y ago

[flagged]

exo-pla-net 3y ago
You seem strangely gleeful about the deaths of so many Americans, despite the efforts of the conscientious minority. Regarding the study, policies != practice. Many Americans defied public policy, negating the sacrifice of others. I'm at 95% confidence that you're among those who refused to wear a mask or shelter in place. I imagine if we sacrificed you, we would have had a measure of greater success.

logicchains 3y ago

It seems like you follow a utilitarian morality system, treating morality as some big calculation, and are unable to conceive that not everybody does. Many people, especially in America, follow deontological moral systems, in which some things are inherently wrong. E.g. people who believe in a fundamental right to freedom of movement or bodily autonomy (or the right to bear arms) do not accept it's morally just to violate those rights in the name of some emergency.

bawolff 3y ago
This hardly seems like a deontology vs utilitarianism thing. You can justify both those positions and their opposites under both systems. E.g. i'm pretty sure every traditional rule system recognizes "inter arma enim silent leges" to some extent or another. I suspect those who claim they don't at all aren't really following a rule system so much as making things up as they go and doing whatever is convinent.
SantalBlush 3y ago
Do those people also believe in abolishing prisons, or arming murderers? We can find circumstances under which they'll make exceptions to their rules in the name of utility. I'm not convinced about this deontological vs. utilitarian binary you suggest.
pixl97 3y ago
At the end of the day everyone follows a utilitarian moral system... If your moral system gets you killed because of an impedance mismatch with reality.
atoav 3y ago
I totally can understand that not everybody has the good of humanity, their country, their friends or even their own family in mind. I would have to be either ignorant or naive to see this any different. You can read my post as a complaint about precisely that lack of utilitarian spirit and if you were to have a longer discussion with me I am convinced that you would see that I have rational reasons for why I think we all would fare better if didn't act under the illusion that we're all independent islands that have no overlap with others and our environment. Now you can also overshoot into the other direction and submit everything to the whole, which can produce great horrors, but so do moste mental frameworks if they are deiven to the extreme (e.g. like individualism in the US).

dfxm12 3y ago

I was surprised how afraid many people are... This fear was exploited by many media outlets and politicians. It's important to remember who these people were, vote them out/disregard them as honest.

spondylosaurus 3y ago
You cut off the rest of the quote, which is "afraid [...] of being left to themselves in their own flats." I don't think this type of fear has anything to do with media fearmongering. People just hate being left alone with their thoughts.

ryandrake 3y ago

> If anything, the whole episode left me with the feeling that I am a stable adult person with a good moral compass and that many people of whom I had assumed the same are neither. To me, one of the most shocking results of the pandemic was learning how many people I considered friends, good people, who I respected, ended up being those bad actors. Truly sad, and eye opening.

anon25783 3y ago

> I was surprised how afraid many people are of being left to themselves in their own flats and what a big topic this was for them. Many people don't seem to have any other interest than meeting other people. You were surprised by that? Humans are extremely social animals, you know. Borderline eusocial, even. Social isolation is a major risk factor for a variety of psychological issues. I'm sure those people do have interests other than meeting people, but in the same way a person deprived of food has an unwavering focus on eating, a person who is all alone can be expected to have a keen interest on socializing. I agree with you that the measures that were taken to try to mitigate the pandemic were very reasonable, in fact I think that masks and vaccines should be pushed a lot harder. But it shouldn't come as a surprise that people are fearful and uncomfortable about being required to isolate themselves from the social sphere. A pragmatic strategy for countering the pandemic should take that as an expectation and must have some way to account for it. The unemployment benefits and stimulus checks we got early on were a really good step in that direction imo: it really helps alleviate people's fear and discomfort if their financial anxieties are reduced.