When I try to understand people's behavior, I find it useful to think holistically. Humans are immensely complex, and aspects of our lives that seem unrelated can often be subtly intertwined.
It was with this thought in mind that I was thinking today about a loose trend I've noticed of people increasingly making bizarre, reckless, or self-defeating decisions in all sorts of different contexts. And I realized that we (the west, at least) are in a place right now of massive cognitive dissonance due to COVID on a scale we haven't seen since at least the last pandemic. By any objective measure, it's profoundly unsafe to even approximate pre-pandemic life; but doing so has also become the unquestioned norm for the majority of people.
This is unavoidably going to have an effect on our mass psyche. I imagine we'll need to wait at least a decade to start to understand the full ramifications of, but I think it's fair to surmise that some amount of the day-to-day nuttiness we see around us is driven by people living a life that simply doesn't make sense but which they can't really imagine an alternative to.
Side note: I want to acknowledge that pervasive cognitive dissonance is and has always been the status quo of life under capitalism for many well-documented reasons. But much of that cognitive dissonance is around the treatment of other people, which for better or for worse can be fairly easily resolved by just imagining the other as non-human and thus devoid of moral worth. COVID focuses the same level of harm-worship onto people's own lives which is much harder to wave away with knee-jerk tribalism.
