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.
When an animal is trapped, it may respond in strange and unpredictable ways.
I think it is easy to dismiss how out of options one feels. We have all been forced into an unwinnable scenario, a broken prisoner's dilemma, where no matter what we do, our lives are forfeit where it counts.
If I stay home, I might as well stay forever, because I know plenty of people aren't anyway, enough to ensure the plague will continue to spread indefinitely. It doesn't matter why even: there no moral high ground to be had, because many of them have no choice, and of the ones that do, can I really say I offer them a better one, knowing what we know?
If I go out, I could die. For me, that has been enough... but at times I don't know how much longer. This life of isolation is scarcely life at all, and my health has so deteriorated from the lack of activity that I am in genuine danger all its own. I lost my breath today trying to install as webcam.
For others? Without the same risk factors? Or with sharper social or economic needs? It's not so hard to see why the pendulum falls the other way. I'm not so convinced of my own moral worth as to deny it's little more than a balance of one fear against another even for me now.
I just don't know anymore. It can't possibly go on like this forever, but here we are in forever anyway.
