Middle Pandemic2
2020-04-02
I just watched a video from Folding Ideas - a creator whose content I have a love-or-hate relationship with. In it, he struggles to describe what the pandemic is like for him, and tries to use a movie as a backboard to bounce concepts off of.
A week or two ago (turns out it was exactly a week ago), I wrote a little half-baked piece detailing what this pandemic has been like, in the early days. And now, after seeing that video, and being frustrated by people’s general lack of engagement with the facts, I want to write a little addendum.
Ahead of the curve
I’ve spent the last month or so feeling like I was 3-4 days ahead of everyone else. Conclusions, predictions, even just emotions and ways to cope with them - I’ve done it a couple days before others. This isn’t a brag, because it doesn’t feel good. It constantly feels like I must be crazy - how could everyone else not work out this obvious math? Every time I’m right, I stress a little more that maybe I’m wrong about the next thing that comes up, because I’ve been right before.
And it especially makes me dread the longer future. Because if I can be right about businesses closing down, skyrocketing unemployment, crashing markets, sagging dollars, even just the decision by people to bake bread as a way to cope - does this mean I’m right about commercial real estate dying, a depression larger and longer than the great depression, with no realistic way out of it due to our complete outsourcing of all useful jobs? Politicians who use the opportunity to consolidate power, using people’s fears to build a socialist system that "helps out those most affected" while really just being a way to take over more of the country?
I hope not. But the more that i look at the math, the more that I can’t come to other conclusions.
Denial
I devoted most of the previous piece to talking about hope, but I wanted to dedicate this to denial. Because I’m not some kind of seer, I’m not ahead of others because I’m smart or divinely empowered. I have the same information as everyone else. The conclusion I have to come to is that I’m just the only one taking it for what it is, not what i want it to be.
There’s a pervasive faith among (coastal) people that if we just distance hard and long enough, this will all go away. Sure, they admit, there might be a "second wave". But ultimately if we just keep our heads in the sand long enough, we’ll overcome this. It will go to zero. This belief is illustrated by the (now-defunct) hashtag #FlattenTheCurve, and reinforced in people’s heads by projections which look like this;
Notice that this is just a set of normal distributions. They assume that there will be an "end", that the tail will go to zero, and (by june at the latest!) this will end.
Everyone is thinking this way. Everyone seems to be in denial. There was (although i can’t find the source) an article that posited that "if every American stood six feet apart for three weeks, the coronavirus would be eliminated." People quote it at me, today.
I could chalk it up to hope, or ignorance, a week or two ago. A month ago it was probably just because people didn’t even understand what a virus was. But today? We’re all moving too quickly to plead ignorance on this.
Emotion
I got over being stressed by the virus. I’m just annoyed by how people treat it, now. But I’m a bit ahead of the curve on that, because there is still a massive herd of people who are nerving each other out over it, just like I did.
