Different in degree, not in kind
Nov. 1st, 2020 02:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brin_bellway[cw: illness, discourse, venting]
(I would like to be clear: I wrote the previous post yesterday (it was merely waiting for the latest WordPress sync before I could finish coding the links), and I did not have this post in mind when I wrote it.)
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A certain twisted congratulations are in order to Siderea, who has managed to hit *multiple* berserk buttons of mine in a single post.
I have a great many thoughts and feelings about how socially coercive grief is, how when something bad happens to you everyone *turns* on you, demands that you feel as miserable as you can, insists that your subjective sense that they are *creating* extra misery in you is merely them revealing what you ~really~ feel and ~it needs to be uncovered, it's for your own good~--
But let's not focus on that one, for the moment. Let's focus on the *other* berserk button in this post, the unprecedented-times button.
This particular instance is far from the worst I've seen, true. Siderea, of all people, knows better than to claim that this has never happened before and could not, at least in its generalities, have been seen coming. But she still talks as if life during a plague is qualitatively different from normal life.
Normal life *is* life during plague. Rhinovirus plagues, influenza plagues, cold-type coronavirus plagues. The list goes on.
The level of background disease risk is unusually high this year, and--particularly in the spring, but to a lesser extent still--the *variance* of the risk is unusually high, and as such many of the cost-benefit analyses of life turn out differently. But they're the same analyses as every year, just with different inputs.
Craft fairs and dance classes and so on were *never* safe. With every convening comes the risk of con crud. Maybe you thought the former level of risk was worth it (sometimes it was), or maybe you were merely oblivious enough not to notice the risk, but it *was* *always* there.
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To those of you who are now hitting the developmental stage I reached when I was 10: welcome to the world. I'm glad you're here.
Really, I am. Please, don't think of that constant undercurrent in your mind when you leave the safety of your nest as innocence lost, but as understanding gained.
And please, don't worry when you find yourself getting less consciously aware of it. That's not repression: it's just shifting into routine processing, the same way driving requires less conscious effort the more experienced you are at it. When one day you look around at your house and find you can *feel* the quarantine zones where you leave things freshly brought in from outside, welcome your new sense with joy. It will serve you well.
(You haven't just lost good futures this year, you've lost bad ones too. There are a lot fewer colds in your future, now that you're becoming more skilled at avoiding infection. Remember that crippling depression colds bring? All those days of pure, elemental misery, of nothing but waiting for the light? You're facing a lot fewer days like that, now. Most of the time you'll never know which days they would have been, but statistically you'll know they're there, and every so often there'll be a control group and you'll see more clearly the difference it makes.)
Look forward, not to the day you no longer have to perform cost-benefit analyses to decide whether something is worth the risk of disease (if that day ever seems to come, you're doing it wrong), but to the day that background disease levels drop and a lot more of those analyses start coming out favourably.
(I would like to be clear: I wrote the previous post yesterday (it was merely waiting for the latest WordPress sync before I could finish coding the links), and I did not have this post in mind when I wrote it.)
---
A certain twisted congratulations are in order to Siderea, who has managed to hit *multiple* berserk buttons of mine in a single post.
I have a great many thoughts and feelings about how socially coercive grief is, how when something bad happens to you everyone *turns* on you, demands that you feel as miserable as you can, insists that your subjective sense that they are *creating* extra misery in you is merely them revealing what you ~really~ feel and ~it needs to be uncovered, it's for your own good~--
But let's not focus on that one, for the moment. Let's focus on the *other* berserk button in this post, the unprecedented-times button.
This particular instance is far from the worst I've seen, true. Siderea, of all people, knows better than to claim that this has never happened before and could not, at least in its generalities, have been seen coming. But she still talks as if life during a plague is qualitatively different from normal life.
Normal life *is* life during plague. Rhinovirus plagues, influenza plagues, cold-type coronavirus plagues. The list goes on.
The level of background disease risk is unusually high this year, and--particularly in the spring, but to a lesser extent still--the *variance* of the risk is unusually high, and as such many of the cost-benefit analyses of life turn out differently. But they're the same analyses as every year, just with different inputs.
Craft fairs and dance classes and so on were *never* safe. With every convening comes the risk of con crud. Maybe you thought the former level of risk was worth it (sometimes it was), or maybe you were merely oblivious enough not to notice the risk, but it *was* *always* there.
---
To those of you who are now hitting the developmental stage I reached when I was 10: welcome to the world. I'm glad you're here.
Really, I am. Please, don't think of that constant undercurrent in your mind when you leave the safety of your nest as innocence lost, but as understanding gained.
And please, don't worry when you find yourself getting less consciously aware of it. That's not repression: it's just shifting into routine processing, the same way driving requires less conscious effort the more experienced you are at it. When one day you look around at your house and find you can *feel* the quarantine zones where you leave things freshly brought in from outside, welcome your new sense with joy. It will serve you well.
(You haven't just lost good futures this year, you've lost bad ones too. There are a lot fewer colds in your future, now that you're becoming more skilled at avoiding infection. Remember that crippling depression colds bring? All those days of pure, elemental misery, of nothing but waiting for the light? You're facing a lot fewer days like that, now. Most of the time you'll never know which days they would have been, but statistically you'll know they're there, and every so often there'll be a control group and you'll see more clearly the difference it makes.)
Look forward, not to the day you no longer have to perform cost-benefit analyses to decide whether something is worth the risk of disease (if that day ever seems to come, you're doing it wrong), but to the day that background disease levels drop and a lot more of those analyses start coming out favourably.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-01 07:05 pm (UTC)---
Also, I don't think it's that pleasure is Bad while work is Good. It's that safety is (at minimum) a higher priority than and (usually) a prerequisite to pleasure, and one works in order to obtain more safety.
(I suppose skydivers and the like would disagree, but that's not how *my* mind operates)
((and if happiness is inherently good and worthy of pursuing, that sure does say some things about grief, doesn't it))
no subject
Date: 2020-11-02 04:27 pm (UTC)(Also can I say the long "it was always true" talk is mostly just adding slight, irrational weight to my desire to go out and buy nice groceries from the nice grocers because fucking hell, I've been stuck in a tiny box for months and it's driving me mad, even though that would involve train-travel and things are actively and substantially worsening here, esp circa "apparently the trains were packed with Halloween-goers, says flatmate who had work that night".)
no subject
Date: 2020-11-02 05:40 pm (UTC)---
(I made the mistake once of telling a friend that my maternal grandmother--to whom I was *not* close--had died recently, and he insisted that I was secretly grieving deep down and demanded I let it out. I swore I would never again tell him when a family member died, *especially* someone I actually *was* close to. Tearing at my emotional wounds has only ever made things worse.)
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I mean, I know that I have a fairly limited emotional range, and I expect that's a major factor here. I don't do catharsis! I have not, historically, done grief, though I haven't ruled out the possibility that I just have a high enough grief threshold that no life event thus far has reached it! I don't even do *sadness* much! My negative emotions are almost always fear or anger, not these, fucking, bouquets of sorrow that other people go on about the masochistic beauty of.
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I don't think there's much I can say about your second paragraph. I'm sure you're already intellectually aware that the same process of analysis can and should give different outputs when provided with different inputs. I'm sorry your training in disease avoidance has been this high-stakes sink-or-swim shit, especially when you didn't even have a long-term home available to shelter-in-place in.
(My usual response to problems is to try to think of advice, but I know sometimes people hate that. If you want help brainstorming methods of obtaining nice groceries that do not involve going on a train, let me know and I'd be happy to.)
no subject
Date: 2020-11-02 06:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-11-02 06:27 pm (UTC)(I'd argue also that there's a kind of implicit logical link there, almost, that any situation that requires of you unprecedented action is an unprecedented situation? I'm not even sure that "unprecedented situation" is an incorrect set of words for "The model remains valid, but we're in a very unusual part of it")
no subject
Date: 2020-11-02 06:24 pm (UTC)It's a good post and I agree with it, it's valid to just want to convey that.
> I made the mistake once of telling a friend
Yeah that sounds like an all-around unpleasant interaction to have.
> I mean, I know that I have a fairly limited emotional range
*nods*. I haven't historically done grief (though, ditto, re:"Possibly the threshold of significance hasn't hit high enough", I haven't even lost grandparents) - I do *mourning*, and I do *sadness at the idea of something's permanent absence from my life* (regardless of the actually of it's absence - I've spent the occasional evening in a fit of melancholy over the fact that my more-prized physical possessions will someday be broken and unwanted), but they're clearly distinct emotions. I've def got sadness in general, and I can get the propensity to poeticise it as an emotion, it seems very natural to me given the texture of the emotion, but also I'm a very strong proponent of "suffering is bad and I should not suffer".
(The other thing that I think of here is how I've cut out *sooo* much anger. I was such a fucking angry 10 year old and now I'm much much much less so. I still have it as an emotion when situationally appropriate, but there was this - profound frustration and anger at the shape of the world and the people in it that I don't have now, even though I'm a lot more aware of the hows and whys of (and the sheer vast extent of) the world's damage.)
> I don't think there's much I can say about your second paragraph
That's valid. You're right, re: cost-benefit, and I do think I'm going to try doing *some* things even though it involves train-travel in the next month or so, just to get out of the house (but I should also spend that coin carefully). But I still assess the emotion I felt upon reading that thing as an irrational additional bias, if that makes sense? A kind of "well if the disaster is perpetual and ongoing then it's safe to ignore it entirely" based complacency that I'd rather not cultivate and am generally kinda prone to.
Re: grocery advice: I'm happy to have advice conditional on it not being very obvious advice I've already heard ten times (this is esp true of you since you have historically given good and interesting advice) - in this case: no, I can't walk, no I can't get it delivered, no I don't know anyone who I can get a lift from. I'm not sure taxis/uber are substantially safer than the train TBH and they're *also* expensive tools I don't habitually use and that makes me reluctant to try and learn. I think that's all the obvious answer off the top of my head.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-02 08:01 pm (UTC)That's fair when taken out of context, but...when I first started seeing "unprecedented times" from journalists and the like, I got the (possibly incorrect) impression that the point was to soothe their ego damage from having been caught completely off guard, by claiming that a generic Reasonable Person would also have been caught completely off guard. Which I don't really think is true: even in one of the least disease-ridden parts of space-time that humanity has ever yet experienced, the correct answer to "will there be a plague at some point in the future" is always yes (and unless you are already quite close to death, the correct answer to "will there be a plague in *my personal* future" is generally likewise yes).
(Of course, the devil is in the details. If you're facing a lot of other life bullshit without an active plague it's reasonable to think you have many higher priorities to work on than anti-plague measures, and you might well be right. And I will absolutely admit that I was not paying enough attention to airborne pathogens previously, and will be wearing masks in [more indoor situations than I used to] in perpetuity, if perhaps not quite as many as right now.)
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>>(The other thing that I think of here is how I've cut out *sooo* much anger. I was such a fucking angry 10 year old and now I'm much much much less so. I still have it as an emotion when situationally appropriate, but there was this - profound frustration and anger at the shape of the world and the people in it that I don't have now, even though I'm a lot more aware of the hows and whys of (and the sheer vast extent of) the world's damage.)
I'm more the other way around. When I was 10 I was completely incapable of remaining angry about anything for longer than 10 - 15 minutes, even things where I intellectually thought that >15 minutes would be appropriate. Puberty gave me the capacity to hold grudges, which in hindsight I think has been a net-negative tradeoff.
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>>(this is esp true of you since you have historically given good and interesting advice)
:)
>>no I can't get it delivered, no I don't know anyone who I can get a lift from
My first thought, before I cut that thought process off with "I should ask first if they actually want me contemplating workarounds for this", was sort of a mix of these two: asking a flatmate who was going to go out anyway if they could pick up some groceries on your behalf. Combining these strategies would compensate for *some* of the downsides of each, though possibly not enough of them.
>>I'm not sure taxis/uber are substantially safer than the train TBH
Depending on the details of the situation, I would expect most taxis to be safer than most trains (upsides: more ventilation, air shared with fewer people. downsides: guaranteed to be sitting next to someone who works a very high-risk profession, namely taxi driver). Very possibly not worth the expense and the learning curve, though, yeah.
If you *do* have to resort to train-based shopping, you might at least be able to minimise crowds. I'm not sure if you're still nocturnal, but if so that might work to your advantage. Bear in mind that the Google panopticon will tell you which times of day tend to be busier than others (also how the current level of busy-ness compares to the norm, which they seem to have re-normed for 2020 now), if you look at that store's listing on Google Maps. (There's a dropdown and/or arrows for looking at the patterns of other days of the week.)
*pokes Google Maps* Looks like they also do it for *some* train stations, but not all. Probably a size threshold.
Shopping *before* the rush is better than shopping *after* the rush, since germs can linger in the air.
(Also the fit of the mask can make a large difference in danger levels, but you likely knew that bit already. I had that one viscerally driven home to me a few weeks ago and I see a lot of people wearing obviously poorly-fitted masks, so it comes to mind.)
I'll let you know if I think of anything else.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-02 10:04 pm (UTC)Do you want the generic reasonable person that is you, or the generic reasonable person who the journalists would have pointed at prior to the pandemic and said "yes that person is basically sensible and reasonable"? Because the latter in fact did not predict the pandemic, even if they probably should have. (Also: *waves little flag of expecting us to have a famine that takes everyone even worse sometime this century*)
> My first thought, before I cut that thought process off with "I should ask first if they actually want me contemplating workarounds for this", was sort of a mix of these two: asking a flatmate who was going to go out anyway if they could pick up some groceries on your behalf. Combining these strategies would compensate for *some* of the downsides of each, though possibly not enough of them.
Asking a flatmate is a good solution for small supplies of common goods, but I'm good enough at planning and improvisation culinarly speaking that I worry less about this (and also I can and do irregular trips to the local cheap-but-mediocre supermarket, which this is above and beyond; getting *good* groceries is one half me eating at a higher standard than the student infrastructure really wants from me and one half the fact that I find buying cool and weird stuff and having a lot of ... not quite control, but adjacent, over what I eat, is enjoyable and good and one trips makes not only that day good but also much of the following days as well as I eat whatever stuff I bought. The shopping I am considering here is in the domain of recreation (or at least quality of life) and not survival.)
> Bear in mind that the Google panopticon will tell you which times of day tend to be busier than others
Oooh good idea (and yeah, I'm moderately nocturnal, currently buffered by class zoom calls at midday - it's of somewhat limited utility by the stores I want to shop at mostly closing at 7-8pm). The google maps coverage of the oslo train system is mediocre for stuff like geography, so I doubt it'll have the best data, but I will check it out.
(they only have the physical location of the platforms recorded on thier system, even though in the city where the lines are underground, the exits are in four or five different locations spread over as much as a 3-block radius. The first night I was in oslo, I walked for 15 minutes with all my suitcases only to discover there was a station exit 30 meters from my hotel)
> Also the fit of the mask can make a large difference in danger levels
I was aware! The cloth mask my mother sent me has awful fit (allowed to sit as it would like, there is a straight-up 1cm gap along the entire top edge), I've been thinking about how I can sew up the edges so that it sits right and will get on it eventually; until then I've kept up with using disposables that fit much better.
(Addendum of "Oh I should do the actual checking before I post this" - it looks like the source station has a small activity dip around lunchtime but is otherwise "very active in the morning, somewhat active the rest of the time, curving down in the evenings" and the destination shows an almost perfect bell curve of activity centered around about 1pm, so optimizing avoiding traffic is just "travel as late in the day as possible" I think. Optimally on a Tuesday or a Wednesday - Sunday has less but there aren't any shops open on a Sunday, that's why there's no traffic then. Then the webpage crashed.)
no subject
Date: 2020-11-03 01:57 am (UTC)I want professional People Who Write Articles About What We Can Expect the Future to Hold.
I *was* thinking at work this evening that I should have put more emphasis on that aspect, that when I first started seeing "unprecedented times" it was from *pundits*. If your career is a major part of your identity, and your career is Person Who Sees Stuff Coming And Warns Others, well, I can see why it would sting to not have seen this coming and not have warned others.
(also it's true that fifteen years of being surrounded by people who care less about disease prevention than I do has engendered a certain bitterness, and I *am* incredibly biased here and am not sure I can 100% endorse my views on the matter)
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>>*waves little flag of expecting us to have a famine that takes everyone even worse sometime this century*
I definitely have a psychological blind spot around famines, and when I'm consciously aware of it enough to worry about it I *do* worry that it's going to cause me to make bad decisions. I was very aware of that dissonance this spring, that even as I *acted* to hedge my food supply I did not really *feel*, deep down, that it could become a problem.
(and guess what, our plague victory garden went *terribly*, and if we had needed to rely on it in any real sense we'd have been pretty screwed. pests ate nearly everything.)
I think the problem there is, well, unprecedentedness. I had an upper-middle-class childhood and even at my poorest have never been at the point of going hungry. There are practice plagues every year, but I have *never* lacked for food, and that seems to have placed it outside some subconscious Overton window.
(Plus I'm not as well-equipped, as a person, to deal with famine. I hate gardening, I hate eating food that isn't rigorously safe, and yeah the low metabolism is handy but it only goes so far.)
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>>I find buying cool and weird stuff and having a lot of ... not quite control, but adjacent, over what I eat, is enjoyable and good
I've been satisfying the desire for cool and weird foods by occasionally finding something in the weirder sections of the cheap grocery store, but since your cool-and-weird-food drive is much higher than mine I can see why that would be more of a problem for you.
no subject
Date: 2020-11-03 11:44 am (UTC)I def agree that there'd be a certain amount of ass-covering and damaged egos involved in such literature, I just also think that they are in fact correct when they say that the "typical reasonable person" would not have thought of the matter; you're very ahead of the curve in that regard.
> I definitely have a psychological blind spot around famines
I think everyone does! I feel like the typical modern western person considers the food supply chain a solved problem and doesn't think about it in the slightest, possibly even if they do have food-supply issues for financial or food-desert reasons. The unprecedented nature (except for how historically they were a big deal) of the problem is part of why I ever think about it TBH.
But I also am damn sure that right now we have a fucked-up relationship with food and land and extracting one from the other, and that the climate is doing all sorts of interesting things, and that the logistics of getting food into cities hasn't *stopped* being a huge logistical task of vast, vast scale just because we have cars and trains now so it's theoretically solvable. I'm pretty sure that in my home city you could half the amount of food coming into the city by taking out, like, three roads.
I'm not sure I have good famine survival skills or traits - my mother is a good gardener and I'm trying to get better at keeping stockpiles (barring the fact that I'm currently six weeks out from leaving the country and low-key trying to run stocks down, at least). I do think I have the metabolism for famine-survival, plausibly, but it's not like that's really a controllable factor and maybe also not as big as a factor as it might be.
>> your cool-and-weird-food drive is much higher than mine
It is indeed! The local supermarket is good for a lot of stuff, but right now I'm running low on a bunch of specific ingredients (and also the vegetables I can get from there cost half as much and are often of better quality) that's making things troublesome. And yeah, all of the things that are "weird" at the local supermarket from my POV are norweigan-isms. And after this long pretty much the main untapped well there is various methods of processing fish that sounded unappealing when I first saw them and continue to sound unappealing now. (Norweigian fish-balls as a cuisine seem to be an exercise in old-fashioned blandness, the kind of food where you add a teaspoon of spice-mix to the sauce and think yourself radical and exotic)
no subject
Date: 2020-11-03 02:47 pm (UTC)And yes, that's absolutely a very mild problem compared to actual starvation, but perhaps it will help give my subconscious a gentle nudge towards "food security is important and we should pay more attention to it". "hey, that three-month supply of cranberry bars was a Good Move, make more moves like that"
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>>(except for how historically they were a big deal)
It does seem...disrespectful? squandering? that we have the ability to preserve food such that it keeps for decades, an ability countless families throughout history would have killed for, and we so rarely use it to anywhere remotely near its full potential.
(They say a properly-made tin keeps *indefinitely*. The expiration date is a (conservative) estimate of when it will start to taste funny, but it remains safe as far out as anyone's checked. Apparently some people keep their spam on like a five-year rotation because they like the funny-tasting version better. It's well-aged.)
And for all Siderea's faults, I absolutely agree with her that JIT is terrifying. There will be (indeed, has been) no assistance in buffering disrupted supply chains: each household, each end user, is responsible for buffering itself, even though many of them can't and many of them don't even know it's up to them.
The plague *does* seem to have caused greater awareness of this, judging by how difficult a time Mom has had finding gamma-seal lids (they convert standard five-gallon buckets into airtight containers, often used for long-term food storage). Of course, some of that might just be the supply-chain disruptions also hitting gamma lids...
no subject
Date: 2020-11-03 03:15 pm (UTC)It does seem like it is! I'm not sure there's any sane way to better-test yourself to famine-ish conditions, though.
> It does seem...disrespectful? squandering?
Disrespectful and squandering are the name of the game when it comes to first-world food policy, I'm afraid. Have you heard the plight of the corn-gods? In general nearly every part of the chain suffers horribly in profoundly stupid ways and I can absolutely understand the desire to rip it all out and start over that some people have, even if that's mostly also just a way to get a famine. Long-term food storage would be nice; having good agricultural policy would be nice, having institutions that allowed "Farmer" to be an effectively trained position would be nice, having supply chains that were effectively optimized both when they need speed and when they can have buffers would be nice but that would be hellishly expensive, one understands why things like JIT come about. Hell, it'd even be nice if we weren't drifting comfortably into climate disaster like we seem to be doing.
(Note: I am not particularly qualified to speak authoritatively about these subjects and anything I say about them is going to contains pounds of bias, hearsay and misunderstandings but I'm willing to accuse the domain of being full of those things in general as another one of the problems)
no subject
Date: 2020-11-03 03:21 pm (UTC)> gamma-seal lids
Ooh neat, I hadn't heard of them.
(Also that reminds me: I should go have a talk with my mother about the ability to order online things like standard buckets and plastic containers, rather than scavenging them because they're not reliably a thing locally. Probably a thing to do when I'm at home, and may be in-viable due to shipping costs, but I was watching Kenji Lopez-Alt talk about his kitchen and he pointed out that you can in fact just buy take-out containers for nearly as cheap as restaurants can if you can track down the suppliers and it's much less trouble than carefully hoarding and saving the ones you get with food already in them. In general he says "go to restaurant suppliers for kitchen-wares" and it seems like an interesting idea I look forward to trying out. There may be some chef-bias in there and it's not actually sensible at all, but I do want to find out!)
no subject
Date: 2020-11-03 10:34 pm (UTC)Maybe I should try shopping on a different day of the week: for all I know new shipments of cranberry bars arrive on Wednesdays and by Tuesday they're gone.)
no subject
Date: 2020-11-03 10:42 pm (UTC)Sorry, can't predict cranberry bar import rates. It's probably worth a shot, though.