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.
---
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: 2020-11-03 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.