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.)
---
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 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)