Really glad to see people opening up about this. I've been saying for a long time that lockdowns were a green light for some people to stop trying to resolve their various neuroses and to just accept them. As long as they aren't trying to impose it on the rest of us anymore, I don't have an issue with it. Though, if the author was a friend or family member of mine, I would suggest that they seek help.
Some of us would argue that the year-long (and counting) lockdowns are the result of neurotics imposing on the rest of us. Some of us have been arguing since the beginning of all this that the old and infirm should have been the ones to isolate themselves — with accommodations and support from the rest of society — while the rest of us took sensible precautions and continued on with the business of life. Some of us trusted that "two weeks to slow the spread" was the sensible policy and what our governments would follow. Instead, what happened was an extended and irrational panic by some forced on the rest of us.
So, I think it's terrific if people would accept their neuroses and not bother the rest of us. But there is no evidence that that's how things work.
Some of us would argue that the year-long and counting failure to ever once have an actual lockdown - just vague restrictions within the realm of what was politically popular - was the result of people-who-can-be-referred-to-with-a-pejorative imposing on the rest of us. Some of us have been arguing that the old and infirm are no less worthwhile members than the rest, and that a true lockdown, without carriers wandering everywhere, would have resolved the situation within a bounded amount of time. Instead, what happened was an extended and irrational panic ('the economy will collapse!!! suicide rates are up!!! my oxygen levels are too low!!!") by some forced on the rest of us.
The point is that a huge portion of businesses were completely open through the entire pandemic. A large number of people did not follow health guidelines.
Forbidding citizens to leave their homes quite clearly violates the right to free expression and free assembly in the First Amendment. I assume you're familiar with it.
Thankfully, we haven't had to test these yet in a court of law over covid. That's the beauty of having these rights enumerated explicitly. Would-be tyrants are afraid to challenge them.
I'm familiar with it, but I think I'm familiar with a different version than you are, because I don't see "expression" in it. I see "speech". I also see that the right to assembly is "to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
In any case, quarantines have in fact been implemented in the US repeatedly over the years. So either the Constitution has changed recently (which might explain why your copy is different from mine), or they were so obviously not a violation of the First Amendment that nobody bothered to test it in a court of law.
For instance, here's a 1902 Supreme Court case confirming the ability of a state government to prevent passengers on a ship (some of whom were US citizens attempting to return to their homes) from leaving the ship: https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/186/380
No mention is made of the First Amendment.
> That from an early day the power of the states to enact and enforce quarantine laws for the safety and the protection of the health of their inhabitants has been recognized by Congress, is beyond question. That until Congress has exercised its power on the subject, such state quarantine laws and state laws for the purpose of preventing, eradicating, or controlling the spread of contagious or infectious diseases, are not repugnant to the Constitution of the United States, although their operation affects interstate or foreign commerce, is not an open question.
(And the implication is that the only thing that would prevent a state from passing laws about quarantines is the federal government passing laws about quarantines and preempting the states - i.e., that Congress could certainly enact a nationwide quarantine if it wanted.)
Anyway, this is all beside the point - plenty of places other than the US, with no First Amendment or equivalent, have also failed to ever implement a real lockdown, because a real lockdown would have been politically unpopular. So it's not a matter of constitutionality.
Quarantines of actually sick individuals, you mean.
The use of PCR tests with ridiculously high thresholds to determine "asymptomatic carriers" was an extreme overreach.
It was such an overreach that the public health establishment has already backtracked on this level of sensitivity in PCR testing, with respect to vaccinated individuals, because they keep getting all these pesky "false positives" after vaccination. It's really messing with their outreach campaigns, understandably.
You can be sure this will all be clarified in litigation over the next few decades while the Trump appointees get to work.
Unless, of course, the restrictionists come down off the ledge. It seems you all are folding on all fronts recently. My genuine prediction is that all of this will be moot in a years time once no one pays any mind to the coronabros anymore.
No, I don't mean quarantines of actually sick individuals. I mean quarantines of anyone and everyone, regardless of testing. From the Supreme Court case I linked to:
> ... on September 29, 1898, the vessel arrived at the quarantine station some distance below the city of New Orleans, was there regularly inspected, and was found, both as to the passengers and cargo, to be free from any infectious or contagious disease, and accordingly was given a clean bill of health, whereby the ship became entitled to proceed to New Orleans and land her passengers and discharge her cargo. This, however, it was asserted she was not permitted to do....
Nobody on board the ship was sick, according to tests, and they were still lawfully quarantined, and the law was constitutional.
But you're right, this will all be forgotten in a few years and relitigated afresh in the court of public opinion (in every country) next pandemic, just like this particular case has been completely forgotten, the quarantines of the Spanish Flu have been completely forgotten, etc.
You’re completely misrepresenting the supposed similarities between your example and the reality in 2021. The document you reference is talking about quarantining travelers from abroad before they officially enter the US:
> "It was asserted that the plaintiff, a corporation created by and existing under the laws of the Republic of France and a citizen of said Republic, on or about September 2, 1898, caused its steamship Britannia to be cleared from the ports of Marseilles, France, and Palermo, Italy, for New Orleans with a cargo of merchandise and with about 408 passengers, some of whom were citizens of the United States returning home, and others who were seeking homes in the United States, and who intended to settle in the state of Louisiana or adjoining states, and that all the passengers referred to at the time of their sailing were free from infectious or contagious diseases. It was further averred that on September 29, 1898, the vessel arrived at the quarantine station some distance below the city of New Orleans"
It does not in any way justify indiscriminately restricting the constitutionally protected freedoms of American citizens, on American soil, for more than a year. Try telling someone in the early 1900's that their church or synagogue is closed for the next 15 months, by order of the U.S government. Good luck. In this case, when Americans have chosen to travel abroad, it justifies a limited quarantine when they return to the country. Nothing more. Indefinite lockdowns of entire states or the entire country is not quarantine. Rather, it's a grave human rights violation that we cargo culted from Communist China.
Are you claiming that American citizens have fewer constitutional rights when not on American soil but attempting to return? Where in the Constitution does it say that?
Anyway, once again, this is all beside the point. I'm not talking about one particular country. I'm talking about the worldwide desire to avoid serious lockdowns.
And I don't know about your church or synagogue, but my church closed voluntarily - and remains closed (we're reopening in limited amounts in a couple of weeks) - because our religion teaches us that when Satan says "You will not surely die!" and tempts us with short-term freedom, we say no. We've been online. It works great.
This might be true if American society as a whole embraced safety measures to keep the rest of society safe. That didn't happen. A significant portion of the country believe the pandemic was a hoax and took no precautions whatsoever.
Google tells me that Taiwan has had a grand total of 124 deaths for a country of 23 million people. That's 0.00053913% of the population, while the US has had 594k deaths for 328 million people - 0.18109756%. Taiwan's "wave" looks like a slow day for the US.
You're talking about total cases while I'm talking about recent cases. Shouldn't the continued use of masks prevent recent cases in Taiwan? What changed?
On top of that, it's pretty clear by now that East Asian populations have some level of preexisting resistance to this family of respiratory viruses, given their proximity to past outbreaks of genealogically similar viruses. It would make sense that their totals will eventually be lower than those in parts of the world that haven't been exposed to SARS like viruses.
I've mostly lost faith in the ability of my country to have an orderly, happy society together at this point. As a recovering agoraphobic I can easily see the same disordered thinking that was once the core of my own mind not only present in other people, but lauded on the news and in mainstream culture.
Here's to hoping things get better, but knowing that the nuts run the nuthouse now.
This is a tenuous link at best. China does not have the same cultural makeup of the United States, and they shut down more aggressively than any western nation. (bear in mind this is not a compliment, I would not like to see US officials literally weld people into their apartment complexes.)
> Some of us have been arguing since the beginning of all this that the old and infirm should have been the ones to isolate themselves — with accommodations and support from the rest of society — while the rest of us took sensible precautions and continued on with the business of life.
That is what happened.
> Some of us trusted that "two weeks to slow the spread" was the sensible policy and what our governments would follow.
Western governments largely did follow that policy, but the US was never able to get out of free-fall. So COVID policy became a bang-bang controller of lockdowns, then slight reopenings, then more lockdowns, because there was never a two week period where spread slowed enough to materially change the risk landscape.
Even when there were lulls in the second derivative, limited re-openings resulted in enormous case spikes. If our numbers ever reached DE or NZ levels, we would've been back in offices and schools. And, in fact, I had plenty of conference calls with Germans who were sitting in their offices last summer.
The re-opening criterion didn't change (except to become more liberal over time, the exact opposite of your characterization). What happened is that the lockdowns -- for whatever reason -- never got spread under control in the USA. That wasn't true everywhere.
> irrational panic
On April 1, 2020 there 26K new cases in the USA. One year later, on April 1, 2021, there were 77K new cases. Vaccination rates among at-risk populations were starting to pick up, but nowhere near where thy are today.
What is the rational policy that would call for lock downs in March 2020 but not in March 2021?
> some would argue...
And others would argue that the expectation that a pandemic should last exactly and only two weeks is its own rather extraordinary neurosis.
There's your problem. There is no such thing as rational lockdown policy for an airborne virus.
Pray tell: where exactly did lockdowns work? Surely not in East Asia where multiple countries are experiencing exponential growth in covid cases right now due to seasonality. Despite widespread adoption of masking, contact tracing, etc.
Certainly not in Sweden, where they never implemented them, yet they continue to have either middling or above average results in terms of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.
Also: no one ever expected the pandemic to be over in two weeks. We did expect our public health officials to stick to the second part, "to slow the spread". Clearly, that was a line to manipulate the public, as things quickly shifted to "until we have a vaccine". People on my side of this issue will never forget or forgive the bait and switch.
The "two weeks" originated from the idea of instituting periodic, local lockdowns in order to keep hospitals from filling to overflow. The idea wasn't to keep people from dying from COVID-19, per se. The idea was that there would be some people who would be affected severely by the virus, but who could pull through if given supportive care in a hospital. What we didn't want was numbers getting so high that people who could have pulled through wouldn't because there were no available bed for them. That's the original idea behind how lockdowns were supposed to be used.
But, returning to my original point, once things locked down, a number of politicians realized that they would be blamed for any deaths that occurred when the lockdown was lifted. These politicians received support from the "if we can save even just one life" crowd — which I'm characterizing as the neurotic.
I couldn't agree more with your assessment, especially considering that the presidential election was occurring around the time when the lockdown began. Ultimately, it was the politics that screwed us.
> There's your problem. There is no such thing as rational lockdown policy for an airborne virus.
OP states that the original lockdowns were reasonable but then complains about continued lockdowns, and my comment was responding to that sentiment.
You're making an entirely different argument -- that lockdowns were always unreasonable.
> Pretell: where exactly did lockdowns work? Surely not in East Asia where multiple countries are experiencing exponential growth in covid cases right now due to seasonality. Despite widespread adoption of masking, contact tracing, etc. Certainly not in Sweden, where they never implemented them, yet they continue to have either middling or above average results in terms of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.
This is probably one of the least intellectually humble/curious things I've ever seen someone write on hacker news.
There's an entire literature base being developed on exactly this question, and the answer is very clearly "it's complicated". For each of your examples I can give a counter-example, and that exchange would be completely specious and unscientific political punditry. This is not a question that can or should be effectively litigated in the comment section of a hacker forum by armchair epidemiologists, at least not without thousands of hours invested. And certainly not helpful if not entered into as an honest search for truth without preconceptions.
> This is probably one of the least intellectually humble/curious things I've ever seen someone write on hacker news.
Goodness. Unfortunately, you'll be positively devastated to learn that this exact discussion has been ongoing in countless threads here for over a year.
> There's an entire literature base being developed on exactly this question, and the answer is very clearly "it's complicated"
It's not that complicated. We have enough data at this point to start revealing signals where they exist. So far, there is some evidence that individual behaviors (e.g., masking, physical distancing) can have positive effects. There is also increasingly strong evidence that state-imposed controls (e.g., lockdowns and mask mandates) have not significantly affected the long-term course of the pandemic.
> This is not a question that can or should be effectively litigated in the comment section of a hacker forum by armchair epidemiologists, at least not without thousands of hours invested.
If your constitution cannot abide listening to people discuss this (or any) topic without first completing your requisite thousands of hours of research, I might gently suggest that HN isn't a safe place for you.
I bill $850/hr, if you want the conversation that badly ;) otherwise, the audience is approximately zero and you aren’t interested in being convinced, so what would even be the point?
They're refering to the money they make at their day job. This person seems fond of telling their HN audience about their high income. It usually only comes up in job- or tax-related threads though.
We can agree that those more concerned with tone than with rational public health policy are more likely to agree with you. You've certainly been polite. Fair enough.
It’s not about politeness, and I’m surely not being particularly kind. It’s about exhibiting the intellectual humility and curiosity that convinces a (largely imagined) audience you’re interested in truth and not just grinding some political axe.
Sure, we're not getting anywhere in this particular discussion. Elsewhere in the thread has been more productive for me. Thanks for your time and your (albeit unsupported) contribution to the collective knowledge of HN.
Let me make myself clear. I am suggesting that from the beginning we should have encouraged the statistically vulnerable to isolate themselves: meaning, isolate themselves voluntarily. I'm suggesting that the rest of us should have supported such people who reached out for support through private and government action. I'm suggesting that other individuals should have been encouraged to take what precautions they deemed sensible.
I think that, by and large, mask mandates should have been effected privately: meaning, business owners should have been free to institute mask policies the same way the do shirts and shoes policies. Government should have publicly given such policies support.
Lockdowns should have been periodic and local: meaning, focused on time and place. The aim of lockdowns would not be to "save even a single life," but to try to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed, so that people who could pull through with supportive care would have an available bed to recover in. In the meantime, government should have endeavored to setup emergency hospitals to make more beds available, relocating them as necessary.
Every point I'm making stresses free choice and personal liberty; and every point I'm making stresses the idea that there are no easy answers and no one has the "master plan."
Instead, what I saw — what we all saw — was federal bureaucrats and state governors dictating what hundreds of millions of people should do, based on conjecture and even whim, and dare I say, even at times personal vanity.
Is there an example where individuals taking personal responsibility of a widespread problem has led to a favorable results? What I've seen is that this line of thinking disconnects the values from the result ie: "We did the right thing, so we have to accept the results." This re-frames the debate from results-orients to values-oriented.
The same reasoning is being used in the climate change debate. Corporations are gearing up PR teams to promote individual responsibility campaigns so that corporate action can be minimized. Again, it disconnects the values from the results so that at the very end when nothing changes a group can be happy that even though it fails, we did the right thing. The end result is cynicism and skepticism to these tactics.
Is there an example where centralized planning has led to favorable results? The centralized planning in the face of this pandemic has resulted in widespread economic destruction, not to mention rioting, looting, arson, and portions of American cities being taken over by "anti-fascist" warlords.
Okay, that's just my opinion, right? Fine. Call me crazy for believing that prolonged isolation, idleness, and political repression leads to egregious economic dislocation and social unrest, but I'm going with that until I hear a better explanation.
That's weird. It's almost like talking about the advocacy of individual responsibility come from a premise that centralized planning failed. What a strange foundation to base a response around. I'm open to a discussion about individual responsibility from first principles and systems-level thinking, but it's as if we're trying to avoid that discussion for some reason.
This sounds almost precisely like what was implemented. There was no widespread state or federal enforcement of mask mandates, even if they were installed. Basically all mask requirements were either implemented or ignored by local businesses. I know people who live in towns where almost zero businesses required masks. The number of businesses that qualified as "essential" meant that there weren't consistent "lockdowns" outside of a few areas (schools being the huge one) and a large portion of remote work arrangements were done on a largely voluntary basis by businesses.
> I find this viewpoint exceedingly arrogant. That you somehow know what's best in the case of a novel global pandemic?
Hindsight is, as they say, 20/20. I find the GP's argument very persuasive. Sitting here in June of 2021 and looking back it's so easy to agree with his plan.
But back in May of 2020? All options looked bad, and I think things were a lot less clear. The "full lock down" did only last a couple of weeks, while things things got incredibly muddled quickly as different organizations and regional governments put their own spin on things.
I don't think we really understood enough of the actual mechanics of the virus, nor enough of the social pressures, until it was far too late to course correct (for the reasons the GP describes).
Thank you. I'm not even taking my own word for it. I didn't dream up any of what I've said on my own, nor by cobbling together either anything Sean Hannity or Chris Cuomo had to say on the subject. I read the paper from the Imperial College (where "social distancing" and "lockdowns" originated, as far as I know) shortly after it came out and have been trying to follow along with the best sources I have been able to find since then.
But, let me come clean about my prejudices. I live in New York. When Governor Cuomo was on television every day, I saw — every day — comments to his feeds on Facebook and Twitter from people saying things like, "Thank you, Governor. Whenever I listen to you I feel calm and safe. I listen to you every day for my sanity."
I wish I were making this up! But, as I said months ago, I am astounded by the people who I imagine have no qualms going on about "patriarchy" bestowing what I see as sycophantic praise on a governor whose entire affect reminds me of the stereotype of an immigrant family's "papa."
This is, in part, why I say "neurotic." We can't have a free country when we have so many people — voters! — like these. The SARS-CoV-2 virus isn't the scariest thing about this pandemic.
That might be because of social media censorship. GBD had their Facebook page deleted in February [1]. Martin Kulldorff has had his Twitter account suspended more than once, though it is now
available [2].
Another large pool, at least in my circle, are very boring people who like having an external justification for their inaction. I would spend time with family, but there's a pandemic. I would take the kids to the park, but there's a pandemic. I would go to happy hour after work, but there's a pandemic. I would start exercising and losing weight, but the gym is closed, pandemic.
Frankly, I don't care if people aren't interested in spending time with their family or going to happy hour during regular times. But the people who did so previously out of obligation find it convenient to have an external justification.
> As long as they aren't trying to impose it on the rest of us anymore,
But that's what you are doing.
> I would suggest that they seek help.
Maybe the right help is for the world not to be driven by the extroverted, over confident, and thoughtless.
I'm a physically imposing person, I'm tall and muscular, so I can get away with being introverted because nobody tries very hard to bully me to be extroverted, they try a little bit but back off quickly.
Most introverts aren't afforded the same luxury. Forcing introverts to adapt to an extroverted world can really mess with your head. To the extroverts of the world they don't see any issues what so ever, and all the introverts should "just get over it".
Can we not agree that what this person is describing is a little more severe than introversion?
I am 100% in favor of calling an extrovert/introvert truce. You let me go to the office, run my bar, see my dying mother in the nursing home, and in return you never have to come to the office or interact with the public again.
The part that is good is that they are admitting that their continuation of shut-in behavior is not about the virus.
Like the old saying goes: Step 1 is admitting you have a problem. The author didn't quite go that far. But they gave enough of an idea of what's going on in their head that someone else can start to diagnose it.
It seems to me that the "way people are built" these days is just a lack of discipline. We have grown up soft and effortlessly, and we did not grow the tools to cope with self regulation as it was never necessary. I don't see how "accepting" this behavior does anything to solve it.
Ostracization is a valid social regulation for enforcing certain qualities in a society and it's not always wrong to use it.
Perhaps it is you who grew up with too much discipline?
Ostracism is shown to be a precursor to terroristic ideation, if your goal is to see less mass shootings and similar extreme events we would all be better served to consider rehabilitative and inclusionary practices instead of punishing people that you deem too soft or ostracizing t them.
In my experience, pro-strict-discipline ideas don't care about effectiveness or consequences. The ideology of discipline itself is the point and the virtue being pursued.
"Neurosis" is no longer a well-defined term in the relevant professional community these days, but to the extent it has a specific meaning beyond being a vague synonym for e.g. "worry", it's an unresolved mismatch between your mental behavior/personality and the expectations of society.
There are two ways to resolve that - change your mental behavior/personality and change the expectations upon you - and there's nothing in the definition to prefer one over the other.
It's hard. A lot of office workers are so happy not just about the lack of a commute but also avoiding office politics and office jerks.
At the same time I do feel for people in the lunch, transportation industry or those office workers that depend on staff being in an office to function.
Personally I really hope I never go back to an office. Its so much easier to work with others online than in person.
I work for a very political company but have a high, broad-in-scope role. The politics have gone to eleven. I think most employees who think politics has _diminished_ in the last year are just demonstrating how remote can lower your ability to read the room.
It gives one the freedom to choose not to actively participate.
In person, it's not considered polite to take a breath and step away to think for 10 minutes before responding. So it's easy to get caught up in the whirlwind.
Remote, there's room to pause, reflect, and decide how to respond. That makes it a lot easier to choose not to engage. Does that mean that you're often letting the white collar Machiavellis have their way? Yes. But perhaps that's not your problem. It's often easier to choose not to have it be your problem when you're physically removed from the situation.
I guess it varies by company. In my previous company, there were a fair few unpleasant company people that enjoyed gossip, snidy remarks, and being just general jerks. As soon as I was fully remote I didn't need to engage with them anymore.
There's also the below point on being able to take timeout and avoid office politics if you so wish while working remotely.
I can appreciate it varies but definitely for me remote work feels a lot more focused on the job with less bullshit human interaction needed.
At what point do we say "Fine, stay inside and live your life as a hermit, but the rest of us are returning to normal."? I feel like these neurotic people have way too much clout and are holding back reopening progress.
I don't think most of the people who feel this way are neurotic. I think most of the people who feel this way are treated very poorly and are forced to work more than 40 hours a week and don't get paid a living wage. We don't hear from them because they don't write for The Atlantic.
I don't hear people on HN who want to continue working remotely being accused of being neurotic or being molly-coddled, and they get get paid well and have very good work conditions.
I agree that the author is courting some kind of depression or neuroticism. But the subtext I heard in the article is that a lot of the things that people have not had to deal with during the pandemic are things we have known are bullshit for a long time. And now that we have seen proof that they aren't necessary, people are reluctant to go back to accepting those bullshit conditions. Especially when we saw how poorly healthcare workers and service workers who did work during the pandemic were treated. And again, those people don't write for the Atlantic but I have a feeling they were well represented by this article.
I have the opposite interpretation. Only this class of people was actually able to "not participate in society" for 18 months:
> I don't hear people on HN who want to continue working remotely being accused of being neurotic or being molly-coddled, and they get get paid well and have very good work conditions.
By "this class of people" I don't literally mean people on HN but people in the typical yuppie lines of work.
Someone who's actually working class has not had the luxury of doing so. Even if you got every stimulus check that covered maybe 10% of the expenses over the last 1.25 years. So the people who could stay inside indefinitely either never lost their job (transitioned to remote or already worked remote pre-pandemic), or they lost their job but had such a massive nest egg that they were able to weather it.
Actual working-class people have not been sheltering inside for 18 months. In my opinion it's unhealthy to do so, so I'm not alleging that it would be a good thing if the working class hid inside too, but rather that the "I'm not ready to return to normal" crowd is driven by neuroticism and a crippling fear of life itself rather than it being some actual necessary result of this respiratory virus pandemic.
One of the things I realized during the pandemic was that the ability to "not participate in society," or more specifically, the option to choose when and how you participate in society, is amazing and valuable. Most of us don't have this option. We have to work in a stupid office or behind the counter at some restaurant and we have to deal with assholes on the road, and we have to rely on disagreeable people to do stuff we can't do ourselves, and it all boils down to these little forced-interactions with people all day every day, just to live. Yuck! I'm blessed to have a computer job that can be done from home, and because of that, this past year has been the best year of my life, because it became acceptable to simply opt-out of all this crap. I realize not everyone had this option, and I truly feel humble and grateful that I have. One of the things I'm looking forward to most in retirement is having the financial independence to just yeet myself off to the woods and live as a hermit, never having to deal with society again, unless it's on my own terms.
I know a good number of service industry people that have been out of work for 18 months and are not very interested in going back to work under the old terms.
> At what point do we say "Fine, stay inside and live your life as a hermit, but the rest of us are returning to normal."?
Has this not already happened? Where I live all covid restrictions have been dropped, sports games are at full capacity, masks optional everywhere but public transit and hospitals, and so on
No, it is not OK to call people "neurotic" like that. Nor is it OK to criticize "these people" who are unlike you for holding anything back when they're not. Reopening is based on epidemiological safety, and people staying home are no threat to anyone in that regard. You know who is? People rushing to be everywhere they used to be as much as they used to be, as though there were never any costs associated with that. There were. There were psychological (and hence productivity) costs for some. There were environmental costs. There were social costs. "Reopening" is never going to mean going back to exactly the way things were, and it shouldn't. Get over it.
I'm surprised by the hand wringing angst at this "unproductive member of society". The article was a lark - a bit of exposition on thinking about things differently. Does the author say you need to lay about? No, he just described what it means for him. Is he privileged? Sure, I suppose. We just went through a global pandemic - cut society some slack. This anger at someone expressing an opinion sounds a lot like fox news faux drama.
I think a lot of the tense reactions come from the notion that governments have leveraged the opinions you speak of to impose extremely illiberal sanctions on liberties we used to take for granted, such as telling us whether and how we are allowed to see our own families.
I’ve seen a number of trend pieces along these lines.
This is not my experience so far. Nor my friends’. If anything, I feel like we need trend pieces along the lines of “whoa, slow down, don’t dive in nose-first”.
Yeah, I live in a weird bubble, but Saturday’s bar excursion was “no masks, no shirts, no distancing”, and the 1-hour wait in line would suggest that there’s plenty of demand for that.
Every so often in the US you’ll hear of people with neuroses that stem from the Great Depression (quite frequently, with hoarding among the elderly population). I think COVID will have a similar impact on a significant subset of the population today.
Sure, the vast majority will move on, but some will continue to live with a vague fear of being too near to other people. Personally, I find this thought very saddening, but I’m bracing myself for it and doing my best to make sure it doesn’t happen to me.
I've always found the real world to be infinitely more stressful than the world of work and school. I also recognize how this is somewhat absurd.
During COVID my to-do list was basically to work, spend time with family and get some exercise. Now my to-do list is to move back to a major city, get a new job to support an increased standard of living, make new friends in a new area. I have to carefully budget my "keeping up with the Joneses" energy because there is no way I can do it all at once.
The absurdity is that I don't really need a new job or to move to a huge city in order to be happy but I'm doing it anyway.
I saw some historian last year say, "there will be a world before covid and a world after covid", and I thought that was hyperbolic. But now I see the truth in the matter - it will not be some obvious, monumental, instantaneous change, but rather the slow, creeping change where a few years from now, we'll look back and see that society is just different. In the US, we'll see some people wear masks all the time when out in public, and others will wear them when sick or during cold/flu season. Others will remain gravely offended by masks. Masks will be a thing.
Other changes I can't see yet, but they will become apparent later. Definitely work will somehow change. Maybe the "everyone back to the office" crowd will realize that is less competitive. Or the opposite, and there will be a snap back to office work. (My money is on the former). The white collar world has been through Zoom School this past year, and, as a remote worker, that benefits me tremendously, as people now understand how it works and the etiquette around it. Plus Zoom is waaay better now than it was - latency is much less, quality is way up.
In the US, maybe some of the outdoor dining, the closing off of streets, will remain. Many marginal restaurants closed, some of which I'll miss greatly, but that gives a chance for new ones to open.
mRNA vaccines are amazing, and I'm betting they'll impact our lives in profound ways from here on out.
Lastly, I have this sense that there are a number of changes happening and that have happened that I can't quite make out, but will become obvious in retrospect and I'm curious what they are.
>I saw some historian last year say, "there will be a world before covid and a world after covid", and I thought that was hyperbolic. But now I see the truth in the matter - it will not be some obvious, monumental, instantaneous change, but rather the slow, creeping change where a few years from now, we'll look back and see that society is just different.
One thing to keep in mind is that this is nothing new. Plague has been with humanity for as long as we have existed. And yet, here we were in 2019 living our lives "normally" after dealing with those in the past. I think there will certainly be a generational cultural divide caused by this which separates us from those who were too young to remember, much like the Depression was for our grandparents. But people will go back to being people regardless.
I agree it is nothing new, but that's the point being made, which is that plagues cause discontinuities with societies - they are a driver of change. And that will happen here, too. People will go back to being people, I agree, but just different people, in some ways :)
Also, I have thought about the generational divide part, and tell me son that he'll be telling his kids and grandkids about what it was like to live through covid!
Mostly because the world is different now. Information and science was sparse then. We now have a strong body of evidence that masks help significantly with reducing the spread of at least some types of pathogens. However, I wouldn't shock me if we went back to no masks again. But it wouldn't shock me if they remained around on some level, either. Before 2020, in the US at least, it was bizarre to see someone wearing them. That has changed.
I sure hope masks will be mandatory in doctor's waiting rooms / hospitals.
Nothing better than being forced to go in person to a doctor to pick up a sick note for your employer (for a minor health issue like headache or whatever) and get sick while waiting in an unventilated room full of sick people coughing and sneezing.
We had 100 years to apply our better access to “information and science”. We had multiple recent flu outbreaks of SARS, MERS, and H1N1. But this time COVID is different. Because it killed more people? The people from 1918 weren’t stupid, they saw their friends and family die in much greater numbers. The day the mask mandate was repealed for vaccinated individuals, half the people at the grocery store don’t wear them anymore. Nevada, where I live, is only 40% vaccinated. There is of course momentum from the mandates, but all signals point to masks being shedded as soon as possible.
Different people and cultures - I don't think it'll stick for all but there are people who enjoy wearing masks. They like hiding behind them, or they feel safe. There are others who use them as a way to gain victim status in society - these are unique present-day phenomenon.
And then there are people who think wearing a mask is a worthwhile thing to do to protect other people when they have some contagious respiratory disease. You might call this category "people with a sense of common decency."
Yea it’s a bit bizarre we’ve had this whole culture of not doing that (COVID-19 being irrelevant here). Remember the phrase “it’s going around the office”? Yea that’s going extinct.
People who are immuno-compromised, of course will want to wear masks
People who are currently ill with some respiratory illness and don't want to share it.
And finally I was reading an article about a few people with various negative facial features that they wished to cover (a mole, a neurological condition that caused unwanted lip movements, a facial scar, etc.) have really appreciated the cover of wearing a mask.
> People who are immuno-compromised, of course will want to wear masks
> People who are currently ill with some respiratory illness and don't want to share it.
These are both new to western society. I do think it was always a bit weird we weren't wearing masks when sick before last year, but maybe it was a good thing? Idk.
The immuno-compromised thing is bizarre. Like where were masks before 2020 for those individuals? There are varying degrees of this, and I'm sure a tiny amount of people who were at high enough risk were wearing one, but the vast, vast majority weren't.
> And finally I was reading an article about a few people with various negative facial features that they wished to cover (a mole, a neurological condition that caused unwanted lip movements, a facial scar, etc.) have really appreciated the cover of wearing a mask.
Yea I can see that, though I would suggest it's likely to be an bad idea psychologically. The "reveal" aspect of the deformity or unpleasantness will be extremely traumatic for the revealer versus normalizing and acceptance.
I guess the immuno-compromised and those who currently have a mild respiratory infection now feel they have “permission” from society to wear a mask. A non-East Asian person wearing a mask two years ago would have attracted a range of unwelcome behaviour – quizzical looks (mildest), questions, comments, verbal or even physical abuse (worst-case scenario) – depending on who they encounter.
Personally, I hope our knowledge and scientific understanding improves with regard to the effectiveness of mask wearing in a non-medical environment to mitigate either spreading or being infected by pathogens.
I think you’re quite off-base with your assertion that someone wearing a mask would be met with violence. Nobody would care. You’d just say “oh I am immuno-compromised so I try not to get sick” and then that’s that. In fact more likely someone would go to great lengths to make you feel comfortable and help you out because generally people are sensitive to people who are sick or have health problems, especially in America. Somebody might have question you because it’s abnormal, but it isn’t any more abnormal or different then someone noticing you are wearing pink hair or a random interesting t-shirt.
I agree that people now feel they have permission, which is good because people who actually need to wear a mask should be able to wear one without being looked at strangely. But the vast majority of people who will continue to wear masks won’t fall in this category. Even after the Democratic administration (who I voted for) and CDC relaxed mask mandates people still wear them for no good reason. (They’re not sick, have no scientific reason for them, etc.)
Regarding violence, I explicitly envisioned this as a worst-case scenario.
As a young male of 20, I was a fan of heavy metal and used to have long hair. Because I was “different”, I used to have inner-city kids shout verbal abuse and throw stones at me (in daylight, walking home from college), have adult males try to start fights in pubs or on the streets and once had a random thug spit in my face as I cycled past while in a bad part of town. Even other friends who were taller and more physically imposing had to deal with similar crap if they were on their own. There are always going to be malicious people who will pick on anyone who’s different in some way. They’ll probably pick on anyone they think isn’t a threat but the less “different” you are, the better your chances are of avoiding unpleasantries.
Yea... I think that's just life, unfortunately. It could be long hair, it could be a mask, or it could be your skin color. Unfortunately there are a lot of morons in this world.
Add people with allergies to that list as well. I've realized how much my allergies are better in the spring (both last year and this year) as a result of wearing a mask when I'm outside.
Sure - there are people in society who gain status by being a victim of some injustice or event. It means others will tend to give them social sympathy points, cater to their needs, and pay attention to them.
In the case of masks - some will wear a mask for no scientific reason, just that they can become a victim. "Sorry I can't attend that event because it's not mask friendly." "Sorry do you think you could wear a mask when we're in a meeting together?" "Sorry I don't go to happy hours b/c of my mask" etc.
It's going to be a whole subculture. There will be blogs, lifestyle magazines, you name it. "How to live your best life when others aren't masking up" - "top 10 skin friendly masks to wear" whatever.
-edit-
And just to make it clear I always wear a mask and follow state and CDC guidelines. I don't care about wearing one. Whatever the gov't says is what I'm going to follow. These are just personal observations.
Agreed on mass transit, I also think wearing the mask outside during pollen season helped a bit with my allergies, so there's a few use cases where I'll probably still wear them. Especially because I've collected so many different designs at this point.
This time we have a legitimate competitor on the world stage who absolutely swear that masks work and that anyone who denies that is killing their population unnecessarily.
We also have social media now, where people can completely inhabit their own worlds of "truth". I think the parent comment is onto something. Some people really are true believers now.
At this point I doubt they will be dissuaded, as long as there is a Trump-electorate sized rump (~30%) who continue masking. If that dwindles to, say, 10% or 15%, then I could imagine them feeling enough shame to come down off the ledge.
I’ve reread this several times. I’m not really sure what you are saying here? The biggest hint is the italicized “swears” are you saying that you think masks are a hoax?
No, I don't believe they're a "hoax". I believe they are a well-intentioned attempt to control viral spread. But just like during Spanish Flu, they have not meaningfully changed outcomes for localities that required them vs. those that didn't. The scientific consensus in Western medicine for 100 years after analysis of Spanish Flu, was that masks do not prevent or slow the spread of a respiratory pandemic. You'd need a respirator for that (N95 "mask"), and you'd need to wear it all the time given what we know now about airborne transmission of Sars-Cov-2. We will soon be returning to this consensus with any luck:
"Randomized control trials have not clearly demonstrated mask efficacy against respiratory viruses, and observational studies conflict on whether mask use predicts lower infection rates. We hypothesized that statewide mask mandates and mask use are associated with lower COVID-19 case growth rates in the United States..."
"Conclusion: mask mandates and use are not associated with slower state-level COVID-19 spread during COVID-19 growth surges. Containment requires future research and implementation of existing efficacious strategies"
The capricious and hypocritical nature of masking policy is surely frustrating but I fail to see how that is relevant to whether or not they are effective.
We're talking about the science, not the public perception of the science, right?
Determining mask efficacy is made much more difficult when people aren't using them effectively. If people are going to restaurants, and having private (indoor!) parties, and going to churches, and any number of events where they don't wear masks, then the pathogen is able to still propagate around.
Now, if you are arguing that masks aren't effective because people won't actually wear them, then I agree that "wear masks" as a policy needs a lot of work. I'm saying if people actually wore masks when appropriate, then they are effective.
I'm not arguing that at all. I'm arguing that the cloth that you found in the junk drawer, and the surgical masks that you bought as a pack of 50 on Amazon, do not filter microscopic viral particles. They say so right on the label in many cases. The research I've read and linked also suggests that this is the case. Maybe in a few years you'll agree that it's common sense.
If you want to actually filter the air that you inhale and exhale I recommend an N95.
You don't need to filter out the viruses, you need to filter the aerosol the viruses are sitting in. That is a major plus of Covid, verification (repeatedly) and acceptance of that fact.
Except that we know now Sars-Cov-2 transmission is airborne. As the aerosol caught in your mask evaporates, the virus sheds into the surrounding air, where it is later contracted by someone else.
I think you'll be a little disappointed at the level of "acceptance" of mask wearing & efficacy going forward.
> it will not be some obvious, monumental, instantaneous change, but rather the slow, creeping change where a few years from now, we'll look back and see that society is just different.
Hasn't it always been like that ? History books make it look like the world radically changes step by step (printing press, the cinema, the radio cars, planes, &c.) but in reality it's always spread over decades.
If you live through these historical moments it's always a gradual change, it's only when you look back at history that you can pin point events (while discarding half of the story most of the time)
I definitely agree with your larger point, and the results of this pandemic will be of similar impact and rate of impact as other historical events. However, there are definitely moments that did have quick impact. 9/11 had immediate, significant, lasting impact to our lives, at least as far as traveling went, for instance.
I suspect it will be another few years before the restrictions settle and find their level, and probably the same again before people start to relax and want to travel internationally to the same degree in the same numbers.
By which time we will have structural changes in the travel and airlines industries.
FYI: The author is Tim Kreider, who wrote "Lazy, A Manifesto" years before the pandemic (which is actually an interesting little book).
So little has changed in his attitude due to the pandemic. I just think that's kind of relevant, as the reader might tricked into thinking he was a quintessential go-getter pre-pandemic. But this has always been his beat.
Honestly I don't want to go back for precisely the opposite reasons. My productivity and general wellbeing during quarantine has skyrocketed to heights ive never seen before. And i definitely felt it go down in the short few months quarantine was being eased.
>Service personnel are apparently ungrateful for the opportunity to get paid not enough to live on by employers who have demonstrated they don’t care whether their workers live or die. More and more people have noticed that some of the basic American axioms—that hard work is a virtue, productivity is an end in itself—are horseshit. I’m remembering those science-fiction stories in which someone accidentally sees behind the façade of their blissful false reality to the grim dystopia they actually inhabit.
All of this is spot on. The issue with government unemployment and minimum wage programs was never that they didn't work; the problem is that they do work. How are you going to get millions of people to work shit jobs for long hours with a smile once you've lifted them out of poverty? How would you keep people in jobs (or marriages) they hate if they got free health care? And how do you get all those poor people to sign up for the military if they got a free college education?
> “For the last year,” a friend recently wrote to me, “a lot of us have been enjoying unaccustomed courtesy and understanding from the world.” When people asked how you were doing, no one expected you to say “Fine.” Instead, they asked, “How are you holding up?” and you’d answer, “Well, you know.” (That “you know” encompassed a lot that was left unspoken: deteriorating mental health, physical atrophy, creeping alcoholism, unraveling marriages, touch starvation, suicidal ideation, collapse-of-democracy anxiety, Hadean boredom and loneliness, solitary rages and despair.) You could admit that you’d accomplished nothing today, this week, all year. Having gotten through another day was a perfectly respectable achievement. I considered it a pass-fail year, and anything you had to do to get through it—indulging inappropriate crushes, strictly temporary addictions, really bad TV—was an acceptable cost of psychological survival. Being “unable to deal” was a legitimate excuse for failing to answer emails, missing deadlines, or declining invitations. Everyone recognized that the situation was simply too much to be borne without occasionally going to pieces. This has, in fact, always been the case; we were just finally allowed to admit it.
A bit harsh but to me this is one long keening whine.
This is the new elite in a nutshell: extremely privileged but obsessed with their own psychological frailty which they flaunt like it's something to be proud of.
Agreed, how did mollycoddling become a virtue? Look, I get that it's fun to commiserate about how stressful life can be, but people today are taking it to a whole new level. Some people are projecting that their lives are balanced on a knife's edge of disaster because of the burden of ... adult responsibilities?
I sense this is coming about because of an cultural emphasis on empathy and validation rather than resilience and mindfulness.
I think this and the parent post are quite a cynical read on the situation. And some of the sibling comments I've now read seem equally cynical: turning experience into a competition of who had it worse. I think it's sad that this is the first thread you read for this article.
Personally, I group empathy, resilience and mindfulness under the umbrella of compassion, as I do recognition and acknowledgment. You can take all of those things and use them in an unhealthy way, but I don't think you can call them the same thing anymore if you do that.
I really do appreciate people being more authentic with their feelings and their vulnerability. It might not resonate with me when they do, but I'm not supposed to be a vessel for their shit, I can just recognise they have it and it's there. Same as I've got my own. And we're all dealing with something. I can also set a boundary and say I'm not in a place to go deep, but I hear ya; I don't have to open up to this all the time.
This has little to do with a privileged elite, I'm sure the privileged elite would rather you continue to suppress these things because it stops you talking about what makes you unhappy, and if you stop talking about that then maybe you don't start organising to change things. Meanwhile, there are plenty of societies outside of our Western bubble that happily engage at this deeper level instead of balking at it, or bottling up.
You can be compassionate and kind-hearted while also acknowledging that not every problem should be validated. Sometimes navel-gazing can trick yourself into thinking your molehill of a problem is actually a mountain.
A new tool in my cognitive-emotional toolkit is conceptualizing the difference between emotional validity and correctness. Far too often are the two concepts are left undifferentiated. Disentangling them leaves room for the empathy of understanding how people's emotional states evolve from their perspective, while also accounting for how their perception differs from reality. Why is this useful? By not immediately dismissing emotional states, we can analyze them, dissect them, and ultimately change them without unhelpful knee-jerk reactions which engage defense mechanisms. Don't fall for the trick of people asking for their perfectly valid emotional states to also be seen as correct.
True. If you (or lots of other people) validate someone's emotional states that are not rooted in correctness (or reality), then they may believe them to be correct.
This may be harmful to that individual in the long run, so we should be careful about how often and how much we validate such feelings.
I think "validating emotion" is currently a counter to jerks who state "You shouldn't feel that (your current emotion). There's no reason to feel that. You should instead feel X emotion."
This reaction is generally unhelpful for the listener, as it basically asserts that (a) the listeners feelings don't exist / are not important or (b) that the listener is feeling the wrong emotions.
Validating emotion is "Yes, I understand why you feel that, having <thing> happen to <you/me> would certainly make someone feel <emotion> " e.g. "Yeah, when your friend criticized your cooking I bet that made you feel bad."
After validating the emotion (to create empathy, to create a safe space for conversation, and emphasize that you care about the person), you can then (optionally) suggest a different (more positive) thought e.g. "Perhaps your friend only meant to say that they love using melted butter on their own pasta, and was not trying to say that the pasta was dry." or supply context e.g. "Alice has been having a rough time at work the last few weeks, that might have been why she was short with you."
So validation of emotion is used to create acceptance ("we accept that emotion currently exists and is a reasonable feeling to have in that context") and to create a safe space for talking about emotions in general and the situation in which they arose. (It is especially useful when teaching children about emotions and teaching them to look at a situation objectively.)
Invalid emotions could exist, but usually an over-the-top emotion (and the actions that you take because of that) normally seem to occur because either (a) some sort of miscommunication occurred ("I thought we were talking about X") or that some sort of important context was missing ("You know, Bob lost his job last week, there's a reason he didn't come to the party, and it wasn't to slight you.")
My concern is that are two distinct concepts at play. One is "validation", a verb, which seems to be simply the basic application of empathy. The other is "valid", an adjective, which is applied to feelings and emotional states but (as far as I can tell) serves no descriptive purpose beyond "worthy of empathy". But aren't all feelings worthy of empathy? What is gained by such a label?
I suppose there could be. Is it possible to reach an emotional state without perceptual input? Maybe?
While I can see where analogy of "make invalid states unrepresentable" is coming from, but I feel that how we talk about them can get in the way of changing them. "Emotional invalidation" is a good search term to find phrases that shut down opportunities for change.
I think `validation` here is carrying a lot of weight. Like anything, it can be acknowledged, or recognised, or seen...and then you act accordingly from there. Don't decide the priority for someone, just notice that they're dealing with something and say that you see it, and let them continue. Don't get pulled into the involvement or start colluding though, just keep it to what you see from the outside.
I feel like you can swap 'validation' with 'confirmation' and these responses will make more sense. "I see you're struggling with something," vs. "I agree, this is the problem."
edit: In fact, aaron-santos in a sibling post has a more succinct explanation, in terms of correctness.
it's not the large things that
send a man to a
madhouse...
no, it's the continuing series of _small_ tragedies
that send a man to the madhouse...
not the death of his love
but a shoelace that snaps
with no time left...
the dread of life
is that huge swarm of trivial shit
that can kill quicker than cancer
and which is always there--
[list of trivial shit]
with each broken shoelace
one of one hundred broken shoelaces,
one man, one woman, one
thing
enters a
madhouse.
Your really not kidding, what a dissaponting comment section. There could be interesting thoughts about social interaction changing and people are yet again arguing about covid restrictions.
> There could be interesting thoughts about social interaction changing and people are yet again arguing about covid restrictions.
Why would or should social interactions change? I temporarily changed my behavior to help limit the spread of covid. But now that vaccines are doing there thing, I'm going back to my old activities.
Did you read the article? Not everyone wants to go back to how things were before? Simple things like not having people stand on top of me in line. There was a year of no social pressure to do anything and it was nice. No need to feel like you needed to socialize because everyone else is. That's what this article was about.
Some people did some introspection and realized they were caught up in societies bull shit. They should be able to discuss that, instead we have internet tough guys talking about how they think we're babying mental illness or think people who are just expressing them selves are mentally weak and we need to just get back to work, that's how the world is. Except we just has a year and a half where that wasn't the case. In some ways the world was actually easier to deal with.
> Did you read the article? Not everyone wants to go back to how things were before? Simple things like not having people stand on top of me in line. There was a year of no social pressure to do anything and it was nice. No need to feel like you needed to socialize because everyone else is. That's what this article was about.
I read the article, but I will admit it doesn't really "make sense" to me. If I don't like something I don't do it or I try and change it, so it becomes something that doesn't bother me. If you don't want to be involved in certain social settings then don't go. I don't get why "Society" needs to change because some people prefer not to be around people. Its perfectly fine that you prefer less social interaction but many people are the complete opposite and that's also okay.
Society wasn't created in a vacuum to create a way of life you feel most accustomed to, that then becomes immutable. It changes all the time. and you don't notice it until it's too late because it happens so gradually.
So it will now. Society could shift to accommodating these other people and you wouldn't notice it, because you already do the thing it is shifting towards, which is maintaining better boundaries for yourself.
My life didn't really change due to the pandemic. I'm not super social. I hang out with the people I like when I like.
But yesterday, for example, I was at the gas station buying a pop and two kids were right up next to me while their mom waited behind me in line. If I had lifted my elbow, I would have caught one of them in the face. I don't hate kids, but I have a personal bubble and that was respected over the last year. I'm really not excited to go back to having strangers brushing up against my hips and sides again. It's not the end of the world, but it unsettles me and I don't feel like a foot or two of space in a store is really that much to ask.
Not everyone has that control over their life. Like some might be stuck in a cycle of work and exist. Some people lost their jobs and had time to maybe realize they really weren't happy. Some people got bored of the default social location of bars and restaurants. Now there's no more forced work events.
Maybe you had some perfect life before covid where you had a 100% control over your life and you could tell people to fuck off and not have repercussions, but most people don't and they're stuck compromising. So in someway the interruption was welcome. Now some people are demanding everything goes back to how it was, some people don't want that. So they write articles on the internet about it. Its not really hard to get, just have some empathy.
> I don't get why "Society" needs to change
And this isn't just about socialization. People, at least Americans, are uncomfortable with the idea of doing nothing. The protestant work ethic has been shoved down our throats. Its immoral to not work, or if you are working to not be at your most efficient. Covid turned this upside down, it was finally OK to be lazy, to do nothing, and not keep the capitalist wheel of buying and consuming turning. Its been ok to "steal time" from your employer or be on unemployment. This maybe isnt a radical idea to say, but to experience it and see it worked for a lot of people is changing their world view. We can do nothing, we don't need to run at 100%, the world won't collapse and I'm not immoral for it. That is a societal change.
I don't understand how resilience could be grouped under compassion. Resilience it's about an individual's ability to get back up. Compassion is typically about understanding between two people.
Under my own understanding, a compassionate person is acting in the interest of your resilience and isn't merely providing a well-disguised form of sympathy, or enablement, that stops you from growing. Compassion in that form may not feel like it until sometime later on.
I think it's largely a subjective concept and we all take different meaning from it, but I developed some of this thinking after reading The Compassionate Mind.[1]
I think there is a big difference between being vulnerable/opening up about those things we are all dealing with, and the "frailty performance art" that OP is talking about. Exemplified by that cringe-worthy viral video of celebrities singing "Imagine" from their multi-million dollar homes early on in the pandemic. It's OK to have troubles in your life and to express and address those troubles without shame. It's another thing entirely to humble-brag about your first world problems on Social Media purely for likes and validation. One is healthy and productive, the other is narcissistic.
How many funerals did you go to in one month? Did you hesitate and worry about giving your own mother a hug afterwards? Are there newborn family members, that you've never even met, that are now walking and talking?
If you think this year was simply "adult responsibilities" getting to people, you may be the one with empathy issues (if not a bucketload more).
> Did you hesitate and worry about giving your own mother a hug afterwards?
But this behavior was never rational risk-reduction; it was always a result of the incredible fear-programming. Granted if you're making a point that trauma isn't always rational and can be induced unnecessarily by external sources I'm with you there.
I would really like to see less navelgazing about the emotional trauma of the Zoom class (not talking about you but the whole "elite" socioeconomic class in general - software engineers, management consultants, etc etc), and more recognition of the harms of suspension of elective surgeries (here in CA all elective surgeries were suspended statewide for a month despite a surplus of ICU beds and despite the fact that even if ICU beds were at capacity not every elective surgery warranted being cancelled), of having a parent or grandparent dying alone because the hospital wouldn't let you in the same room as them, of even the "little" things like cancelled dental checkups, missed allergy shots, missed pediatric appointments etc
If your mother was healthy and lived in the same household, maybe it wasn’t necessary behavior, but for folks like myself (and the countless millions of other Americans) whose family lives across the country and are severely immunocompromised, it was absolutely necessary.
My point is that regardless of their immune status, briefly hugging someone in an outdoor environment is not actually a risky behavior. Thus why I'm saying that it's really much better viewed as trauma induced by the societal fear-programming rather than an inevitable result of the SARS-CoV-2 virus emerging.
By the way, I do feel the need to mention this because it's not recognized enough: the closer someone is to death (as are most of the people at genuine risk of COVID-19), the higher the relative cost of spending a year of avoiding physical contact with loved ones. If your parent has only an expected value of 2 years left then they could easily spend 75% of that being deprived of social interaction and physical contact from loved ones. That's no small thing.
I generally don't like to quantify things that don't have hard numbers behind them, but just to get some napkin math down:
Let's say there's a 1/1000 chance in infection of the parent if the [adult] child is actively infected during a brief outdoor hug. The chance of the child being currently infected depends on the current base rate but for the napkin's sake let's put it at 1/10. (As an aside, in actuality while there is evidence of pre-symptomatic transmission for SARS-CoV-2 the overwhelming evidence shows that asymptomatic transmission doesn't occur so just a heuristic of "am I actively sick or not" gets you good risk management anyway but let's avoid that for now)
Now let's say that the chance of the parent dying or having a seriously bad outcome given SARS-CoV-2 infection is 1/10.
That brings us to (1/1000) * (1/10) * (1/10) = 1 death per 100,000 of these hug-events. If we stick with my earlier example of someone with 2 years of life expectancy, that would factor out to (365*2*24*60)/(10^5) = 10.512 minutes "lost" per hug, if we assume that hugging someone doesn't have any positive effects on their physical wellbeing whatsoever.
I think actually talking about the fact that adult responsibilities are stressful af and that we've all just accepted that as normal is a good thing. I am remarkably better off financially than my peers and have less responsibility and I still feel as though it could all come crumbling down at any moment. If I or my partner can't work a full-time job, have sudden medical bills, get into a car accident there is no support network waiting for me and I don't have enough wealth accrued to support myself without my salary.
We've based our whole society around everyone just being expected to be fundamentally financially insecure. The difference between upper-middle class and poor is how much junk I can buy, it doesn't make me any less insecure about all the big expenses that are required for me to live and work -- my pantry, my rent, my car, my health. I grew up poor and I thought having money would make it better. That when people say they don't have to worry about money they meant it. But what it really meant for me was you stop having to worry about small day-to-day expenses but I stil have the sword of damocles over my head for the big stuff.
Empathy is a good thing and understanding that outside of the really really rich we're all in a similar situation is a good thing.
I think you put it really well. I’ve gotten to a place of financial stability and shave realized how precarious it still is. I can weather small car emergencies but when it comes to medical bills, that’s a different story.
I’m just working on emigrating to a country with a better social safety net. I’d rather pay more in taxes (though tbh it’s about the same) and not have to worry anymore.
> have realized how precarious it still is. I can weather small car emergencies but when it comes to medical bills, that’s a different story.
Would you mind elaborating a bit about your situation especially regarding health insurance? It seems like healthcare varies so much based on what health insurance one has.
> I am remarkably better off financially than my peers and have less responsibility and I still feel as though it could all come crumbling down at any moment. If I or my partner can't work a full-time job, have sudden medical bills, get into a car accident there is no support network waiting for me and I don't have enough wealth accrued to support myself without my salary.
Could you expand on that? It sounds like you and your partner work full-time. Do you and/or your partner get medical insurance through work? Do you get disability insurance? Do you have an emergency fund?
Maybe I am reading too much into 'remarkably better off financially'. I would like to see where you are coming from but I am having trouble.
> I sense this is coming about because of an cultural emphasis on empathy and validation rather than resilience and mindfulness.
"This" meaning reading articles about mental health, or "this" meaning people experiencing mental health?
People have had mental health issues forever. People have openly talked about them only in the past few years, when social media gave the whole world an outlet to talk about whatever they want with (usually) no real-world consequences(exceptions exist, obviously).
I mean, when I was in college it wasn't quite as open so I didn't go around telling people that I sometimes daydream of walking in front of traffic. When I was working my first office job I didn't let many people know that I had panic attacks sitting at my desk for essentially no good reason.
I'm glad I personally found out how to improve my mental state, but it's crazy to me to suggest that having a cultural emphasis on empathy and acceptance is causing people to experience mental health issues. That seems backwards to me.
The humble bragging online about “my first haircut in 18 months” or “I’m going to a party for the first time since the pandemic and I don’t know if I’ll remember how to party!” can all roll into a ditch.
My most charitable interpretation is that the ability to have avoided leaving one's house in 18 months implies a certain level of wealth (both literally in terms of money but also in terms of life situation etc)
I guess it could also be viewed as implicitly bragging about getting the vaccine (if that's the reason they're "reentering society"), but that follows less directly imo
It's boastful among those on the pro government control side of things (so most of HN according to the downvotes).
It's signaling your virtue. It's saying aren't I a good citizen for listening to the _science_. Isn't it great that I locked myself up because I care about you.
That’s a surprising (to me) way to characterize those who were extremely cautious around COVID.
Another honest question if you don’t mind: I assume you stop at red lights (a system designed, installed and run by the government). Do you self-identify as someone who stops at red lights because you’re “pro government control”? I mean stopping no doubt interferes with your rights to travel, slows down your forward progress and lastly seems to be sold as “yes it’s an inconvenience but it protects both you and your community”.
It’s worth observing that gang members, murderers and the like most likely stop at red lights. Do they do it because they’re “pro-government control?” I posit not. It’s more likely they accept the inconvenience and they accept the temporary delay in their rights to travel because they’ve done the calculus of risk vs reward. Risk to both themselves and others. We all choose to stop because it’s the safest thing for everyone.
This paints me in a somewhat negative light--in
the spirit of honesty--prior to flashing left turn signals, I often didn't. Well, I probably stopped and looked both ways, but I didn't necessarily obey. I think this is completely tangential to your point though.
I do try to be a good citizen to my neighbors and friends. I pick up garbage and keep my house clean. I live on a private road (not fancy, just not publicly maintained.), and I help maintain that.
I try to walk faster when a car is waiting for me to cross. I do things I believe help my community, but I also break rules if I disagree with them. I would argue with my parents if I believed their reasoning was lacking, and generally if I obeyed a command of theirs even though I disagreed it was from fear of retribution.
To steel man your argument, I think what you're saying is that being pro COVID vaccine isn't necessarily being pro-government control, and people are taking the vaccine purely to help others in society.
I agree, there are definitely people that fall in this category. I still believe that the overwhelming majority of people that have taken the vaccine also are happy that views like mine are censored, think the government is doing a great job promoting this vaccine and do support lockdowns. It's hard for me to separate the two opinions because such a seemingly overwhelming majority of people with one of these opinions have all of them.
I think taking the vaccine if you believe it is healthy and helps others is a good thing for you to do. That said I think blocking me from speaking against vaccine requirements, and or being able to discuss how the vaccine might be unhealthy
Is atrocious and has no place in a free society. Yet, this is happening. Not only that, but I'm worried I'll be forced to be vaccinated to live a normal life, even though I have COVID antibodies.
From my vantage, it's difficult to remain optimistic because of what I perceive as a governmental overreach being supported by the majority of people. I legitimately feel threatened, and that makes it hard for me to be un-biased.
Edit: Just realized my link may not make sense without a bit of context. Essentially it's saying a lot of the damage done by COVID is caused by the spike protein itself. The mRNA vaccines cause your body to produce the spike protein. I'm not saying _you_ should be convinced because of this link, I'm just giving an example of why I'm skeptical.
Just so you know where I'm coming from - I've been vehemently anti lockdown since late April 2020 and still am, I'm generally appalled at the level of mindless obedience to "experts" and "the science" that has been displayed by many people over the past year, and at the enthusiastic embrace of censorship of wrongthink that those same people exhibited. I was also skeptical of taking the emergency vaccines until I did many hours of my own reading, since I'm fairly young and very fit and consider covid to be a fairly negligible concern for my own personal health.
Having said all that, did you fully read your own link? It does mention that the spike protein can cause damage to lung tissue and other things as well. But there's also these two paragraphs which seem extremely relevant, in that they directly contradict the implicit claim you're making that the spike proteins produced in reaction to the mRNA vaccine are dangerous just like the ones on the virus itself:
> The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines produce the full-length spike protein. Pfizer studied several formulations initially, but found that the full length protein vaccine had fewer side effects and was better tolerated than other vaccine candidates, so that is the one they went with. It is also likely that the full protein contains more epitopes (sites for immune activity) and therefore produces more thorough and longer lasting immunity. The proteins, however, are in a fixed state, they are unable to change their confirmation, which is necessary to bind to cells. So they function differently than spike proteins on infecting virus.
> After the Pfizer vaccine full spike proteins are expressed on the vaccinated cells for presentation to the immune system. But the vaccine-induced proteins do not appear to cause any harmful effects. This may be because the vaccine is administered in the muscle, and so muscle cells are the ones taking up the mRNA and making spike proteins. There is a vigorous immune response which neutralizes the spike proteins before they can cause any harm. This is very different from a virus replicating throughout the body.
I firmly believe getting vaccinated is a personal choice so I'm not trying to pressure you. But your concerns seem to be directly called out as unsubstantiated and not backed by evidence according to your own source.
Yes, I did read those. My point is basically that there's still emerging science, and seeing as I don't trust the government, medical industry (which stands to profit greatly), the media (which have pushed the vaccine like crazy), and pretty much any authority, how can I believe evidence provided by the companies that stand to profit billions?
> This may be because the vaccine is administered in the muscle, and so muscle cells are the ones taking up the mRNA and making spike proteins.
Which was found after filing a freedom of information request with the Japanese government. Study translated into english.
https://files.catbox.moe/0vwcmj.pdf
Either way, there's still no possibility for long term evidence of safety, and I have COVID antibodies from the disease itself, so why would I take the vaccine?
You immediately assume the worst possible intent from those statements. Your cynicism casts it as some hollow statements, when most likely it was just people sharing there lives. Some might be fake, sure, bet I bet most aren’t.
Try to be more compassionate of others and assume better intent.
It's more than just cynicism. He also refers to the vaccines as "experimental" which is pure, unadulterated conspiracy nonsense. It's pretty clear he has an ax to grind.
Sure, fair as well. It's under emergency use authorization--not technically experimental.
Experimental may be strong, but it at least somewhat aptly describes a vaccine that uses a novel technology that still does not yet have FDA approval.
> pure, unadulterated conspiracy nonsense
My use of experimental seems a bit logical to me, but I understand if you disagree. That said, your dismissal is quite shallow and leads me to believe you're unwilling to have a real discussion on the topic as my opinion is just `unadulterated conspiracy nonsense`.
I believe more speech is the solution to bad speech. If you disagree with me please engage in an honest non-dismissive manner and we'll both become more informed even if you're right, you'll at least understand why I'm misinformed.
>>I believe more speech is the solution to bad speech. If you disagree with me please engage in an honest non-dismissive manner and we'll both become more informed even if you're right, you'll at least understand why I'm misinformed.
The reason I didn't assume good faith, and still don't, is that you described people who stayed indoors for a year as "obedient shut-ins" and attributed their behavior to them being on the "government control side of things." And now you're complaining about how you cannot post anything without getting downvoted and are trying to turn the tables by pretending to be someone who just wants to have an honest conversation.
For the sake of good faith discussion, I do have two questions if you don't mind
(1) I believe both Moderna and Pfizer are in the process of seeking full FDA approval for their mRNA vaccines. Assuming they succeed, is it safe to say your opinion of the vaccines will change accordingly to a less-contrarian view?
(2) My understanding (and you can correct me if I'm wrong) is that your view is one looking to protect against tail risk, which can be summarized with the following statement: 'Absence of evidence of risk is not sufficient'. In other words, you want sufficient evidence that mRNA vaccines are safe, rather than accepting an EUA based on demonstrated effectiveness and lack of known risk[0].
My question is whether you're willing to reconsider the above statement as the absence of evidence of risk continues in the face of overwhelming distribution of the vaccine? For example, J&J was paused after just 8 million doses. Pfizer and Moderna are an order of magnitude higher on doses (on the order of about 100 million doses). Even if we're modelling against the risk of a side-effect that takes many months, or even somehow years, on average to materialize, on a bell curve many many vaccine recipients would already have materialized the side effects. (IE if materializing under 3 months is a 5 sigma event, we would have had enough adverse effects materializing to halt the use of the vaccines, similar to how J&J was halted after something like 6 or 8 observed blood clottings)
Furthermore, my understanding is that FDA approval is based on having 6 months of phase 3 clinical trial safety data (and EUA based on 2 months of the same). The number of people enrolled in phase 3 clinical trials of mRNA vaccines is so few compared to the total number of vaccines (I think 40,000 in pfizer phase 3 trials), it is absurd to consider that new issues could show up in phase 3 trials that had not already demonstrated en masse in the hundreds of MILLIONS of doses given out in the public. It's statistically impossible.
With that in mind, I would suggest that waiting until FDA full approval is basically pointless; if you're worried about side effects that take decades on average, the FDA won't be able to save you from that, and if you're worried about side effects that take months on average, we would already know about it from the hundreds of millions of willing volunteers.
[0] Lack of known risk: the J&J vaccine was halted and investigated immediately when there was a potential blood clotting issue. No such potential risks have yet been uncovered with Pfizer and Moderna, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
Regarding (1)... I would feel better, but I would still not get the vaccine having had COVID myself, and I would still be completely against any form of restriction of those without the vaccine.
I believe my views will be contrarian as long as I live under a large government. The biggest issue for me though is being told to obey without being convinced. The more persecuted I feel, the more I have a desire to backlash. When Alex Jones was de-platformed I was like, huh, guy's crazy, so why would they want to remove him. He's a joke, not a real threat right? Then suddenly Youtube included a CDC banner on its home page and started removing content that was at all critical of the CDC's authority. I then started finding more and more evidence of control that frankly scares me.
So, yeah I would maybe be a bit more measured if it was FDA approved, but at this point the degree of cooperation between tech/media/government on this messaging has me actually terrified.
Regarding (2), yes I would like proof of absence of harm--which is what I believe you're asking. Unfortunately, I do want that over the long term. I see the point you're making, but for my age group, I'm just as safe to get COVID itself and self isolate while I have it (which I did inadvertently). From all evidence, having had COVID is better than the vaccines themselves, but that's not at all considered when people are requiring a card to eat at a restaurant or go to a gym.
@helen___keller IDK if there's a thread depth limit or something, but it's been 15mins and I still can't reply, so I'm writing here.
In my area, there are limitations at gyms such that you cannot workout without a mask unless you've got a vaccine card. Restaurants just require a mask unless you've been vaccinated--thought I've not seen them check. I personally don't try to skate around the requirement (lie). I just wear the mask. I admit, that's not the same as not allowing admission, but I've only seen these sort of restrictions pick up, but not back down. As such, I am afraid further restrictions for un-vaccinated are coming.
I'm jealous that you don't have the restrictions in your area, and we are looking at moving.
> I believe my views will be contrarian as long as I live under a large government. The biggest issue for me though is being told to obey without being convinced. The more persecuted I feel, the more I have a desire to backlash.
I understand how you feel, although I don't personally relate. I'd urge you to consider that whatever truth exists in the world is independent of your government. There are countries with more free and less free governments, places with vaccine passport systems and places where vaccines are basically nonexistent. The truth of whether mRNA vaccines are safe and effective is the same in all of these places.
> the degree of cooperation between tech/media/government on this messaging has me actually terrified
Again, this is understandable, but at the end of the day this is just, for lack of a better phrase, how the world works. It's capitalism, basically. Tech/media control the vast vast majority of marketing. Government wanted to do marketing to make people more confident in the vaccine or encourage people to wear masks or whatever. Obviously the marketing was not effective on you.
But at the end of the day the truth of whether these things were effective, useful, or needed is completely orthogonal to the fact that government got buddy with tech/media to promote them.
> that's not at all considered when people are requiring a card to eat at a restaurant or go to a gym
Is this happening for you? Just wondering. Where I am, pandemic rules are gone entirely except for requiring masks on public transit and in medical settings.
I can't post my opinions here without being madly downvoted. I post legitimate evidence of the censure of my opinions and am downvoted.
Youtube removes any videos critical of the Government's handling of COVID, and state governments gives beer and ice cream to people willing to take an experimental vaccine.
This post will be downvoted into oblivion. When people on my side can't have a conversation with people on the other side, how are we supposed to maintain positive outlooks?
Have you considered that the brazen nature of you tribalism, combined with your inability to see good in others (notice how you immediately took the worst possible interpretation to the point where I'd argue you must have invented facts) is what is leading to your feelings of social censure?
It sounds to me like you're reading too far into things and taking online posts too seriously.
When someone posts a picture of a salad I don't suggest they're signalling their dietary virtue. When someone posts a picture of them hanging out with their friends I don't suggest they're signalling their virtue of being popular. Sometimes people post about things and it's fine to just ignore them and move on if it doesn't appeal to you.
It's easy to fall into a trap of thinking negatively of everyone on the other side. Particularly when it's hard to even have a conversation like this one.
The original statement while likely not humble bragging or what not, does at least immediately announce what side you're on. If a conservative or libertarian did the same, they'd probably be chastised.
It takes a lot of thinking to get from a simple statement of fact (or relief) to what you're suggesting, which is loaded with assumptions to an incredible degree.
I urge you to consider the possibility that not everyone who thinks vaccinating right now is a good idea is "pro government control". They may just have different ideas than you about what their responsibilities are or about the risk/benefit tradeoffs of vaccination.
In terms of whether these kinds of posts are virtue signalling or not, what wouldn't be virtue signalling in your mind? Just not saying anything? I'm not a huge social media user myself, but more extroverted people seem to enjoy posting what's happening in their lives. COVID and its various consequences certainly falls into that category.
> not everyone who thinks vaccinating right now is a good idea is "pro government control".
Absolutely, but on a Venn diagram, it's a very large crossover.
> what wouldn't be virtue signaling in your mind? Just not saying anything?
These criticisms are completely valid. What I'm saying is it's easy to start seeing people as enemies when your views are actively stifled by tech Cos, downvoted into oblivion for being at all contrarian to general consensus on COVID, and the Government not only pays for vaccines, but runs lotteries for vaccinated people.
I agree that reading into comments too much is a bad thing, but this is what people on the other side of things are doing--particularly since they are basically disallowed from voicing theirs.
I suspect you're choosing the parameters of this venn diagram to most efficiently reject viewpoints you disagree with without having to engage with them.
It appears at least that your perception of others as being for increased government control, a property you infer about them rather than how they describe themselves, has meant you haven't had to think carefully about the merits of lockdowns, emergency FDA approval for novel vaccines, or other measures seen in the past year. They're suspicious machinations of the government therefore we can reject them out of hand, evidently.
I had to google the word 'mollycoddling' and now feel the urge to use this word in conversation. Perhaps popularizing this fun term will help to de-virtue-ize this phenomenon!
I think you're conflating two different sets of responsibilities - those of the person who is struggling, and those of the people around them. Everyone agrees it's more virtuous to be resilient and mindful than to complain all the time. Thing is, it's also more virtuous to empathize with people than to tell them to get over themselves.
> extremely privileged but obsessed with their own psychological frailty which they flaunt like it's something to be proud of
This type of judgement about mental health is what drove Naomi Osaka to withdraw from Roland Garros yesterday.
It’s about time that as society we open up about mental health and how to deal with our issues, instead of blaming the people with the issues and calling them weak or snowflakes. People with issues need help, not bullying.
Absolutely. True mental health issues need clinical diagnosis and treatment. Things like CBT and antipsychotics have saved the lives of many people with psychological disorders, and modern mental health treatment is as valid as any other area of medical science.
But the type of "therapy culture" the parent describes is absolutely obnoxious, self serving, and all pervading among the upper and middle class. People have been so convinced, jeered on by social media, of this pseudo-Freudian nonsense about deep seated emotional traumas requiring therapy, that the real issue of mental health has been conflated with feeling annoyed about having to respond to work emails or being bummed about a breakup.
Agreed, to me it seems that the "therapy culture" is missing a key element of actual therapy, working to address the root causes and cultivating a sense of agency and ability to change one's situation in life. Acknowledging one's own mental illness or troublesome state of mind is an excellent first step but it needs to progress past that.
What I'm seeing is a sort of "pop-therapy" where people self diagnose and then wallow in it looking for sympathy while not making sincere efforts to overcome what they have to deal with.
"people self diagnose and then wallow in it looking for sympathy while not making sincere efforts to overcome what they have to deal with"
The thing about depression is that it makes making an effort hard.
You can feel hopless, have no energy (even to get out of bed, shower, brush your teeth, or feed yourself), and be full of slef-recrimination and self-loathing on top of that. The more they don't do the worse they feel, leading to a worsening spiral.
It's easy to say that the sufferer should just make the effort to get out of this state, but it is the nature of depression to prevent that. The lucky ones can do it, but many others can't.
Saying to a depressed person that they should make the effort is like telling a gambling addict not to gamble, an alcoholic not to drink, or a person with an eating disorder to just eat less.
It's a lot easier said than done, and what keeps them from doing so often runs a lot deeper than people who make offhand dismissals realize.
Speaking as someone who has struggled depression, alcohol, eating, and other issues, I can confirm that the only solution is to make the effort to change.
Therapy and medication can help, but every solution comes down to individual effort, and nobody can do it for you.
It is important to recognize that falling into depression, addition, and neurotic behavior IS a personal failure, as only then can someone forgive themselves and seek change. Acceptance, accountability, and agency are key
> working to address the root causes and cultivating a sense of agency and ability to change one's situation in life.
Have you considered that people with issues might not even be capable of doing this? That they could have a very low sense of agency and maybe no idea about the real root causes of their issues, and they might have tried a thousand times to “fix” them without success?
> and all pervading among the upper and middle class.
Do you have any numbers/stats or links to backup this claim? What does “all pervading” mean here according to you?
Also, please don’t be so quick to dismiss or trivialize other people’s issues. Even if to you, from the outside, those issues seem petty or superficial, they could be incredibly bad and debilitating for the people suffering from them.
It is coordinated and strategic, they work together to normalize this shit. They've successfully weaponized their mental health. It is turning people into vampires that suck the life and resources of family and fiends.
It seems like everyone is articulating ‘emotional hostage taking’. This is actually a very very common thing amongst Asian (all of Asia) parents. It usually goes something like this:
Look at how hard your parents work for you, and here you are not doing this and that, or doing something that don’t match our values.
And this is a constant lifelong guilt-burden that they utilize. It’s almost as if they feel entitled to something just because they had to do stuff in life ... like work a blue collar job.
The stuff that the new American generation is doing is a remix of that age old form of abuse.
>It’s about time that as society we open up about mental health and how to deal with our issues
I've heard this over and over throughout my life, usually presented as a self-evident just-so truism.
My workplace threw a mental health awareness event with a conspicuous absent of any specific persons mental health issues being discussed. I've noticed various authority figures offering to be a figure to cry on who were stoic about their own personal problems. Even this specific post is not an admission of any mental health problems, it's shaming others for blaming and bullying, and calling for society to open up. The linked post does contain a lot of opening up, but it doesn't really advocate for it and has a ton of fatalism wrapped into it .
"People with issues need help" is thrown out there, yet help is a scarce resource. I see that according to every statistic, we're about as anxious and depressed and as open about mental health as we ever have been, and suicide rates have been on the rise for awhile. All I hear in response is the answer is more openness, openness will fix these problems that we're simply more aware of than in the past. I'm more inclined to believe that people who are highly open are more likely to talk about mental health issues in the first place, and their personal biases eventually start to pass as common wisdom.
I can't help but reject the concept that opening up is the answer and am more drawn towards stoic views and the idea that discretion about your own difficulties can have virtues for yourself and others. I'm drawn more towards private discussions of such issues, with consideration for how such discussions may impact others and yourself as being the most socially and emotionally intelligent option.
I can't entirely tell whether you're missing this or simply beating around the edges of it, but:
The focus on openness for mental health, to the exclusion of all other solutions, is about productivity and hierarchies.
Employers and managers aren't ready for their employees to take care of their mental health. That would often involve paying for them to have better access mental health care. That would often involve them having relatively sudden and/or extended absences (followed by greatly improved health and much better productivity!) and they're not going to pay people for extended breaks. It would often involve adjustments to the way people perform work and interact with management. It would likely involve removing a lot of abusive people from management roles, since they are likely causing a lot of these mental health issues.
People with authority are not prepared for a system that accommodates mental health issues in a serious way.
> any specific persons mental health issues being discussed.
Because, under what circumstances would that ever be a good idea?
> I can't help but reject the concept that opening up is the answer and am more drawn towards stoic views and the idea that discretion about your own difficulties can have virtues for yourself and others.
>It’s about time that as society we open up about mental health and how to deal with our issues, instead of blaming the people with the issues and calling them weak or snowflakes
I imagine the parent poster you're responding to would agree with me that the problem here is centering your identity on weaknesses instead of focusing on what you can improve.
I've had my share of anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts, but as with anything else in life it really doesn't matter much what other people say about you and those things but how you alone deal with them. Obviously other people can play a part in this but at its core, success is exclusively individually based.
> Obviously other people can play a part in this but at its core, success is exclusively individually based.
Luck plays a huge role in success though. Literally every breakthrough experienced in my life wasn't because I worked very hard but because I was at the right time at the right place. Yes I wasn't lazy but I still won't lie to myself the same way I lie to HR & recruiter types who want to hear how X led me to Y. (X and Y were so far apart that only a miracle could explain what motivated me to "pivot").
Humans are all blinded by hindsight when we are asked to tell the story that made us (or broke us). People parrot Ayn Rand about "being the master of our success" because it makes us sound so much more virtuous than admitting we were at the right place at the right time, instead e.g.: Some poor maggots born in a 3rd world slum getting their limbs chopped as a child and sent to beg. Or that old homeless guy who has been set on fire twice who they call "the beggar king" who is always at the Frankfurt railway station, and who has a story about his father injecting him smack when he was 9 to get him hooked (and under better control). The majority that we tend to forget about simply never gets a chance. We don't count them because the only thing they are good for is so we feel better about our own great life which is perfectly visible when put into the contrast of such people.
>Luck plays a huge role in success though. Literally every breakthrough experienced in my life wasn't because I worked very hard but because I was at the right time at the right place.
Longitudinal effort is what allows luck to work for you. If you keep trying things every single day, some of that luck will "compound" and pay off.
I disagree, if only because those who take heed to your advice will find themselves worse off than if they treat themselves as the master of their own success. Clearly work alone isn't the only reason and you need to be smart about it, but effort always trumps excuses, even if the outcome of another's similar or lesser effort is better than your own.
I was thinking of the same connection to Naomi Osaka as I opened this comment section. There's also a bit of a connection to the issue of low-end employers being unable to find people willing to endure exploitative wages and working conditions. This last year-plus has been amazing in terms of surfacing problems that were already there. I repeat:
The problems were already there.
That includes the problems with personal boundaries, with the general brokenness of requiring people to come into the office every day (very extrovert-centric and environmentally disastrous), with income/wealth disparities, with crappy health care, with "truth decay" and preferring Twitter/YouTube conspiracy theorists to actual experts, etc. People have had ample opportunity to look at how we've built our society and consider whether previous decisions had been the right ones, and an increasing number are saying NO.
This story fits right into that, particularly wrt boundaries and mental health issues. All of the comments trying to reestablish extrovert/neurotypical hegemony by flinging names and insults at anybody who doesn't "fit the mold" are just incredibly privileged and offensive. FFS let's allow people to be how they want to be, be open about their needs, cope how they can, and work the way they're most effective.
>It’s about time that as society we open up about mental health and how to deal with our issues,
I hear this general refrain a lot, and something about it has always sounded wrong to me. What do people mean when they say "deal with our issues?" The way this sentiment is conveyed makes it sound like there is some promised land of mental health around the bend, if only enough people have the "right" attitude about it.
I'm not particularly convinced that there's much of any stigma against mild mental health issues these days. And by mild, I mean normal problems that most people will encounter in their lives (ie, OCD, anxiety, depression, etc.) In fact, a lot of people are actively encouraged to talk about their mental health problems, to a degree which would have been unthinkable in the 1950s. Generally, I think this has been a net positive for society. I know a lot of people who had they been born in an earlier time might have been marginalized, or felt that they were truly broken, rather than simply being neurotic. But, I also believe there are eventually diminishing returns to this approach. Constantly focusing on your problems and your negative emotions can have very perverse incentives. It's possible to become addicted to your own misery, and it's also possible to become addicted to the relief and the closeness that comes from people trying to sooth your psychological trauma. Generally speaking, any extreme emotions can be addicting, and moderation is not the same as repression.
Given that we keep talking about mental health issues more and more, but suicide rates for teens are generally increasing, I'm very skeptical that having more "conversations" about mental health is going to do much good at all. In the least, most of the "conversations" I see about mental health mostly have to do with putting on a big show of empathizing with the victim, who themselves are putting on a big show of displaying their emotions.
Now of course, if "conversations" about mental health means something different, such as an analytical approach to causes of trauma and positive mental health outcomes, then I'm all for it.
Ah yes, those mild mental health issues that still get people fired for regularly under the auspice of "attendance issues," "cultural fit," or any of the numerous reasons they can get fired for that are totally the result of their mild mental health issue but have to be re-phrased so that the company doesn't get sued.
As someone with ADHD, anxiety/depression, and chronic migraines; the bullshit conversations and 'management' meetings I've had to sit through because people very much still don't have any understanding of these issues is staggering. While I am not getting fired for calling out twice or thrice in a week once in a while, that's mostly due to me being in a "knowledge worker" job, if I was in a customer facing job or other position that requires "butt in seat hours" I am certain that I would have already gotten canned 100 times over due to these mild mental health issues; because quantity attendance is more important that quality attendance in a lot of jobs.
OCD isn't a "normal thing that most people will encounter" problem, neither is depression, neither is anxiety; OCD isn't some "lol I need to fill my gas tank to a round dollar amount," depression isn't "boy howdy did I feel sad for a few weeks after that break-up," anxiety isn't "that was a bit stressful firing that employee." You can feel depressed without having depression, you can feel anxious without having anxiety, you can be exacting without having OCD; but none of the prior are mental illnesses while all of the latter are. So, while the __feeling__ has been normalized, the actual illness absolutely hasn't been; and from experience it's been made more difficult by the generalizing of the words, where now people equate the action/feeling with the much more serious illness - so now I have to spend time explaining how debilitating the actual illness is, just to have people go "well I feel depressed sometimes, and I'm here."
Quite frankly, one of the many reasons folks have to put how bad things are or can get out there is due to this conflation of the feeling with the illness; so you seeing these expressions of "things are actually this bad for me," and conflating it with "emotional porn" because "everybody experiences things like OCD, depression, anxiety, etc" is actually a perfect example of why I can very confidently say that the stigma about mental health hasn't changed that much; it's just been repackaged with a nicer bow.
This article isn't about Naomi Osaka; it's about a guy reveling in sloth. He's pretty explicit about just not wanting to contribute to society. He doesn't want to work, he wants to sit on the couch and watch TV.
Refusing to encourage a narcissist is not the same as bullying them. I hope he gets the help he needs, but he's going to have to want it first.
>It’s about time that as society we open up about mental health and how to deal with our issues, instead of blaming the people with the issues and calling them weak or snowflakes. People with issues need help
But we don't get that, and we'll never get that. Understanding that our society is incapable of doing this in public is fundamental to navigating one's own mental health.
And part of that is recognizing that if being open about mental health is considered virtuous, then people will work really hard at providing (counterproductive) cosmetic attempts of "openness" to mental health.
But making normal human emotions pathological is not helpful either. Having a major disruption to your daily routine, be it work or social is very stressful, creates uncomfortable emotions and for the most part that’s a completely normal and healthy reaction.
Then it's their responsibility to seek it out. If you're privileged enough to lead the life described in the article, you can also afford to visit a therapist on a weekly basis. Otherwise, you can't suddenly expect the general public to treat you with sympathy, particularly if you're among the hyper-rich or otherwise elite.
> Otherwise, you can't suddenly expect the general public to treat you with sympathy, particularly if you're among the hyper-rich or otherwise elite.
Why shouldn’t everyone treat everyone else with sympathy? Why should people be “deserving” of some basic human respect? I’ve only lived my own life, not anyone else’s, so I’m in no position to judge others.
A lot of people that maybe should seek help might not be capable of doing so, probably because of taboos, trauma or other issues.
Sympathy and respect are two different principals. I treat everyone with respect, but sympathizing with someone requires emotional bandwidth that I don't always have the ability to give. When people cry for help on the internet, I can't offer my assistance anymore. Most of these people would be better suited with introspection than talking to me anyways.
> When people cry for help on the internet, I can't offer my assistance anymore.
So you can’t offer your assistance, but you still spend your time offering criticism in the form of judgmental comments to their stories. That doesn’t seem very respectful.
In some cases sympathy is unhelpful or even counterproductive. When someone has an unrealistic or irrational world view they don't need sympathy, they need a hard dose of reality and maybe some practical assistance toward changing their situation.
Sure.. but what if despite knowing that they still don't?
A lot of people suffering from depression don't seek help despite knowing they should. They watch themselves sinking deeper and deeper, and their lives gradually falling apart and don't ask for help, or even when they do they might not follow through with what they need to do to improve their lives.. from missing therapy appointments, to not taking medication, to not taking the little steps to improve their lives.
There are various reasons for that, but the bottom line is that many of them don't, and no amount of finger wagging at them is going to change that.
Then it's their responsibility to build a support group. Any therapist will tell you that voicing your gripes to the internet will only hurt your more, which is why you need people around you who you trust to process your emotions with. As a citizen of the internet, I have zero patience for people who make their issues part of my life. It may sounds cruel, but I just don't have the time or emotional liquidity to deal with it. From what I've seen, a lot of other people also share that sentiment.
Mental health is something that should be taken seriously, not spammed on the internet or commoditized.
> It’s about time that as society we open up about mental health and how to deal with our issues
There's exhaustive discussion of mental health issues in every corner of society. In some corners of society, people announce their mental health issues before even telling you their name.
> People with issues need help, not bullying.
Yes, but some discernment is necessary to distinguish between the ones that need help and the ones that need the HTFU. There isn't enough help to go around for everyone that claims to have issues.
When people are rewarded with fawning attention and privilege because of their issues, you've incentivized people to have issues.
Part of opening up about mental health is not throwing labels around casually. Depression is a particular brain chemistry imbalance that doesn't respond much to lifestyle changes but is usually treated well by meds. It's not about disliking office politics. If Tim Kreider wrote about taking SSRIs to get back to productive and active life, I don't see much of a debate.
Sorry dude, but the new elite are me, you and the rest of the people on this board: receiving six figure salaries for staring at a screen and writing programs for a couple hours every day. It's not the writer getting work for feature sets in the collapsing media landscape.
We (software engineers) are not the elite just because our salaries are high. Don't be fooled by this.
We are highly trained workers. We're closer to the workers in construction or the other trades more than anything else. We just happen to get paid more, due to market circumstances.
The actual elite are trying to drive our salaries down every day.
Edit:
And even if after reading my comment you still think we're the elite, check out any "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired?" thread.
You can argue over who's at the top, but we absolutely (currently) do have cushier jobs than writers. You might not believe this, but journalists can also be highly trained workers too.
Their world got rocked by a race to the bottom, and a push towards lower-quality, rushed journalism, and yes, fake news and clickbait. Something that some of the people on this very board have absolutely helped enable.
The same thing will happen to us too. Computer programming won't be looked on seen as a highly-trained or lucrative skill, and we'll be pushed out and left to wither by some new profession who have been tricked into believing they're smarter than all the others.
This cycle has played out before, and it will play out again. Try and have some compassion for those under you, the same way you'd appreciate it when it's your turn.
I'll admit we're nearer to elite than most, but billionaires and politicians would privately mock this statement.
I think we should all acknowledged there's well to do peasants (us), and then there's true elites. There are more levels of wealth than are typically acknowledged in conversations like this, and it leads to very muddy arguments.
You're seeing a local maxima. The elite are earning your full salary in one day simply by the interest gained on their capital, and they have actual power to exert their will upon society and shape the future of mankind. They have the resources and ability to survive the next great filter and form a breakaway civilization, but at this stage of the game, you and I do not.
I don't think software developers/professionals have acquired the cultural capital to be viewed as elites quite yet. I think much of the antagonistic Silicon Valley coverage in publications like NYT, which one could say are more traditionally elite, is driven by a difficulty with reckoning with their material decline and the emergence of these new candidate elites.
I mean, sure on the one hand we're not super famous. But on the other, we get to make stuff like Twitter so, I guess what I'm saying is roll your character carefully.
I can't think of a more on-brand Hacker News comment than to respond to an article talking about "enjoying unaccustomed courtesy and understanding from the world" with a whole screed on how people don't deserve courtesy and understanding.
I agree. It's unfortunate that the tone of this site has shifted from a playful, exuberant, rebellious culture looking to creatively tinker, build and solve problems with new approaches and solutions to... this.
Denying problems exist if they don't affect you doesn't solve them.
Just not the wrong kind of rebellion where you might be exposed to an opinion that doesn't give you good vibes, right?
This website is in the shadow of tech in general and the valley in particular. HN doesn't mirror that culture, but does reacts to it. The culture here is visibly molded by the ongoing cultural rot in the Bay Area and Tech. If you're good at sniffing out the trends IRL, you can watch in real time how attitudes shift here in the following few months.
Why should anyone put on a show that lets you feel "playful, exuberant, rebellious" if soaking in ""tech" culture" has caused the attitude of regular people to come out of alignment with the safe-for-tv entertainment you seek?
The article isn't about "enjoying unaccustomed courtesy and understanding from the world." It's about the author's experience on a year long vacation. "Actually, depression isn't that bad because I don't have to work" has not been the experience of anyone I know. All this article does is minimize the very real suffering that many people are experiencing.
> This is the new elite in a nutshell: extremely privileged but obsessed with their own psychological frailty which they flaunt like it's something to be proud of.
Absolutely this. Middle/upper class America has been doing this for the last decade, and it's left a horrible impression on our youth. I'm not going to teach the next generation of kids to give up so easily.
A bit harsh, but to me this is nothing but whining. The article talks about different ways of living and the trade offs associated with each. Then this commentary comes in with a harsh call them like they seem them framing where these ideas about life are not to be considered or discussed because they might interfere with the appearance of brave engagement or whatever it is that is being endorsed.
This is kind of like the trade offs with being social or being extremely focused with little time and energy allocated to socialization. Committing to spending the time and energy to be social might generate great value from weak connections but it might also generate or expose conflicts and reveal that hardly anyone in your community sees or values things the way you do. Neither way of living is whining, they are just different ways of living.
Comparing ways of living is always full of opportunities for conflict and misunderstanding, but being ready or even anxious to judge others negatively limits the ability to evaluate alternatives in a cool and realistic manner.
>Snide viewpoints like this are one of the main reasons people with mental illness often hide their conditions and suffer in silence.
It is profoundly psychologically damaging to be forced to cooperate (work, live, socialize) with such people who tacitly dehumanize those they do not understand with casual and capricious ease, such as the way the top level commenter dismisses the OP with a superficial and borderline bad faith analysis of the link at hand.
No one should ever have to justify their feelings. That’s it’s. That’s my point. Hard stop.
As a society, culture, community we need to get to the point where we respect the feelings of others implicitly. Feelings are not equations, there are no right or wrong answers. By implicitly acknowledging all the feelings of others we are respecting each other and nurturing common ground where we can discuss the differences that underlie perception and create an environment ripe for interpersonal growth. Failure to do so breeds resentment and festers in the homes, workplaces, and communities where the feelings of some are neglected.
It's one thing to mention it, quite another to continually moan about it day in and day out. Yes, I have empathy for your situation and if you need help, I can be there. But the rest is on you and not me. I don't need to see continual Facebook posts about it. There is quite a bit of sympathy-gathering that's taken hold and it's getting ridiculous.
Clearly you didn't read all of my comment. Continually moaning about it is not doing anything about it except being a drama-queen. Yes I have empathy, but endless Facebook "woe is me..." posts are not the key to getting help.
Saying you are empathetic while also uniformly dismissing those you claim to empathize with doesn't ring too clear. No evidence of empathy, lots of evidence of dismissal.
Just my 2c as someone looking at how the issue has been framed.
"Reading comprehension" my friend. I said "continually moaning" as in repeatedly doing that. I have empathy, I don't have unlimited empathy. At some point when a friend or loved one just wants to post on FB about how shitty their depression is, they're not really interested in getting better but just in the attention. If you can't understand that, be thankful you don't have someone like that in your life.
The author's complaint is about an entirely self-imposed nonsense barrier.
>When people asked how you were doing, no one expected you to say “Fine.” Instead, they asked, “How are you holding up?” and you’d answer, “Well, you know.”
So what? Maybe it's because I've spent my life in careers where performance can be measured (even badly), but I haven't since high school felt pressure to exaggerate beyond "alright" or the classic "it's going".
I mean, sometimes I am actually in a good mood. I must be crazy. I'm sitting here waiting for a bleomycin infusion and I just told the nurse I had a good weekend. How inconceivable! Just two days ago I could barely eat dinner! What right do I have to be happy?
Good news: typing this made me laugh, a little. It was worth it.
You know, I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I think in our (laudable) effort that's ramped up over the last 15-30 years, as a society, not to shit on people who become mentally ill or fragile in the face of certain adversity or stress, we've made becoming mentally ill and fragile the most valid way to respond to stress, always above criticism, and in a real sense generated more of that than would have existed otherwise.
This scathing contempt for poor mental health is precisely the kind of attitude that drives people to commit suicide instead of seeking help.
Poor mental health isn't "whining"; it's the number one cause of death for ages 15-24 in the US. It's rampant, and many people reading your comment will themselves be struggling.
If anyone reading this is in a bad way, please know that most of us don't look down on you. Many downright heroic people who have changed the world have had their (very) bad patches. Newton, Tesla, Lincoln.
Programmers aren't known for their empathy, so don't pay attention to any tone deaf drum beating you hear here. Outside of Hacker News, you're surrounded by people who do indeed care about and respect you, as well as professionals who will put the best of their minds into helping you through the storm.
Okay, as someone who used to suffer from really bad depression for about 5 years, you're the one over stepping your position on this.
There is poor mental health. Theres also fishing for attention and making outlandish claims for sympathy. This article isnt a testament of poor mental health. It's a whining child who refuses to grow, at best. If you suffer from depression or other issues, you can spot out a phony in a heartbeat. Thats why some people in the comments get pissed off over these articles. The author is faking it and doing more harm than good. Most people with actual mental health issues WANT it to end, unlike the author, because guess what, the word suffering isnt an accident. The culture of "it's okay to suffer" is pretty fucked up.
In truth, no one really looks down on poor mental health anymore. Get with the times. The most backwoods redneck these days understands that life or severe events gets hard on people, it can happen to anyone, and it takes a toll on them, being hard on that person doesn't help. It's really the woke crowd that keeps bringing up that theres a stigma. No one else does or thinks that.
Honestly, the veteran community is probably the best right now when it comes to helping with poor mental health. Most of you are going to look down on that, but that's your prejudice problem. If anyone wants to try picking themselves back up, take some lessons from that crowd to see how they help vets with PTSD.
There is indeed compassion to be found around us. There is also coldness and callousness and contempt, and if these human sympathies have been expunged from your world, a lot of us would pay handsomely for interstellar travel to join you.
I agree that we all need to be pushing our oars as hard as we can, even if we're bruised and bloodied and can't push very hard. Freeloaders aren't acceptable; we all need to be trying our best.
Is the article writer trying his best? I don't know, but I found his piece beautiful. His battle right now is with meaning and metamorphosis, and I think those are respectable things to wrestle with.
I'm fond of the mental health innovation for veterans that I'm familiar with: VR exposure therapy for PTSD. I'm genuinely curious -- what else does the veteran community do for people who are struggling?
See, you did it again. There is nothing "beautiful" about mental health issues. Do you think there is something beautiful when someone breaks their arm? The way people treat those with broken limbs is the best form of compassion that achieves real results to end someone's mental health problems. No one faults anyone who broke their arm and they're in pain, having trouble with day to day functioning. However its then, "Hey, you need to see a doc to put your arm in place and get you a caste. Let me take you to the hospital." You get faulted when your dumbass lives with a broken arm for no reason, constantly complaining when there is a fix possible. Go through the process. Take the time for the bone to heal. People show their compassion, which helps you out even more, when they do little things to help you out while it heals, instead of just saying, "I'm sorry about your broken arm. Youre so strong. It's okay for it to be broken forever. It's your identity now. You should always be known as the one with the broken arm. It's so beautiful that you broke your arm." Then you go through physical therapy to get back to fighting strength, along with making sure it doesn't happen again. You also now know how to avoid or deal with a similar event to avoid a break. This is how mental health should be approached. Dont fucking treat it as a fashionable badge of courage, allowing it to fester and rot someone's head. That depression rot makes it far fucking harder to heal. Look, it took me far too long to overcome my own depression because most "help" out there focuses on it being "okay to be depressed" instead of actually fixing it. This includes some really shitty therapists who believe depression should be an accepted identity, one of which I dumped too much money on. That's why these type of articles and rhetoric anger me to no end. You have zero clue how dangerous this is in the long run for people.
Most vets that I personally know which adapted to a stable life well do a few things. A hobby they personally devote to. They exercise outside fairly regularly. Some type of difficult long term task they give themselves. More importantly I think, they have friends that were combat vets as well and they all talk regularly. Like 90s teenage girls everyday or every other day on the phone and in person. Not texting, actually talking. Not everyone can take their awesome crass, dark humor well, which is a good vent for when things get rough for them. I think everyone I know had therapy to some level and for some amount of time. I cant speak much to that because that's something I dont poke into. I just know that two new vets into the group went from not doing a lot of what I mentioned and... yea, not adapting well to society... to then doing pretty good in like 6-12 months. That VR stuff is really designed for hyper specific PTSD triggers to my knowledge. Not general societal stuff. I ended up doing gov contracting which ended up leading me to making too many vet friends overtime. If it wasn't for them, I'd still be in a mental pit at best.
I think we're on exactly the same page. The fact that the writer is hurting wasn't beautiful. Many of his ideas, however, were. If they're not your cup of tea, so be it.
I think that you think that "It's okay to be depressed" is a platitude celebrating complacency. It's actually about shame. Many people, especially men, would sooner suffer than admit to needing help. Behind the platitude is the desire to say, "You don't need to be ashamed about being depressed. It's a thing that strikes the best of us, and you can hold your head high as we help you back to your feet."
But yeah, a lot of therapists are terrible. It's indeed important to find one that wants to get you back on your feet as soon as possible; sympathy isn't a substitute for recovery.
I like your veterans' tips for climbing out of depression:
* Develop a hobby
* Regularly exercise outside
* Take on a big project, and put something into it every day
* Spend in-person time with people who get it
I sometimes do mental health volunteer work, and I'll incorporate your tips. Nothing beats a strategy that has met empirical success.
> If anyone wants to try picking themselves back up, take some lessons from that crowd to see how they help vets with PTSD.
as someone suffering who is not a veteran, nor in the US at all, is there something I can read about that outlines their approach or what they are doing to help them that is new?
I'll give you a run down of all the things that eventually helped me out.
1. Health. 30 minutes minimum, 1 hour preferably a day of moving around outside. Obviously general exercise like lifting weights is good, but you need sun vitamin d daily. Go for a long walk daily at the minimum. Find what you like to do and what you can sustainbly do. I have rotator cuff issues, so gymnastics is a no go for me, for example. Even though I'd love to do it. Oh well. I jog, walk and do some weight lifting. Also, eat right. Get your blood checked. I happen to be a bit iron deficient. So I eat beef liver once a week and pate throughout the week to keep it up. Has worked well for me without the need for artificial vitamins. When my iron is low, that's when the head fog and general "woe" really starts to kick in.
2. Social. You got to be social daily. This one I noticed one day where I was invited to a party after a really bad downhill on depression. I accidentally clicked with a few people about movies and we talked for like 6 hours straight. My voice was gone for like 2 days, but holy shit did I feel great for like a week. You need to have dumb, long conversations with people. Laughing and having fun. Try finding social groups over a hobby or activity locally. You said outside of US, we have Meetup.com, maybe you have something similar? I've done it here in Florida a few times. 50% of the ones I went to were good. Dont get down trodden if you show up to a few stinkers. Try different groups until you find one. Just look for groups where you can talk and have fun. If you happen to have a circle of friends already, just not tight knit (yet), take it upon yourself to do a weekly thing. Board game night, book club, movie night or just everyone buys a random 6 pack of beer and you all hang out for the night talking shit. Do not underestimate the value of this. I'm serious. It seems silly, but we've evolved as social-pack animals for a reason.
3. Personal mental health: Lots of variability here. Try it out or try to learn from it and do your own thing.
Free write journaling: Sit at the computer, word processor open, and type exactly what's on your mind. Did someone piss you off yesterday? What do you want for lunch? Was that chick/dude yesterday cute and you should have introduced yourself? What should have you done? Does your ass itch? You are dumping your thoughts. It seems super silly, I know. But it's literally exactly what's in your head as it passes by. I do this almost every morning. It clears my head and makes me feel refreshed, kind of like a mental shower. I also think out what I want to do during the day, what went right or wrong yesterday and so forth. But it's not structured at all. Simply stream of thought, no matter how stupid the thought. 15 or 20 min of this. Typically I just feel like stopping when I figure I have nothing else "new" to think. No one ever reads these journals by the way. Nor should they.
Task/purpose: I dont know how to explain this one easily. Actually, Jordan Peterson talkd about this the best. Anyways, pick something difficult to do, because YOU want to. Not because of a trend or whatever. This can range from a crazy in depth research topic, read all of agatha Christie novels in order, do a non-profit, do a 10,000 piece puzzle, start a community garden, whatever. It just does have to be out of your norm, longish term (I say minimum 2 weeks to accomplish, but whatever) and something you just want to do, for you, to make you happy, fuck what anyone else thinks (as long as it's legal). If they're somewhat short term, you do another one and so forth. I think the more important of a task, the better, but I say dont focus on that at first. Do for you to practice focusing, for you, on your own happiness. But do make a definable end point goal. So you can say, "I finished this". Start small, work upwards overtime.
Hobby: similar to the last but this is just fun, for you. I really dont recommend video games. A "constructive" hobby is best. I like woodworking and fiction writing. If I could get past the sound of cats fucking, I'd play the violin more. I imagine somewhat soon I'll get into model making or painting.
Creative/analytical balance: probably specific to me, but I'll mention it. If I do too much dev or research, I burnout. If I do too much writing or the occasional graphic design/marketing, I burn out. I've learned I have to do a little bit of the opposite everyday or at least try to alternate days. Easily if I go 3 days doing only one, I get into a funk.
Meditation: Eh... i did it as focus training for a month and haven't for a few years. Mehta, maybe for you? Free writing or reading always feels better for me.
Regrets, mistakes: this is a rough one and good as a journaling exercise. Talk to yourself about your regrets, on paper or word processor, whichever is the most comfortable. See about what you can fix if you can. Forgive yourself for what you cant. Everyone has regrets and it's alright. Talk to yourself about it, be honest and work through it all. This was a big one for me. It ends up being painful and cathartic. Can take a few weeks, but it's well worth it.
Cant think of much else except I read somewhere relating depression to an angry dog. Right now it's biting you. Work through it. Got out of its clutches. That dog will eventually just occasionally bark. If you ignore it, it'll bite again. Eventually you learn to appreciate the bark as a warning that something is wrong and you need to fix it now before it gets worse. You will have ups and downs and trip sometimes. Take the good times as a sign you were on the right path. You slip a bit, that's okay, you'll get out of it again since you got out before. Somewhere else talked about how anxiety and depression, once you are mentally healthy, are good tools to feel. Small, slight depression is subconsciously telling you you're on the wrong path with nothing to gain. Anxiety is subconsciously warning you that you are not fully prepared for a situation, be alert and careful as you step forward. It's just when we never address them over long stretches of time, stacked on top of poor health and poor social interactions, is when we come to our depression states that eat away at us.
I think the article itself is what downplays and trivializes poor mental health. "Well, you know" is just the new version of "fine" - a way to brush the very real things the author mentioned under the rug and not speak about them. The societal response to depression, addiction, anxiety, loneliness, and despair should not be to stay at home and never talk about it.
I don't know how someone could write an article about the near-pandemic rise of mental illness over the last year but still come to the conclusion that, actually, this is better.
I think it’s one thing for a person who is struggling with depression to think that life as a member of the elite in the richest country ever is too much to bear.
It’s something else for The Atlantic to publish that view as if it is non-pathological. It seems to me the Atlantic thinks this is a view a large percentage of its well heeled readership is going to sympathize with.
Agreed. I can't only imagine what would happen to these people if they had to face any actual adversity, given what had happened to them in the face of staying at home in the most comfortable civilization that had ever existed.
In reality though, I suspect most of them are fine. This is just the result of a subculture that celebrates being a victim. Anything that can signal as suffering and weakness is somehow warped into a desirable trait because it triggers the wildly overstimulated empathy response, and leads to attention.
Pain (among other experiences) exists as a gradient compared against both your average experience and any outlier experiences (good or bad). A result of living in a more comfortable, advanced society is that things that seem smaller to someone on the outside are bigger on the personal level. These people aren't inherently weak or soft, it's just that the worst thing or day they have experienced is pretty good in a global sense, but pretty bad in a personal subjective sense.
Lack of recent exposure also makes people weak. They need to get back in practice or it's like they're skipping the gym to veg-out on the couch with Netflix, weed, and a case of Doritos.
If you want to up your social-pain threshold, say "hello" strangely to 200 random people.
I disagree. For a very long time people have been coping with their depression and anxiety by drinking too much, eating badly, becoming violent, abusive, killing themselves. It's not that the "new elite" can't handle the stresses of life, the stresses of life have always been there, but finally some people are waking up to the fact that there are better ways to cope with them than my above list. Such as therapy, or leaving that awful fucking toxic open office corporate environment. Being honest that you are struggling mentally is brave, not frail. They are the people probably most likely to not have another scotch or two, and get divorced.
The lecture includes multiple studies and actual science. Basically scientifically illustrating what many people feel intuitively - that somehow society has become obtusely frail.
I haven’t heard of NEET before, so I looked it up.
NEET, an acronym for "Not in Education, Employment, or Training", refers to a person who is unemployed and not receiving an education or vocational training
Don't get into the habit of using it. Just like incel, it's a trendy pejorative that for some reason is currently socially acceptable to use for people who mostly do not identify with the label. It's a reminder that the no-bullying campaign and war on slurs is a one way street.
You see a lot of angry young men who are convinced of their own genius, convinced that they alone are responsible for their accomplishments, deeply offended that someone else might received care and compassion for what they consider to be weaknesses. It is all an effort to justify their own juvenile selfishness and to recast it as a virtue.
But sometimes there is a link to a cool github repo so here we all are.
There is certainly a vocal contingent that will jump in and attack working people, young people, or poor people as being crybabies anytime corporate profits are in question. Get back to work, peons!
He is a whining man-child who refuses to grow up, the writing does not suggest a mentally ill person - and I believe that lots of people who started receiving government checks, now don't want to go back to work - the employment numbers were dismal, and employers are having a hard time finding people to take up jobs. Most people work dead-end, meaningless jobs anyways. So why not just drop out?
Tl dr; The author, with all his pandemic-granted free time, has been mulling over the tenants of nihilism and is struggling to adapt.
> More and more people have noticed that some of the basic American axioms—that hard work is a virtue, productivity is an end in itself—are horseshit.
Yes, despite what some tell you, values aren't universal truths - they are matters of opinion. Does that really mean you should refuse to adopt values in your life -- resigning to lay in your bed unmotivated to get out? Do you also refuse to have a favorite flavor of ice cream?
- The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotion, and spends himself in a worthy cause; and if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that he’ll never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat. - Theodore Roosevelt
One who hides, wastes this short life addicted to screen distractions, actively avoids everyone, and misses-out on life for their lack of backbone has a name: coward. It's better actually that they stay inside so others don't have to waste their time on disappointments from people who aren't reciprocal, social, or respectable.
Your tax dollars at work. Job is supposed to be about addressing needs of others, not optimum personal enjoyment. There are plenty of people who prefer restful, solitary passtime for enjoyment - watching Netflix, reading, cocktail on the beach, meditation. They still need to do something in return for people who work on Netflix app or serve them cocktails, otherwise none of the stuff that we enjoy will get made. There are a small number of adults who are truly too mentally or physically disabled to earn their upkeep, but a lot more can improve with a combination of treatment and stimulus checks going away.
