We're burning the candle from both ends. Is the light worth it?
We take lots of risks in life. On a grand scale, everything we do involves some risk, especially in our world so polluted with plastics. Just eating and drinking has more risk. So we run the numbers in our head of whether or not an activity is worth the risk. Loosely tied in with this is the risk to our time if we, for instance, go back to school, hate the program, and get nowhere with it. We want something for our efforts. We might need to watch a few people jump off a cliff into water to decide it's worth the risk, or to do a backflip off the garage. The joy it might bring (or the esteem from friends) is worth the potential for harm. But when risk it dramatically and easily reduced by simple precautions, then it feels like the risk isn't because of joy but because of a refusal to be told what to do. Like teenagers who flout seatbelt laws. They're in that new freedom from parental control and don't want any boundaries. But then they have a near miss and realize it's actually not a big deal to wear one. Or, something I've seen, they get a girlfriend who becomes like a replacement mom reminding them to stop taking stupid risks because you've got kids depending on you, fer fucks sake!
We generally want to live the longest life possible, as healthy as possible right??, not just for ourselves but for the people who love us or need us, but many are taking risks that don't appear to be worth anything.
Nate Bear writes,"Of all the Covid research that has never made it into the mass media, the stuff about how a Covid infection, even a mild one, ages a person biologically might be the most stunning. An infection shortens your telomeres, bits of DNA at the end of your chromosomes that shorten each time a cell divides as you age. When it can't shorten any longer, it dies. Covid snips some bits off, speeding up your death clock basically. Telomeres have been called the key to ageing and fighting cancer. As they get shorter, your death gets closer. It's like a bomb fuse, and Covid makes it shorter."
In the comments,
"Shorter telomeres, shorter life. This is what they did to us with their back to normal. . . . My brain is currently short-circuiting. Why are we doing all this research to cure all these known diseases if we're just going to let the new pathogen on the block run amok? . . . And yet my news feed if full of articles about the fountain of youth and how to cheat ageing!"
Funny, that.
I got used to wearing an N95 all day (8-9 hours) every day in less time than it took for me to get used to wearing a seatbelt when they were first legislated. I remember complaining being strapped to the car felt like being in a straight-jacket! But that's likely because I was a teenager with that illusion of immortality affecting my decisions. What on earth makes it worth the risk to go to work or school or go shopping or take the bus without an N95 snuggly on your face??
4 comments:
I wonder why these arguments don’t land. Wading through this tapestry of enthymemes, I’m curious where the real argument lies.
One interesting possibility is how some see modern medical technology as a luxury versus a necessity. I’m grateful for modern technology but it is not my baseline. Or perhaps the difference lies in how we see ourselves as autonomous from the microbial world out there as opposed to something that always permeates us. By some reckoning we’re half bacteria and viruses right now. I’m not sure what the difference is, but somewhere we disagree—not necessarily in values but in the hierarchy of their importance.
Surely, we all do want to thrive and to protect our families and to be there for them. But I struggle to relate to this risk or the attending analogies. Even at the start of the pandemic and towards its peak, I could not understand why I would alter the way I live. It’s not that I don’t understand the risks, it’s that I’m not at war with nature. It’s that you cannot hold off a viral wave. (while less probable, it only takes one particle to get infected and there are more entry points than just the mouth and nose—like the eyes). There are many things we can fight against and control, but this, to me, is like a judgment on humanity that you just accept.
I’ve often wondered if it panned out differently at what point would I have felt differently. If the world population dropped 20%? If my town was cut in half? I’m not even sure then would I act differently. Would those for masks treat the sick like leapers while we attended to the sick? I just don’t know. For most, I think this period taught us that even our best efforts could only delay the inevitable.
At the bottom, though, it is our values and how we stack them that seem to make all the difference. The pandemic showed me that we don’t share these values as well as I thought we did. And, interestingly, our ideas of what selfishness is, what love is, what care is, all hinge on how we construct these values. And I think it scares us, that others think and live in such incommensurate ways.
In the best of times our differences is what makes us stronger. In the worst of times our differences tear us apart. I look forward to better times.
RE: "you cannot hold off a viral wave" - We dramatically diminished the waves (and hence the mutations) when people masked. It's possible at least to diminish the effect even if it's not possible to completely eliminate it - not now, not after so many in power took the wrong path back in Feb. 2020. Yes, along with N95s I also wear goggles and don't touch my face until I'm home. It took about a week to get used to that.
Changing how we live based on the changing environment is HOW organisms adapt. Refusing to change is refusing to work with nature. Viruses aren't a judgement on humanity, particularly not the man-made kind. We can avoid them. And the more we stop letting them use our bodies as hosts, the fewer mutations on the horizon and the better targeted vaccines can be made.
All of our efforts, pretty much all we do, is to delay the inevitable, to stave off illness and death. Why bother brushing your teeth, scraping off bacteria that's only going to come back again? Why bother stopping at a red light when it only delays the inevitable? If you enjoy living tomorrow, you might enjoy it five years down the road, so we make an effort to keep it going. N95s add to that effort.
On caring: If I smoked, I wouldn't do it inside a public building even if alone in a room, because someone could come in - even after I left - and be bothered by the smoke I left lingering in the air. They might have asthma and be immediately harmed by the smoke I left behind. Similarly, by wearing an N95, I make sure I don't leave behind a level 3 pathogen in the air for someone else to inhale. We can never eliminate harm in the world, but we can reduce it. I don't understand avoiding hitting people in a car but refusing to avoid hitting them with Covid except as an inability to assess risk accurately. Covid currently causes more fatalities than car collisions, but we SEE car accidents, and we don't notice what happened to that kid in the checkout line that we chatted with, and then later realized we had Covid.
I get the gist, but the analogies seem strained. We can eliminate smoking form restaurants, sure, it’s easy to see who is and who is not smoking. With COVID we have to assume it’s everywhere. It’s like a paranoia.
With cars, we are out of our element, our bodies moving at high, unnatural speeds. Seat belts make some sense. With COVID it’s like we're being asked to wear seat belts while walking around.
And I might long for a time where seat belts were not yet a thing and smoking was common, but I get how society has moved this way. Yet this valence jump to COVID protocols was too much.
We had near total compliance and it failed miserably. Masks were mandatory everywhere. Vaccine compliance was above 80%. Many things were shut down or with reduced attendance. And still COVID came barreling through. Almost everyone got it. If you think you didn’t you were likely one of the many asymptomatic cases.
But imagine our city does try to go even further than the last attempt. Say we all put our fingers in the dike. Would every city do this? Would ever country do this? Would we do it forever? What of the animals? COVID does not just pool in a human reservoir. No, this is not how we adapt. It is more than just a puff of absurdity.
I have a large area of forest on our property and a few years ago Gypsy moths invaded our maples. I worked tirelessly trying to save the trees. I picked off caterpillars one by one, week by week. It was a Sisyphean task. Later in the year I crushed as many cocoons as I could find—all in the hope that maybe next year it would be better. But my work did nothing. Nothing! It was all for naught. The next year was even worse. But I still tried and tried. Then the following year the plague vanished, as quickly as it came. The moths were destroyed—as they always are—by a virus. Nature has a balance and will reset things regardless the hubris of man. COVID will to vanish—in the sense that it fades back into pantheon of other viruses that we rarely think of. And, no doubt a new pandemic will some day come again. As with times of war, it is sad to live in such times but they eventually pass.
…and maybe that is the better analogy: war. It brings to mind Wells’ ‘The War of the Worlds’. Or better yet, Sartre’s ‘Paris under the Occupation’. How do we fight or adapt to this occupation? To some the practical response to occupation is acquiescence. We might even tattle on our neighbors to ensure our own survival. Others resist, even at the threat of others suffering for their deeds.
Absolutely the hurdle with Covid is that it's possible to spread it before having any symptoms, and we've given up on testing (and many tests don't work well before day 5 or so), so we need to wear N95s pretty much whenever in a public building. I don't think we'll ever completely eradicate Covid, so I don't care about people going to bars unmasked. I don't understand it, but it doesn't directly affect people trying hard to avoid it. But I'd really like to see people masked in hospitals, schools, stores, and on public transportation. Anywhere people have to go - particularly the vulnerable and children - could add this layer of protection.
We sort of had mandatory masking. In my school, kids were forced to eat lunch indoors, something I fought against and lost. So they wore masks for most of the day, but all took them off in unison for an hour in the middle, completely undoing any benefit of the masks during the rest of the day. And opening a window during lunch led to a VP storming down the hallway to bellow at me that children can't learn if they're cold! So I don't feel like we really tried to eradicate it. The mandates always felt like suggestions as I'd remind kids to pull up the bit of cloth we offered them for free (no nose clip to hold it on, and one layer of polyester). I handed out N95s to kids in exchange for the school's garbage. So most didn't wear masks the entire time, and most masks were crap. I wonder what would have happened if we were all issued N95 post-lockdown, and told to wear them whenever outside the house for two months. Worldwide. Some people think that could still eradicate it, but masks have taken on a symbolic status that makes it all but impossible to mandate now.
Before mask mandates, even during lockdown, we were permitted to go to grocery stores, and at that point, we were told to wear gloves, and not masks. Masks needed to be saved for healthcare workers. That was the biggest blunder of all time. And before that, people were encouraged to travel in March break 2020 before the planned 2-week lockdown started!
We did everything wrong, but I think we can at least reduce the problem in overcrowded hospitals and slow the rate of disabilities if more people wore N95s. We're in a lucky place, so far, that it's not spreading between people and animals. The next mutation might be the one that enables that to happen. I'd rather try to prevent it than just sit back to watch it all unfold. I don't think nature will balance it all out in a few years if we just ignore it all. But I hold out hope for better vaccines, and, until then, we can do ourselves and others a huge service by reducing the number of infections we get with N95s. It reduces the chances of Long Covid, the overflow in hospitals, the absences from school and work, and it reduces the speed of mutation.
I don't think the war analogy quite fits, not WWII anyway, because we don't need to bravely and energetically risk our lives attacking the enemy. It's more of a stealth manoeuvre. If we all just don't let it in our bodies, then it will disappear.
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