I’m like a broken record with this but we really are massively underestimating how the world is still dealing with the collective derangement induced by the Covid years
This is true. We have never collectively dealt w/the trauma because of all the people who want to pretend it didn’t happen. My cousin‘s wife died, my grandma was locked down alone in nursing home and died, my cousin‘s son overdosed. I couldn’t go to any of the funerals. Everyone has these traumas.
EXACTLY. It’s been really instructive to contrast how Biden just didn’t want to talk about it with Andy Beshear, who was constantly front and center in reassuring folks during the worst of Covid and giving them them a story to believe in. And Beshear is loved and reelected!
(Obviously I am extremely in favor of lockdowns/covid mitigation measures etc etc etc, it just appears that the pandemic coupled with Trump generally drove Americans completely insane, from an already not great baseline in the U.S.)
After the Great Stew Controversy yesterday I saw someone arguing that people following basic food safety guidelines "have anxiety" and are "creating boundaries" and it was the same exact kind of pushback remember about COVID mitigations. We're going to keep reliving some of the same exact shit.
Here's what happened: a writer on here posted that she'd made a delicious batch of beef stew and forgot to put it in the fridge and it sat out overnight, so she discarded it. And a debate ensued over whether it might have been fine. Food safety guidelines say don't risk it.
A bunch of the people who said it was fine cited some pretty weak reasoning (our ancestors didn't have refrigeration, and they survived! If it was covered it should be fine!) and in a few cases said things like Americans are hysterical about food safety, etc.
I - a person who has a gut like a Labrador retriever - would not risk this. I posted a short thread about why. And my notifications went bananas. People were... in their feelings about all of this. I thought it was a kind of mundane food safety thing, but... not so much.
That’s so nasty lol. We made chicken soup Friday and refrigerated and had our last bit last night that needed water to balance and we had a little leftover and I was like “we shouldn’t toss it” and she was like “I’m making you throw this away. You have no choice in this”
My aunt would leave food out to soil for weeks and still it eat
I remember my mom calling the Butterball hotline and making her listen as they explained we’d all die if she served the Turkey she left out to thaw for three days
i think humans are finally so decoupled from the concept of "survival" that taking basic steps to lower your chances of getting sick or dying is seen as some sort of bizarre worthless ritual
you could be sick enough to need urgent care from covid & someone would still criticize you for exaggerating
then again i bet you could find people acting the same way in the victorian era so maybe I'm wrong and people are just stupid and don't take shit serious when it's not their own ass on the line
I don't know if you follow Seth Cotlar (historian) but he has recently been posting about historic anti-vaccination campaigns from the first half of the 20th century and it's interesting to see many of the same arguments coming up again in the 21st century.
I was reading a book about rats, because I'm That Guy, and back in 1900, San Francisco media was trying to downplay an outbreak of the literal plague. It was like reading a news article.
My partner had a coworker who is lucky he’s still alive after COVID. The stories he would tell about how he felt would have sent me straight to the hospital. That…was not the coworkers reaction at the time or to this day. So, yeah.
Probably doesn't help that those who didnt get vaccinated are probably suffering cognitive decline from the various neuropathological side effects from a cardiovascular disease known for causing hypoxia.
Well, that and the fact that even mild cases of Covid can cause up to a 10% increase in the rate at which gray matter deteriorates. People out there, catching it over and over again, inflicting more damage each time? Not a great strategy! A lot of people were (and are) acting like...
... as long as it doesn't kill you, you're golden, and that is absolutely not the case. Not many really want to acknowledge that it's still out there, fucking people up on the reg, either.
Also as a country we never grappled with the collective trauma & loss of COVID on multiple axes - I think the trauma manifests in odd ways since it wasn't dealt with directly.
Plus COVID causes measurable brain damage in many cases, including to parts that regulate emotional responses.
imo the hyper individualism and the idea that freedom means you get to do whatever you want anytime shoved into people's brains for the last century or so did NOT work well when they suddenly had to have limits and think of one another as a society for a couple months
I've met guys with such a shallow understanding of how the world works i honestly believe there was no parenting involved and they just never got past the toddler phase mentally
My theory: it comes from a couple of generations of people being traumatized and lied to so thoroughly that ignorance of the world is seen as a protective measure against complexity they're not emotionally mature enough to cope with.
Just jumping off that insight - it suggests that China is also in the throes of suppressed COVID trauma, considering their measures were even more thoroughgoing. And we should look for a new kind of post-civid politics there also.
It’s also possible to draw some lines between the Satanic panic, 9/11, Iraq War era, Obama, Tea Party, up to now, too, in terms of people always being anxious about the times.
Tommy Lee Jones in Men In Black:
“Yeah, ‘A person’ is smart. ‘People’ are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals & you know it!”
Split between this (clearly true to some extent) and the idea that medieval peasant stupidity never went away and just couldn’t be seen until social media became available.
We are still not over the two nuclear bombings which scared the populace and then made Roswell weather balloons scary and then the X- Files and faark me. It's convoluted
Yes indeed. People have really changed due to it, and I feel quite alienated from them. After being called a sheeple for the 100th time I decided that I really loathed them. Their sheer ignorance and unoriginality hurts my brain. I feel like that about Reform UK Ltd supporters too.
O yea if you know anyone in any sort of mental health or therapy fields : anecdotal - but they’re all Way busier than earlier — and a lot of relationships and friendships didn’t survive the year/s of lockdowns and some going full conspiracy theorist or whatever worse things too 😞
People on here are smarter than me so maybe they can explain:
I get that we’re all broken from not only COVID but also 9/11, Iraq, the Great Recession…
But then I think about what folks had to endure in the 1930’s and ‘40’s.
Are we all really that more fragile?
No snark, I honestly don’t know.
Why do you think the 50s are known for alcoholism and diet amphetamines and housewives on downers and a black hole of consumerism and intense conformity and ...
And that was the mainstream "well adjusted" part of the population.
I spent a fair amount of time with grandparents and great-grandparents who lived through the depression and WWII. They were broken. Wonderful people, but the past had done a number on them. It also wasn’t talked about, so as a kid, I mostly didn’t notice.
I was thinking as I was working earlier and I basically came to your conclusion too.
I guess that those in the Greatest Generation were broken by everything too, just like you said.
I though about how WWII propaganda was directed as much internally as externally, to put up a brave front.
The boomers in my family are all horribly wounded people. Imagine having the same social ills but not being able to opening confront incest, alcoholism, misogyny, child abuse as parenting, & lack of enough food to eat. Couple this with >50% of the human population being considered 2nd class citizens
Just so I know I’m being clear, my grandparents and great-grandparents were/are Silent Gen. My grandmother is in her late 90’s and I spent time with her mother as a kid.
It’s an entirely different kind of broken from boomers, really. Much quieter and deeper pain.
Yes, this.
For my grandparents in manifested in a need for control.
It also made them feel invincible.
I asked my Nonna once if the reason she refuses help is bc she survived the war & the depression so now she thinks she can survive anything & she said yes, exactly.
My mom was like wtf 😂
Their paranoia to me is seen in their hyper-independence, their silence, & their stoicism.
They didn’t expect things to get better even tho they did.
They were always steeling themselves for the next hard thing.
My Nonna handled lockdown better than her children & grandchildren.
Chaos is a weapon of the right. It doesn't matter what the subject is, they will fuel it. They use the confusion to divide us, distract us & control us. We are being played.
There is definitely an argument to be made that the current iteration of the Republican coalition is the result of two events: the racial panic in response to Obama's election, and the Pandemic forcing people to confront that they have less control over their lives than their self-myths allow.
Anti-vax, anti-mask, etc. make a lot of sense as a form of coping by denialism. Americans - who view much of life through the prisms of consumerism, individualism, and Calvinist work ethic - were forced for the first time to confront one of the realities of life, and they snapped.
Covid causes cognitive decline, especially in people who have had multiple infections. It’s becoming more and more apparent, and I imagine will only get worse as the virus is being left to spread willy nilly.
"Perfect storm" is still far overutilized, but the combination of individualized information filters, the billionaire axis, the actual neurodamage from covid, the isolation, and the *lack of any reckoning* has been one hammer blow to civilization after another.
I still have no idea what this drone stuff is about. I had gone out for a smoke, i think it was thanksgiving(?), had seen a bunch flying around to the north (i live in south FL). didn't think much of it, figured some event or such. but suddenly people are talking about drones everywhere. like, wtf?
At the same time this belief is what caused me to become sick & disabled for the foreseeable future. I think if we had more cohesion & unity around the notion of keeping each other safe vs messaging about how hard it was for individuals, we could have strengthened one another.
Seeing people willing to risk their lives and that of others to eat at Applebee's or not wear a mask at the grocery store was much more stressful than the virus itself. The times where it felt like we were working on something together were good feeling.
For some, it goes back further than that (which is somewaht scarier)
I was pumping gasoline in ~2012 [eastern outskirts of Nashville] and there were two jets overhead up at cruise, leaving contrails. Their paths were going to cross, and were clearly at wildly different altitutdes.
Ack 1/
Like, nowhere near colliding, either b/c altitude or lateral distance.
This guy at the next pump was on the phone, happened to notice and completely flipped out. "There's something going ON. There are TWO planes in the SKY." and hurriedly got off the phone. Had to explain what he was seeing to him.
"There are drones in the sky!"
Okay. What are the drones doing?
"Flying around."
And this is scary?
"Terrifying."
I don't get it. If they were shooting at people or releasing clouds of wasps or something then I might panic. As is it's just a mild curiosity. It's kind of amusing.
Indeed. We've never been given the time or resources to figure it out. But that's life now. The internet communication amplification and technology have conspired to make time flow faster and things happen at a massively faster rate. It's why people in rural areas experience being forgot.
But the politics has also disrupted its flow - illuminating all manner of foibles, corruption, and bad governing. But it also amplified the popularist Donald Trump who gamed it all and won against all odds that a crook and conman would prevail.
And here we are in the midst of the great fragmentation and the great reveal. Clare W. Graves, the father of measuring stages of human development upstaging his friend Maslow because life is open system. He called this time "The Great Leap"
Said Dawlabani Ph.D. author of Memenomics and a participant with me in Don Beck's Spiral Dynamics training is working on his new book 2nd Sapiens where he weaves Gravesian theory with natural intelligence of nature to paint a picture or view of where we are headed. Soon to be published.
Those were fun. I miss the nutters who were convinced that Bigfoot lived behind their house, stole their flannel shirts from the line and loved lemon merange pies.
Not just the isolation of lockdowns or the trauma of mourning, but the virus itself damages the frontal cortex, even in mild infections. Which deals with impulse control, mood regulation, abstract thinking, error correction and general reasoning.
Yes! loss of empathy too! Fronto-temporal dementia is definitely an interesting model to compare with as we know covid damages the frontal cortex, the temporal lobes and the somatosensory cortex (Last one causes the loss of smell processing).
I'd heard some half-jokingly compare SARS-2's host manipulation abilities to cordyceps infections in ants & toxoplasmosis in mice...then people started discussing it seriously: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7175891/
I look up at the sky almost every night in the jacuzzi. We also have the flight tracker app. We look up all the time. We are by Pendleton. When I tell you what I saw the other night moving at the speed of light was unlike anything I have seen in my life. Thinking you're too clever for this ain't it
Yes. We are all suffering PTSD or something like it, and only some of us are in a position to be aware of it; even fewer have the space and the will to do something about it.
This is a media induced collective panic in the USA atm... I have seen images of so called "drone" sightings which were just planes landing or helicopters! I guess about 99% of those sightings are just air traffic related and another set is jokesters, after the media made a panic!
Comments
1) the world is unjust & needs to change & I want to help
2) the world is scary & everyone is out to get me & I need someone to save me
food hygiene is good and cool
I remember my mom calling the Butterball hotline and making her listen as they explained we’d all die if she served the Turkey she left out to thaw for three days
you could be sick enough to need urgent care from covid & someone would still criticize you for exaggerating
Plus COVID causes measurable brain damage in many cases, including to parts that regulate emotional responses.
i honestly believe they broke
My mum disillusioned me of this when I was like 5, wtf was going on during folks' upbringing that they weren't
it's extremely weird and horrifyingly common
Tommy Lee Jones in Men In Black:
“Yeah, ‘A person’ is smart. ‘People’ are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals & you know it!”
But the internet was built on science and https://alt.ufo.net
The first site I ever saw on the net in 1993.
It's so many things. But the roots are deep
I get that we’re all broken from not only COVID but also 9/11, Iraq, the Great Recession…
But then I think about what folks had to endure in the 1930’s and ‘40’s.
Are we all really that more fragile?
No snark, I honestly don’t know.
And that was the mainstream "well adjusted" part of the population.
We’re no different.
I guess that those in the Greatest Generation were broken by everything too, just like you said.
I though about how WWII propaganda was directed as much internally as externally, to put up a brave front.
It’s an entirely different kind of broken from boomers, really. Much quieter and deeper pain.
For my grandparents in manifested in a need for control.
It also made them feel invincible.
I asked my Nonna once if the reason she refuses help is bc she survived the war & the depression so now she thinks she can survive anything & she said yes, exactly.
My mom was like wtf 😂
They didn’t expect things to get better even tho they did.
They were always steeling themselves for the next hard thing.
My Nonna handled lockdown better than her children & grandchildren.
I was pumping gasoline in ~2012 [eastern outskirts of Nashville] and there were two jets overhead up at cruise, leaving contrails. Their paths were going to cross, and were clearly at wildly different altitutdes.
Ack 1/
This guy at the next pump was on the phone, happened to notice and completely flipped out. "There's something going ON. There are TWO planes in the SKY." and hurriedly got off the phone. Had to explain what he was seeing to him.
Okay. What are the drones doing?
"Flying around."
And this is scary?
"Terrifying."
I don't get it. If they were shooting at people or releasing clouds of wasps or something then I might panic. As is it's just a mild curiosity. It's kind of amusing.
https://x.com/JamesThrot/status/1768304290521604579
I also have visual processing issues as a result of COVID so sometimes my eyes deceive me or misinterpret what I’m seeing as something else.
It’s scary.
The bad news is that we are also incredibly misguided at most of the relevant levels just now.
Probably not that much, there's more than enough lights in the sky that people just don't notice till someone points and says "LOOK!"
But I do wonder
This drone thing, it’s getting Sirius.