Yeah, I suppose. I wonder if it's more that they're teetering on the edge and then some traumatic experience just bounces them in.
Based on personal experience I've had times when I've felt like I've veered towards cuckoo land and it's usually been from trauma.
Like, at some point last year I started to lose the plot.
All of the stuff I wanted to do with my life just disappeared - universities gone, work gone, study groups gone, travel very restricted or gone. And the supermarkets started putting up barriers and everyone put stuff on their face, the pubs were closed, people started walking in weird directions around shops and talking about "social distancing" and making stuff illegal and blah blah blah.
And it just fucked with me, it made me feel schizophrenic, because I just don't get this as a response to coronavirus. It felt like, well, you have a 1% chance of dying, maybe 10% if you're in an at-risk group, so just kill yourself now (remove everything that makes life worth living) to avoid the risk. And all I could do is just think about all of the downstream long term permanent effects.
It made me think - is there something underlying this? Like, are the government pushing this because they know something worse is coming down the line (is this a trial run to protect against sars-cov-3 that wipes out 20% of us?). But why are other people just going along with it?
And all the time what seemed like _everyone_ was wandering around acting as if this thing was super bad, and here's me just like, trying to get on with it. I remember walking around empty streets, closed up stores, and just thinking like, what? why? am I in a dream? And it went on for months and months, a year.
Then I'd just be wandering around in a haze, and the cause and effect was disconnected, and meh. It's hard to even word it. I just had some sort of episode.
I've snapped out of it now, but I mean really I've only managed to do that because I'm quite disconnected (I don't work a 9-5, my country has quite lax restrictions, etc).
If I were one of the truckers or whatever and someone was telling me "do this or I'll turn your life upside down" I'd probably be into batshit theories too. If I were in Australia or NZ I don't even think I'd be alive, lol.
I mean, we're still doing some of this shit.
I now know that my countrymen would lock me in a box for months on end to add 1% to their life expectancy. It seems totally horrific when I write that down, but yet people still openly discuss this as if it's some totally normal thing like buying a big mac or whatever. Just odd.
I know what you mean. And I feel for you, as well as countless others who got f___ed over by the virus without even catching it.
Beyond those who died from it, Covid incurred a mental health debt our societies will pay off for years, probably decades, to come. Maybe decades. Suicide attempts among teenagers have doubled over the last 18-or-so months. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
I've had to deal with my fair share of mental health issues, but I'm kind of a loner, so the Covid restrictions were not as hard on me as on others. But as a species, we're very social beings, and being disconnected from others is a recipe for a mental health disaster that - say, 10 to 20 years from now - might look even worse than the damage the virus itself did.
FWIW, my godmother holds a yearly Easter-brunch that she has cancelled two years in a row now and will probably cancel again, come Easter. I'm not a religious person, but that brunch has been a fixture in my year for as long as I can remember. I miss it dearly. Likewise, a close friend of my mother's holds a Christmas party every year, again, for as long as I can remember. Cancelled, two years in a row, and who knows if it will be cancelled this year.
It is important, I think, to acknowledge the pain this virus has caused on all of us, even if we got away.
And we - I mean human beings in general - need to make sense of things, at a very fundamental level. If we run out of sensible explanations for what's happening around us, we turn to the irrational.
On a more abstract level, I think living in a modern industrialized capitalist economy incurs a mental health cost we rarely acknowledge. And Covid has turned up the volume to the max. Unfortunately, when we, as a society, acknowledge this mental health cost, our response is to throw pills at it instead of dealing with the underlying pathology.
It feels like if we don't do anything about it, we'll run into a World-War-II-Holocaust-level disaster far sooner than anyone alive right now should be comfortable with. If I look back at history, though, this has happened before, repeatedly, and we failed to learn the lessons offered to us on a silver platter.
I wish I had something more hopeful to say. So let me say this: Nietzsche once said that we have art so we don't die from the truth. The more I think about this, the more I find this to be true. That's what art is for. Life can be a neverending horror show, but through art, we can transform that horror into beauty. Last but not least, it is a means for us to connect to our fellow human beings, even when the lockdown otherwise disconnects us from them.
Based on personal experience I've had times when I've felt like I've veered towards cuckoo land and it's usually been from trauma.
Like, at some point last year I started to lose the plot.
All of the stuff I wanted to do with my life just disappeared - universities gone, work gone, study groups gone, travel very restricted or gone. And the supermarkets started putting up barriers and everyone put stuff on their face, the pubs were closed, people started walking in weird directions around shops and talking about "social distancing" and making stuff illegal and blah blah blah.
And it just fucked with me, it made me feel schizophrenic, because I just don't get this as a response to coronavirus. It felt like, well, you have a 1% chance of dying, maybe 10% if you're in an at-risk group, so just kill yourself now (remove everything that makes life worth living) to avoid the risk. And all I could do is just think about all of the downstream long term permanent effects.
It made me think - is there something underlying this? Like, are the government pushing this because they know something worse is coming down the line (is this a trial run to protect against sars-cov-3 that wipes out 20% of us?). But why are other people just going along with it?
And all the time what seemed like _everyone_ was wandering around acting as if this thing was super bad, and here's me just like, trying to get on with it. I remember walking around empty streets, closed up stores, and just thinking like, what? why? am I in a dream? And it went on for months and months, a year.
Then I'd just be wandering around in a haze, and the cause and effect was disconnected, and meh. It's hard to even word it. I just had some sort of episode.
I've snapped out of it now, but I mean really I've only managed to do that because I'm quite disconnected (I don't work a 9-5, my country has quite lax restrictions, etc).
If I were one of the truckers or whatever and someone was telling me "do this or I'll turn your life upside down" I'd probably be into batshit theories too. If I were in Australia or NZ I don't even think I'd be alive, lol.
I mean, we're still doing some of this shit.
I now know that my countrymen would lock me in a box for months on end to add 1% to their life expectancy. It seems totally horrific when I write that down, but yet people still openly discuss this as if it's some totally normal thing like buying a big mac or whatever. Just odd.
Sorry for the monologue.