By Dom Nozzi
I continue to agree that some people (not all – I cannot recall the last time I wore a mask, for example) will be wearing masks for the rest of their lives. COVID is highly likely to be like the flu. Prudent people will be getting both a flu shot and a COVID shot every fall.
As for the state of affairs, I continue to think that the infection rate, hospitalization rate, death rate, etc., is way overblown by the media.
I’m currently reading a book called The Power of Bad. The authors talk about how humans are hard-wired to be profoundly affected by bad news and hardly affected at all by good news (in other words, bad news tends to stick with us and traumatize us for a long time, whereas good news does not tend to put us in a “good mood” for more than just a brief time. We forget “good” news very quickly).
Examples: what is a word that is the opposite of “trauma”? Does anyone ever have PTSD for good things? What is the opposite of “murderer”? What about the opposite of “disgust”? In each case, there is no “good” example because bad is way more influential and powerful to us than good, so our language has a large number of words for “bad” things and much fewer words for “good” things. The media and the Internet have significantly ramped up this problem of our always being terrified of bad to the point that we think and behave irrationally.
You really need to read the book.
Applying the concept to relationships, the authors note that studies find the most long-lasting relationships are those where both people in the relationship know that avoiding doing or saying bad things is far more important than doing good deeds for (or saying good things to) your significant other.
My on-going advice: stop reading or listening or watching the media – particularly when it is reporting on the hysteria topics such as politics or pandemics. If you don’t ignore the media, you will be gravely and wrongly misled into becoming convinced – like Chicken Little – that the WORLD IS COMING TO AN END. Examples: Steven Pinker and Michael Shellenberger and Bjorn Lomborg reporting that on a huge number of social/environmental well-being indicators, the world is making tremendous progress. Almost none of us know this because the media is manipulating us 24/7 with hysterical falsehoods. A great many of us therefore wrongly think all those indicators are significantly worsening every week. The media no longer reports reality and truth. Their almost single-minded objective is to maximize how much money they make. And the best way to do that is to exaggerate or use dishonesty to enrage and terrify us. I call it the “Daily Dose of Doom.”
I can always tell who watches the news or listens to the news or reads the news too much: They are the ones who are most afraid of such things as crime and environmental ruin and drugs and political doom. So much so that their perception of what is really happening in the world is extremely far from what is really going on. Studies confirm this, by the way. I also believe that those who continue to wear masks in public are nearly always people who watch far more news (the Daily Dose of Doom) than others.
In my opinion, with vaccines and boosters and extremely low rates of infection (or substantially negative infection outcomes) means that lock downs and mask wearing and group size limits and no hand shaking are instances of “safety theatre.” People wearing masks at this point are simply virtue signaling (“look at how safe and virtuous and ethical and wonderful and progressive I am for wearing a mask!”).
I’m not saying I want to force people to stop doing things like wearing a mask, but I am saying that I feel sorry that many people are so infected with the “safetyism” disease that they engage in extreme efforts to be “safe.” At some point, people need to realize that it is impossible to have 100% safety in life. There will always be some level of risk in life (thankfully!), and doing things like mask wearing or reduced socializing severely detracts from quality of life.
Life is too short to significantly curtail pleasant experiences in life due to worry over exquisitely tiny risks.
Standing Against Mob Rule 