I'm so bored with the pandemic

Expect to learn nothing from this article

Rennes, May 5th, first jab. Turns out I’m still alive

I want it all to go away. The interminable debates, the pseudosceptics, the follow the science drones, the breathless headlines telling us about a new variant that might be really bad or might not be really bad, the endless confusion I sense in every fucking one of us that seems only to be resolved by avoiding the devilish detail and just picking a side you identify more comfortably with.

A special pox on those types who wear masks in their social media avatars. Because. To set an example to all the unwashed who aren't as public spirited or Well Informed as me. Please please stop performing like that.

To be sure, Covid-19 is a Bad Event that has caused Bad Things like people dying and people losing work and idiots becoming influential about Vitamin D and sanctimonious people who are lucky enough to have jobs that don't actually produce any material goods, but who have gardens, demanding permanent lockdown because they really liked how life changed last year when they got in touch with Things That Really Matter that they'd almost forgotten about.

All of these are bads of Covid.

Tut all you like at this flippancy but I didn't know any of the people who died from it (yet) and I refuse to pretend that the scale of loss is anything to me beyond an abstract cloud of mortality figures I keep hearing about well beyond the hamlet I live in and my small social circle.

Now everyone is furious about the media reporting on Omicron being a 'South African variant' and how racist it is to call it that, especially in light of South Africa's evident brilliance at sequencing things and its openness to quickly sharing that information with the world's scientific community. An activist bloke on LinkedIn says that stopping incoming flights from South Africa is proof of structural racism and I ask him what he thinks of Morocco barring incoming flights from any other country and of course he doesn't reply. Because he’s not really making an argument. He’s signaling to his in-group.

I cut my Being Angry All The Time teeth on Brexit Twitter and honed them to diamond cutting edges during all the Trump hysteria and Boris Johnson finagling his way into Downing Street. Then I realised that participating in the outrage cycle is mostly about a mix of projected self-hate and adoption of a hero archetype persona that helps us to reflect on how great we are and how the world would be better if there were more of Us in it than Them. All so Jungian.

It was fun to let all that go and realise how often I'd been wrong about everything. Not that the people I was dunking on had been right. We're pretty much all wrong when we're tippy-tapping away at our screens and keyboards on social sites, is my theory now. Because we're mostly sending smoke signals about how we see ourselves or want to be seen by others, rather than trying to arrive at any approximation of reality.

And this is the thing that I now find so grindingly, achingly, tiringly dull about this pandemic. It's like the participants in the good old gentler days of the Culture Wars were all dosed up on steroids and handed a weapon called Science that they haven't been trained to use.

To be fair I think it's entertaining when fringe figures come up with things like stills from microscope observations showing actual living immortal creatures in the Moderna vaccine.¹ It's fun. It's light relief. Like watching Infowars can be fun (if you haven't watched Infowars, it's amazing and I recommend enriching your day sometime by watching a couple of segments. Yes, bad things also happen on Infowars but I'm not your dad, so it's up to you whether you want to try it or not).

What's much less entertaining and in fact rubs me up the wrong way even more than mad stuff like being inoculated with strange creatures is the censorious quality of people with no domain-level expertise in epidemiology, biological science, vaccine design or public policy droning on with their opinions about whether or not everyone else ought to be forced to get their jabs and wear their masks.

I'm getting my booster soon and I comply with every mask-wearing edict thank you very much for your interesting opinion, Mr or Ms Sensible Citizen injecting your opinion directly into my eyeballs. I haven't a hope in hell of understanding whether a 3rd dose of Pfizer will fuck up my heart or not because I am never going to read all the studies and I honestly don't care all that much now that it's so blindingly obvious that having Covid can be such a grim and potentially fatal experience. Let alone the fact that people who worry about vaccine side effects don't seem to consider that we also know very little about any potential lasting side-effects of having the actual disease itself.

It's the way that this pandemic has jacked everyone with self-righteous but insecurely-founded certainties that I find most exhausting. Both sides. The ones who cherry pick bits of research to question vaccine efficacy in preventing illness and death and the ones who peddle the ideas about what it is to be the kind of Good Person that their in-group favours.

I’m trying to give up wondering about most of it.

Am I less likely to give other people a version of Sars-COV-2 now that I'm vaccinated? The jury is still out, overnighting in a hotel and ordering in room service for the foreseeable on this question. Some say I am and some say I'm not. This piece by Leighton Woodhouse has some interesting arguments about why this matters if vaccine mandates are to be introduced. Leighton's piece is refreshing for its lack of certainty but rigour in reasoning. I expect that eventually we'll be able to call it one way or the other with reasonable confidence, but we really don't seem to be there yet. And that's fine by me.

The sense I'm getting is that I'm increasingly interested in focusing entirely on what I'm going to do and consequently not really giving a fuck what others think or want for themselves. Sure, it might turn out that the unvaccinated are going to end up as incubators for endless mutations that eventually get around the changes to my immune system. Then again, maybe they won't. The point is that I have neither the expertise nor, frankly, the will to develop it sufficiently to argue with any confidence.

A feature of all our current information culture hysteria, whether it's on climate, vaccines, race, gender, whatever, is how the moral valence is surfaced instantly. It's impossible to say 'I don't know but I think this because that seems daft' without drawing condemnation from someone for causing harm. This is the trump card of course. We're never satisfied to just point out that what someone thinks may be in error. Their error can always be portrayed as harmful. This is, of course, the quality of discourse that leads to emotional contagion. Also known as Twitter's business model.

An old guy in my hamlet said he won't be getting vaccinated and I noticed that this didn't bug me anything like as much as someone announcing online that they won't. He made some Gallic noises to signify his disapproval, made theatrical stabbing motions into his arm (it's how you end up talking to your British neighbours when you're a certain age around here) and we both laughed.

It made me think of context. We exchanged gifts last Christmas and he and his wife are always ready to have a patient chat despite my terrible accent. Plus, I love these old Norman farming types. What I noticed was that I felt nothing of the judgement, when Mr C announced his position, that I feel when some randomer on the internet says exactly the same thing.

So, in passing, I've been reminded that those online social connections seem to lack a truly human quality. Me and Mr C, regardless of his vaccination status, are in this pandemic together because we're voisins and I actively wish for his wellbeing in a way I just can't find in my heart when it comes to folk on the internet.

People often ask me 'Mike, how did you achieve this Zen quality' and when I've finished slapping them and giving them a piece of my mind I start to explain my theory of the liberating quality of giving many fewer fucks about whether I really know things or not. And the calm which descends when I'm minding my own business. Getting on with the things I like, which does sometimes include observing people being really annoying in legacy and social media, but generally finding equanimity with uncertainty.

But this pandemic can get in the bin. Reading on an 8 hour train journey with your glasses steaming up with every breath can get in the bin. Having to have a mask in every jacket and in the car, in case I spontaneously need to buy something, can get in the bin. Not hugging and kissing my friends can get in the bin (although, mostly, I binned off social distancing about a year ago - JUDGE ME NOW).

Most of all, people with access to the internet and a burning need to say what they think all the time about everything in a field they cannot possibly understand. They can get in the bin.

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If you’re interested in Covid but bored with the usual mishmash of fatalistic, alarmist or moralistic takes, Scott Alexander has done some interesting writing lately. Firstly, on the Ivermectin thing. He did a meta analysis of all the studies that appeared to show that Ivermectin was helpful as a preventative or for treating symptoms. His conclusion is that it may be, but only if you have worms. It isn’t the last word on the subject and it’s a LOT of words, but interesting to see how he thought it through.

Still with Scott Alexander, one of his things is looking at prediction or forecasting communities to see how they envisage things developing in any particular field. His brief look at the forecast community’s view of Omicron is quite accessible. I’m hoping they’re wrong.

Alexander (if you haven’t come across him) is part of a thing sometimes known as the Rationalist community or movement. His Astral Codex Ten blog is often fascinating, along with the comments from many of his followers.

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This has all been a bit sombre, so here’s a picture of my dog.²

You think I’m cute but only because you aren’t cycling or jogging past me

It was Youna who first got me thinking about formal mindfulness practice, which is a story that isn’t as unlikely as this sentence makes it seem.

So there is a direct connection between her, the ending of my social media addiction and finding a certain peace through noticing internal states more, how they connect with the apparently external world and being less captured by thoughts.

Youns has no opinions on masks or vaccine efficacy and she loves everyone. She also has unerring navigation skills.³ She’s kind of a role model to me.

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Finally, this article came about because I initially spoke the title in conversation and immediately this song came into my head. Bonus fact, because many people are often surprised to learn this - like most of the punks The Clash were actually of the bourgeoisie. Marketing, eh.

1. Sorry not sorry for sharing this content from its source rather than smugly posting one of the much more readily found debunkings. YouTube seems to have removed it and Google is obviously limiting discoverability. Thank me for encouraging you to DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH!

2. Youna is technically my OH’s dog. But we call her ‘our’ dog. Or, because it’s funny, the dog.

3. Except sometimes. The white thing on her collar is a GPS tracker. She is very fast and sometimes quite reckless when she’s on the scent.