Things I Didn't Learn in 2020
damnoptimist.substack.com
damnoptimist.substack.com
This part really resonated. What a weird year it's been. Finding the right balance between having a social life and being safe + conscientious has proven to be exhausting and depressing.
My wife and I have chosen to be super safe and turn down almost all social engagements, even ones with close family who promised to wear masks and social distance. If it wasn't a life or death thing, we felt the "right" thing to do was to host the even on Zoom, or not at all.
That decision never came lightly though and missing events with friends and family always weighed on us heavily. We'd never know if we were doing the right thing or if we were being too cautious. Especially when, on Facebook or Instagram, we would see close friends without masks hanging out and partying, while we sequestered ourselves from the rest of the world.
It's hard not to have emotions in a situation like that. At times I have felt frustrated, angry, tired, etc. Everyone has a different perspective on this whole thing, a different feeling of risk, and a difference decision about how to behave during it all. I long for the day when we can be human again without having to pass every social decision through some matrix of risk calculation.
People that recklessly and selfishly endanger themselves and others would not remain my close friends.
My friends know our household is pretty strict about gatherings. We've maybe had a handful of people over, mostly one at at time, and only when it was totally necessary. My parents knew better than to even mention whatever their crazy Thanksgiving and Christmas plans were--they knew they could count us out because I was very clear with them throughout the year.
Honestly I'm not that torn and none of this weighs heavily on me because I'm not on Facebook or any other social media. I don't get bombarded with pictures of loved ones acting irresponsibly and taking risks with their lives every day, so out of sight, out of mind. My wife on the other hand is on facebook and insta all day and took 2020 much worse. Another example of social media's wonderful redeeming qualities.
I think it's because there are a lot of them proportionally, as responses to the pandemic have been rather divided even within close social groups.
Try shaming party-goers in your friendship circle on, say, social media, and you might find the blowback hard going as "they" in sufficient numbers shame you back for being too cautious or controlling, and you become the pariah. Even if you're confident you're right, you can feel the loss of social capital. And who wants to be known as the sourpuss who tries to ruin other people's happy times?
Maybe feeling like losing social capital is even an illusion, amplified by the way social media distorts social group feelings. It only takes a few people to point the shame back at you to induce a feeling that the larger group sees you that way, whether they do or not, because your other social connections tend not to speak up in your defence.
If one of my gambling buddies tried to convince me to head to a casino with him right now, I'd have no problem saying, "Dude, we've been pals for a while but WTF are you talking about? Use your head, buddy." and I don't think either of us would take it the wrong way.
Drunk driving is universally agreed to be a terrible thing to do... Most people even if they have done it, would acknowledge that it was a bad, wreck-less, often youth driven decision.
With COVID the spectrum of agreement on how dangerous it is, is so much more vague. Clearly some people do not believe they're doing anything wrong by attending a maskless party. They may recognize that others think its wrong, but themselves truly believe that we are wrong and this is all dumb.
That's what's so fucked up about this situation. I really don't feel like I could guilt my friends even if I wanted to. Despite really believing they are making the "wrong" decision, I also recognize that they don't share that opinion, and that they are part of a fairly large group that shares their viewpoint. It's not as cut and dry as I wish it was and that's what's so stressful about it.
Yes, I think this is exactly why we struggle with tamping down on COVID spread. While many commenting in this thread understand how the drunk driving analogy holds (probabilistic, dangerous to others besides yourself) COVID is new enough and communication hasn’t been strong enough for the message to percolate through society.
My fiancée and I have been extremely cautious, we don’t go anywhere, we order amazon fresh, we work from home, etc.
She had to go into work a few times last week to build her machine (she’s a Mechanical Engineer), she wore a mask at all times, avoided interaction with other people.
Out of an abundance of caution she got a PCR test afterward - it came back positive.
Now we’re wearing masks in the house and she’s staying in her room. She’s asymptomatic thankfully, an initial test for me came back negative but it’s too early to be definitive (and we were with each other prior to her positive test result).
It sucks - the anxiety was already fairly extreme prior to this, but now waiting around to see if I develop symptoms and seeing story after story of random healthy person dying is really upsetting.
False positive probability with PCR is quite low, 0.5% to 2%.
Whatever the stress of social isolation, being isolated apart from your SO while waiting to see if you develop symptoms is 10x times worse. People don’t take it seriously because they just don’t think it’ll happen to them.
Just something interesting you might want to read into. False positives can be much higher than 0.5-4% figures, depending on how you look at it.
Out of the positive results, about 13% [1] and 25% [2] were false. In [2] 400 out of 1570 positives would be false. I have seen as high as 40% being false in other publications.
[1] https://www.aacc.org/science-and-research/scientific-shorts/...
[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
I hope you both weather it fine. Some people seem to experience almost no symptoms; I hope that is the case here. Maybe she only got hit with a small viral load given how safe she has been... in which case hopefully her body is able to defend and create antibodies. Would be curious to hear how things evolve for you, if you’re willing and able to share.
Good luck.
One thing that really caught my attention is how reddit went from 'if you wear masks you are overreacting and a bad person' to 'if you don't wear masks you are killing people and a bad person' in a heartbeat.
I'm not advocating not wearing masks or anything, I was just surprised how the definition of what was the "obviously" right thing to do changed in a heartbeat without any concern on how diagonally opposite these two advices were.
When such opposite advices are given by the same institution I think some skepticism is really useful. (Did they know the previous advice was wrong in which case they lied? Did they not know any better but gave advice anyway? What was the compelling evidence to change their minds?). Again, I think you should wear masks, but the total lack of questioning and the instantaneous change of opinion I saw online was really weird.
Way too many times leaders and people wanted quick decisions in 2020 when what scepticism may help us do is slow us down to be more thoughtful, critical and careful.
In any case, the scared worried self-isolating comments I have read in this thread from "man-folk" make me think that when we got rid of TB and SPox and Polion - we probably got rid of Testosterone at the same time.
My guess for #8 - The dog wants you to put on your shoes and take him for a walk.
If they can walk, they can learn social protocol.
Not to mention if it's from a face on the computer screen.
Instead, just tell the parent to put the child in a different room.
Most of us don't where I work. Not only we don't necessarily look our best, and neither do our rooms, but most of the times the screen is used for other purposes. Usually screen sharing, a powerpoint persentation, or some work document.
I always just pin whatever screen is being shared to be full screen so I don't have to look at anyone.
A lot of people have fairly managed video setups at this point although not all do.
Having a webcam on for longer meetings is tiring, because I feel less free to change my position and move around. But it's okay for a short meeting. I make sure I look reasonable beforehand.
Kids can generally walk aged one. I think that’s too young to learn social protocol.
> But I'm not sure that any given Zoom meeting is important enough to mess up my son's breeding.
Agreed. I'm lucky to be working in a place where my superiors all have kids, so this is implicitly understood.
If you live in a corporate environment where status matters, your kids should better not detail a meeting where you are the person with a low status compared to the other participants. If status doesn't matter in your corporate culture you just have to be aware of the importance of the meeting. If you company is fighting for survival it is probably not funny to derail the discussion.
However, there are many unimportant meetings with people with the same status and I agree that if it doesn't become a pattern it can be a sweet/nice/funny distraction ;-)
Do you get hostile and reject people helping you with flat tire, when you're lost, chasing down you escaped dog?
Do you jump to the conclusion that the offer is indictment of you're parenting?
Sarcasm aside, I think the main difference between pair programming and OP's scenario is that usually it's unsolicited advice that is unwelcome. Pair programming is usually consensual.
If you were at the park playing fetch with your dog, you'd probably be annoyed if someone started giving you unsolicited judgmental advice about dog grooming.
The "social protocol" expects that if all adults in the household are working then childcare services are a must-have; but as lifestyles and services are disrupted for Covid-related resons, this is becoming unworkable for a large number of families.
At the beginning of a conference talk a couple years ago, my 2.5-year-old demonstrated his ability to "learn social protocol".
2 minutes into the talk, he shouted "Don't talk in the lecture!" (and was promptly removed by one parent to the hallway).
Some colleagues are not so lucky. Multiple young children, small flats, day-to-day logistics complications, significant others that are essential workers (as my wife, who is working extra shifts since this pandemonium started, and I don't have an idea what would I do if we had a child) or could not work from home... And same goes for business partners or clients. I don't even dare scrutinize them about what they are going through these days. Some of their loved ones may be impacted, or they are having a hard time by themselves, the least they need is me judging them because they have a needy kid.
I remember a couple of years ago I had an interview with a job candidate, online because some other circumstances (FYI he was hired and is a great chap). He was pretty anxious, I can hear and see that, and in the middle of the interview his six-month baby started crying. We could hear the wife trying to calm the baby down and seen him sweating peas. My senior colleague did the best thing at that moment, basically aborting the interview discussion altogether and started talking about children and parenting and so on. We offered the guy to take a break, but the baby calmed down soon enough, so we continued. I remember the relief I've seen when he realized we understand him and that we're on the same page. He became much more relaxed in the rest of the interview.