Thread by @stevenmazie

A thread on wrapping our minds around what COVID has wrought:

I remember breaking into tears in March 2020 when I read that COVID may kill as many as 250k Americans. That's the size of my hometown, I thought. Well. As of today the figure is 863,000. Approaching one million dead.

As horrifying as that death toll is, looking back at it doesn't emotionally devastate me as much as learning two years ago that 250,000 would die in the future. I think I'm not alone in that. 669 days on, we're a bit numb to the unfathomable suffering this virus has inflicted.

Behind each of the 863,000 deaths are partners, children, co-workers, friends...a staggering heap of loss and mourning. And we're still losing so many every day. Yesterday 1,896 Americans died of covid.

I'm thinking back to one of the best courses I ever took: The Metaphysics of Time with the brilliant Derek Parfit who died in 2017.

His 1984 classic, Reason and Persons, describes humans' seemingly inherent "bias toward the future"—a tendency to discount pains and pleasures in the past and to over-weight the value or impact of pains and pleasures in our future. He thought this bias to be irrational.

I remember taking issue with his thesis, as we have at least some control over what happens next but little say (as long as we lack time travel) to affect the past. So it seems rational (I thought) to value our futures more than our pasts.

But our relative numbness toward the nearly 1m dead in our country from a novel awful virus does seem to me now to be irrational and pernicious—and we should try to fight against it.

A proper sense of the devastation will screw our heads on straighter to confront the virus as it continues to harm and kill us. Practical decisions about vaccination decisions—personal and political. Weighing preventative measures against their social and economic cost.

And taking moral stock of a shock that has taken so many of our fellows from our midst in such a short time. We might not always be breaking down and crying over the 863,000 dead, but we should try to feel that weight from time to time.

END