Thread by @toastfloats

@waynemcdougall and @Thoughtfulnz 's posts have embedded in my brain the forecast metaphor, whether it's for drying the laundry or for covid. By extension, I think I understand the people saying to me yesterday apparently sincerely, "It's such a surprise, covid is everywhere!?"

They are the people that are surprised when it rains.
They are the ones angry at Uber spot pricing.
They are shocked when they hear a tsunami siren blast.
They don't have an earthquake kit in Wellington.
They 'live my life without fear'.

The benefit of moving through the world with no awareness of risk is the 'freedom from fear'. This willful ignorance is a strategy. The theory apparently is that there is less existential dread which makes one happier, more relaxed.

Of course the downside of this ignorance is the complete lack of preparedness makes a person more vulnerable when the risk materialises as an issue. It is quite a mission to gather resources as you evacuate a hurricane zone and you don't even know the route out.

So we wake up in Dec 2022 with people genuinely shocked at the high rate of covid around them, the sick friends, peers, and family, the short supplies at the pharmacy for basic respiratory illness palliatives, the closed restaurants. But at least they weren't living in fear!

We'll wake up in Mar 23 with people joining the #longcovidnz support community to figure out how to manage symptoms that they had no idea could be so severe. Young, previously healthy and fit adults who didn't live in fear. They will be surprised. Why didn't anyone tell me?

The central purpose of a forecast is to enable us to evaluate a future probability and put in place strategies to either capitalise or mitigate based on what we project. If you choose not to engage with the forecast, you've made a choice.

What this pandemic has done to me beyond the medically obvious is destroyed my empathy for people who choose to avoid fear, forecasts, and the future. When Wellie pops off, if you don't have food, water, and good boots, I'm at a point where I don't think I'll have any f*s left.

I hate that for myself, tbf.
However, I live in a world where risk and reward are real, where statistical probabilities are useful to help me plan, whether it's my laundry, a volcano in Auckland, or a system failure for our web site at work.

Because my view of the world is so alien to the fearless, they believe it must be horrific. They apparently think I cower in my house, terrified every day. This isn't the case. I've climbed mountains, ridden bikes across countries, sailed across oceans.

Every single adventure from floating down the Nile to anchoring off remote islands in the South Pacific involved risk, sometimes substantial. Every time I 'lived in fear' by preparing myself, my boat, my family, my finances to reduce both the likelihood and impact of disaster.

My strategic choice is the opposite. I consume forecasts avidly. I have spent decades learning how to interpret them, how to tease out the signal from the noise and convert them into next actions. We prepared for many disasters that didn't happen on our journeys.

We also prepared for disasters that did materialise. I have no regrets whatsoever for the epinephrine we carried but never used; We had the supplies we needed when a fellow traveler lost a finger in a storm.

This too is a lifestyle choice.

Who really can say which of us -- those who use forecasts and act accordingly or those who choose to willfully ignore them -- is living in greater fear.