Many can escape the pandemic already. They can just refuse to socialise. Yes if they have kids, if they need…

Many can escape the pandemic already. They can just refuse to socialise. Yes if they have kids, if they need hospitals or aged care (for example), they will have enforced high-risk situations. But quite a lot of people are not in that situation. A short thought experiment. /1

I’ve lived a fairly normal life, without catching Covid, for the entire pandemic. That’s because social life (including travel) has never been a great desire. I’m not a hermit. I have lots of friends. But I don’t crave social events. /2

I have kids, who have had to go through school and now university, during this pandemic. They’ve also even able to avoid Covid, except for one who caught it at university. They masked to do this. So we did find a way to manage that high-risk situation. /3

We’ve also socialised with friends. But in controlled situations. Always outside. It can be done. No doubt we’re socialising less, because we’ve excluded indoor things. But life is still good. I’ve always been a person who likes their own company. /4

I’m inviting a partial reframing of this pandemic here. That sees the worst challenges of it as being partly also of our own making. The number who seem to desperately need continuous social connection. To involve themselves in mass gatherings. To travel, above all. /5

It’s a criminal disgrace that we’re allowing Covid to spread. But in a way Covid is attacking that part of our lives that was already *hypersocial*, unhealthily so. You can see it in all the stories about ‘loneliness’. How ill-equipped many are to be alone. /6

As if continuous social connection is the default state for human health and happiness. To me that’s a mistaken idea. Social connection is violence. Driven far more by the desire for conformity, than by individual happiness and health. /7

Our ‘mental health’ has never been more fragile than since the introduction of social media, vastly accelerating our supposed connection. In reality imposing a relentless, unending, anxiety-producing game of social comparison and conformity upon us. /8

What I sometimes call high school life, scaled up to all life. The continuous battle for identity in groups/teams, in battle with other teams. Who wants that shit? Not me. I similarly have minimal stress on this platform, because I simply refuse to play the team sports. /9

Reality acts in mysterious ways. As much as anybody I want Covid gone, so the full range of life is available to me and my family. But even then, I would still be very sparing in the social side of that life. Human development uses sociality as a stage. /10

A pathway to individual self-knowledge. You’re supposed to need friends and sociality less, as you age. Not more. As you come to mature self-understanding. You need people less. You’re placing less burden on them. You still have family and friends. But you *need* them less. /11

That’s what the saying you’re born alone, you live alone, and you die alone means. Not that you’re a hermit, but that you’re always existentially alone, really. No other person can ever really understand what being you is. Nor should they, they have themselves to understand. /12

Friendship and our loves are encounters, between strong independent souls. Or they should be. Not the team sports of trying to find an identity in a status hierarchy, through eternal social events. It’s a false binary to say being less social is being more ‘anti-social’. /13

There’s always a silver lining. Covid is attacking our hypersociality, our culture infected by conformity and comparison. Those pretending to love ’living with’ Covid are destroying themselves, doing it. You have some power here, to choose less social life. /14

And thus much less Covid. Perhaps even none, depending on your circumstances. Pandemics reboot societies. This one is doing it right now, we’re just very short-term in how we frame it. /15

Alongside the horrendous toll it’s taking on those who can’t avoid it, it is also at the same time attacking the worst aspects of our cultures, too. The smug status quo is being eaten away from the inside. It just doesn’t realise it. Yet. /end