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It’s become quite common to find silver linings to the pandemic. We’re all quite sick of doom-and-gloom stories of how everything is terrible and disrupted and strange and uncomfortable, and how we want to get back to some pre-pandemic bliss.
Article by Joakim Book from AIER.
In this search for silver linings, many people talk about the liberations of working from home – at least among the chattering and privileged-slash-elitist classes that can do so reasonably well (the students, professors, journalists, accountants, lawyers, politicians, etc). We immediately cut out the commute, a necessary ill that most people have long complained about. We can work from our beds if we wish, or attend Zoom meetings wearing nothing but our PJs. We can spend more time with our loved ones, and walk the dog on our lunch break.
All of these benefits we didn’t think about and we’re just now realizing were always available to us. Simon Kuper of the Financial Times writes about the “blessed solitude” that we’re both allowed and encouraged to pursue:
“Last Saturday, I got coffee outside with a friend whom I’d barely seen all pandemic. Straight after bumping elbows, he proudly took out his phone to show me his latest medical tests: his bad cholesterol had plummeted because he had stopped eating out. He was happy not socialising. Invited to two illegal dinner parties the previous night, he had told each host that he couldn’t come because he was going to the other gathering. He then sat at home and watched Netflix. We enjoyed seeing each other, but in less than an hour we were both done, made our excuses and each retreated home to blessed solitude.”
Lots of people who have been fortunate enough not to lose their jobs (and even some who have) are richer today than they were before the pandemic. Household savings rates are through the roof and aggregate net wealth is higher than ever.
The message is pretty stark: if we haven’t gravely fallen victim to the disease or had loved ones suffer (or been depressed, or stuck home with abusive partners, or been lonely, or seen our grand youthful goals destroyed, or any number of ills the pandemic policies have unleashed on us…), we’ve actually had a pretty good pandemic.
Something is really weird about this take, and others like it. Many were indeed shoved into a new normal that initially felt uncomfortable and strange, but that they grew to like. As with many arguments that point to suboptimal actions and irrational humans, they rely for their existence on a combination of ignorance and malevolence; If something is less great than it could be, that can only come about in these two ways. Either you weren’t aware, which straddles the definition of ‘suboptimal’ – if you weren’t aware that there were proverbial hundred-dollar bills on the sidewalk, it’s not clear that you were suffering from the “suboptimality” either – or you knew, but were prevented to act on it by someone else.
But malevolence, and power to enforce it, are unstable traits; they gradually fall apart, as technologic change undermines the obstacles put in your way, and innovative human beings search for greener fields and greener tools elsewhere. At any given time some inconsiderate boss can refuse your want to work remotely, but over time it’s not clear that they can: bosses move on, information can be exchanged, negotiation takes place, and you can vote with your feet and simply leave for a less narrow-minded employer. It’s not like remote work was unheard of before the pandemic, and if your employer stubbornly refused, there were plenty more fish in the sea.
The thing is, most people who – before the pandemic – tried remote work or working from home, returned to the office. Remote work is hard: it’s often quite lonely; it takes mental work and discipline, and often a certain kind of character to do it for long. Most people who try find that they miss the social banter, the change of scenery, and the natural winding-down period of that ostensibly horrid commute. Everyone loves to complain about the commute and dream about a world without it, but it was never clear in practice that they actually dislike it – commuting comes with underappreciated benefits too.
Martin Wolf, a longstanding journalist also at the Financial Times, was astonished early in the pandemic that perhaps the world’s foremost newspaper could be run with no more than about five people on site. It’s unlikely that they’ll go back entirely to the way things were only a little over a year ago. Sometimes technology can advance quicker than we realize and undermine some of the reasons that prevented us from replacing previous routines with alternatives.
Dr. Joseph Mercola said, “Synthetic meat is the epitome of ultraprocessed food, and it seems naïve to think it won’t have health effects similar to other ultraprocessed junk foods.” For All-American REAL beef raised in pastures, sous vide, then freeze-dried for long-term storage, visit Whole Cows and use promo code “no junk” at checkout.
But the mistake is to attribute this change to the shock doctrine of the pandemic: if we truly do not value the physical nature of the office – including all what comes with it, from the water cooler chats to commuting, social events, or lunch with colleagues – once the technology of Zoom and internet and Trello and shared folders were widespread enough, we’d gradually see this change anyway as people voluntarily substitute towards what suits them better. We don’t need to be abruptly shocked into doing what we already, intrinsically, want.
Similarly, when we are abruptly shocked into different behavior, like during the pandemic, it’s not clear that it’s an improvement even if it might feel that way at first. It takes time to discover the full bundle of such a change and what you’re actually giving up: It’s naïve to think that just because some isolated aspect of our new lives, a mere tumultuous year in, seems not altogether terrible, that it’s therefore a move from suboptimal to optimal.
Here’s a counterintuitive conclusion that you, Jordan Peterson-style, can think about for a decade: most things we do, do more than the things we think they do. Institutions don’t just do one thing; incentives don’t just matter in one predictable way; activities, behavior, transactions, and beliefs are bundles of values and social interactions, the sum result of which we can rarely discern. When you buy your morning coffee, you don’t only mechanically do it for the coffee, but also, in part, for the barista’s pretty smile – perhaps the friendliest thing anyone does to you that day.
When you block out that smile with a piece of cloth and inconvenience yourself with mumbling into a mask of your own, you’re not maintaining your caffeinated beverage – you’re giving up a cherished routine, a social interaction, a small sliver of beauty. It might not be obvious yet that you’ve lost that until you feel depressed and lonely but can’t fathom why.
We almost never know the full bundle of what we are giving up. Individual, social, and professional structures are evolving processes, trial-and-error, where we only find out what works over time. “The only effective judge of things is time,” writes Nassim Taleb energetically in his excellent essay on the Lindy Effect – the tendency of things that have been around for long to stay around even longer. There’s wisdom in what works, what’s been time-tested, and what has been around.
Kuper tells of people who would rather spend an evening in front of Netflix than at dinner parties or pub rounds with friends. The strange thing is that that action was always available to you in the past, but you almost never chose it: that tells us something about your full, honest judgment and makes it hard for me to believe that the new state of things is really something you prefer.
“I’d like to retain some of my pandemic habits,” Kuper writes at the end of his piece, “such as spending one day each weekend entirely at home. But I suspect I’ll fall back into the unwanted pre-Covid whirl.” And in that sentence alone we find all that’s wrong with his approach: if it’s unwanted, why are you doing it? What could possibly pull you in, against your will – kicking and screaming, I’m sure – towards a “whirl” of friendships and events and social gatherings that deep down you really hate? Perhaps you could have claimed ignorance in the past, but after this year of trying you most certainly cannot. If you truly value that day at home every week, you’ll do it: “Do. Or do not do,” our beloved Yoda says in Star Wars, “there is no try.”
Align your actions with your values; and if you find that you routinely do what you profess not to want, perhaps it’s time to update the stories you tell about your wants. In what’s probably the favorite thing I ever wrote, I said that it’s fine to want any number of things, but “it’s not fine to delude yourself that you want those dreams if you don’t act on them. Dreams unaccompanied by action are empty wishes, deceitful words.”
For someone, somewhere, I’m sure the pandemic may have shocked them into a better path – That much is at least conceivable. But it’s naïve to believe that it’s true for most, or even many, of us.
‘The Purge’ by Big Tech targets conservatives, including us
Just when we thought the Covid-19 lockdowns were ending and our ability to stay afloat was improving, censorship reared its ugly head.
For the last few months, NOQ Report has appealed to our readers for assistance in staying afloat through Covid-19 lockdowns. The downturn in the economy has limited our ability to generate proper ad revenue just as our traffic was skyrocketing. We had our first sustained stretch of three months with over a million visitors in November, December, and January, but February saw a dip.
It wasn’t just the shortened month. We expected that. We also expected the continuation of dropping traffic from “woke” Big Tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, but it has actually been much worse than anticipated. Our Twitter account was banned. One of our YouTube accounts was banned and another has been suspended. Facebook “fact-checks” everything we post. Spotify canceled us. Why? Because we believe in the truth prevailing, and that means we will continue to discuss “taboo” topics.
The 2020 presidential election was stolen. You can’t say that on Big Tech platforms without risking cancelation, but we’d rather get cancelled for telling the truth rather than staying around to repeat mainstream media’s lies. They have been covering it up since before the election and they’ve convinced the vast majority of conservative news outlets that they will be harmed if they continue to discuss voter fraud. We refuse to back down. The truth is the truth.
The lies associated with Covid-19 are only slightly more prevalent than the suppression of valid scientific information that runs counter to the prescribed narrative. We should be allowed to ask questions about the vaccines, for example, as there is ample evidence for concern. One does not have to be an “anti-vaxxer” in order to want answers about vaccines that are still considered experimental and that have a track record in a short period of time of having side-effects. These questions are not allowed on Big Tech which is just another reason we are getting cancelled.
There are more topics that they refuse to allow. In turn, we refuse to stop discussing them. This is why we desperately need your help. The best way NOQ Report readers can help is to donate. Our Giving Fuel page makes it easy to donate one-time or monthly. Alternatively, you can donate through PayPal as well. We are on track to be short by about $5300 per month in order to maintain operations.
The second way to help is to become a partner. We’ve strongly considered seeking angel investors in the past but because we were paying the bills, it didn’t seem necessary. Now, we’re struggling to pay the bills. We had 5,657,724 sessions on our website from November, 2020, through February, 2021. Our intention is to elevate that to higher levels this year by focusing on a strategy that relies on free speech rather than being beholden to progressive Big Tech companies.
During that four-month stretch, Twitter and Facebook accounted for about 20% of our traffic. We are actively working on operating as if that traffic is zero, replacing it with platforms that operate more freely such as Gab, Parler, and others. While we were never as dependent on Big Tech as most conservative sites, we’d like to be completely free from them. That doesn’t mean we will block them, but we refuse to be beholden to companies that absolutely despise us simply because of our political ideology.
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