Since I only post something here when I have something I want to get off my chest and use as a reference for later, I haven't needed to post anything for a while because there haven't been any new topics in the public discourse in a while, so I haven't had any new opinions in a while. No apologies for that. But now of course we have something that affects everyone, and I have strong opinions about it, just like everyone, but of course my opinions don't line up with anyone else's, just like always. So here are my opinions on the pandemic and why I have them even though nobody else agrees with me.
This is related to my previous post I called Morality of Death, where I raised a lot of questions but didn't give any answers, because there really aren't any answers to them. I gave my own views a little but I didn't explain a whole lot about them, so let's start with a recap of that:
1) Death is inevitable. Lives are never "saved", only extended.
2) Quality of life is more important to me than life itself. This may take a little more explanation, because most people are going to disagree with this statement. My values are influenced by things I've already written about elsewhere, but the short version is that I don't actually have anything left to live for. That statement sounds more bleak than I mean it to. I'm now 35 years old and I've already had a full life packed with all sorts of transformative experiences. I've already done most of the things that people want to do with their lives. See my post called Lowering the Bar for a list of them. But as that goes, I'm married, gainfully employed, and have already checked off everything on my bucket list except for two or three that realistically are never going to be checked off (I'm already too old to canoe down the entire Mississippi, I'm never going to be able to afford to build a 500-foot single-room tower to live in, and nobody else in my community has any interest in creating a community support network). And my wife and I don't have kids, and we aren't going to. That's a big one. So this effectively means that at this point I am just marking time and waiting for the end, because I have nothing left I want to do. I can't kill myself because of my religious beliefs and the pain I don't want to cause my wife and loved ones, so here I stay, living a completely meaningless life and just waiting. For this reason, I value the quality of the waiting room a lot more than people who still have things they want to accomplish with their lives or who have kids filling them with motivation to stick around and keep achieving things. I pass the time with lots of hobbies that keep my brain occupied, but that's about it.
3) For me, a life of insufficient quality isn't worth living. I'd be better off dying and freeing up the resources I'm taking up for the use of others.
This brings me to the reason for this particular post.
Because I'm definitely going to be dead 100 years from now; and I value keeping the time between now and the time of my death fun and comfortable (in ways that don't violate my morals) more than I value putting that time off for as long as possible; I don't really care whether I survive this pandemic or not. For that matter, I don't really care whether my family members survive it or not. Sure, if they die, I'll be very sad, but refer back to point 1. At some point, they're going to die anyway, and if I'm still alive when they do, I'm going to be very sad. So we might as well die now as any other time because it's not going to be any less sad, any less painful, or any less inevitable for people I love to die 20 years from now than it is if they died today.
Because I have those values, I'm more than willing to pursue the herd immunity approach until a vaccine becomes available. Historically that's the best solution for the long term. We're not still dealing with the Plague of Justinian in 2020 because eventually it killed everybody it was going to kill, and everyone alive today is immune to it. This is a better approach than the classic example of an eradicated disease, smallpox. Smallpox could still come back and become a pandemic again because we eradicated it through vaccines, not through herd immunity. It's a dangerous biological agent, even a potential weapon because of that. Justinian's Plague is done. People don't want to go the herd immunity route if there's a way around it because it has such a high up-front "cost." Just letting nature take its course and letting the virus run around until it can't kill anyone anymore is going to result in an awful lot of deaths. But again, I disagree with pretty much everyone that those deaths are actually preventable. They're not. All we can do is postpone them. And for people who actually have something to live for, they might want to postpone it as long as possible, but that doesn't invalidate my views based on my values.
Would I take a vaccine if it became available? Sure, because I don't want to infect people who don't want to die. But until one does, I still say let it do its thing. The more people get infected now, the fewer people have to worry about weaponized Coronavirus after it's eventually eradicated. And if those people die of it, those people were always going to die anyway. We all are. And I'd rather leave an immune world behind when we do.
