Conversation

Just reflecting on how pandemic has completely cornered attention far beyond anything I’ve seen. Beyond fall of wall, gulf war, 9/11 etc by orders of magnitude. It hasn’t just sucked attention away from those activities, it has shut them down. Life is domesticity and distancing
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For the first time I grok what it means to “have no life” but oddly enough I’m living a lot. Maybe you can’t have a life and live it too? Maybe normal was a kinda theatrical deadness. There’s a meditative quality here, being forced to focus on living rather than on having a life.
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Condition reminds me a bit of Ursula Le Guin’s depiction of 2 worlds in The Dispossessed. On Urras people had lives. On Annares, people lived. It was an anarcho-syndicalism world, so I guess we’re all anarchists now. Domestic cozy anarchists.
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It’s not a great state but it’s not terrible. I can imagine life on a planet that’s permanently like this because everything is lava. Annares was a harsh desert world.
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Kinda sucks to live with a 24h horizon on endless repeat though. Groundhog Day. Except at an intellectual level we’re trying different things to figure out an exit.
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Cracks me up that there’s a real apocalypse scenario here: no vaccine, no treatment, too much mutation for herd immunity, morphing attack, and the thing just kills another big slice of us each time we try to open up until collapse. Very low likelihood but not zero.
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Like a horror movie where a group is trapped in a cabin and each time one of them makes a run for it the monster gets them. But food is running out in cabin. So only a matter of time before the monster or starvation gets them.
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Something very mellow, gentle and contrarian about this apocalypse. Like the big bad wolf being murdered and eaten by grandma
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Replying to
The best way to directly feel the other-worldly character of this is to go on a drive more than a quarter mile from your house, then it really sets in Reminds me of when I was living on a tall ship for weeks and when we took out a dingy to see the ship from the water... Surreal!