Yup, it’s me, back online, blogging again.
It’s been a minute since I’ve chronicled life online. A lot has changed since I blogged regularly. I graduated from Burning Man, after spending 12 years attending and working at the event. I’m glad I did it and equally glad to have moved onto other things.
Cooking is my primary occupation now. After cooking at a variety of restaurants I’ve landed in Maritime, cooking on boats. I spent almost three seasons on a river cruise ship on the Columbia River in the Pacific North West, and now I’m off to work Cargo ships as a Merchant Marine Cook. I keep saying it’s what I always wanted to be when I grew up, I just didn’t know it.
COVID of course quite literally plagues us all. It saddens me that the pandemic has caused so much discord. I remember when reading history as a high school student, how I use to wonder, how people just let things happen. Now, I think I understand a little more, that we have no real control over other people and their choices, but the choices of others, in this case, can and do effect us all.
This brings me to an article I read recently about a book about pandemics that was published just before COVID broke out. There’s also an updated paper from the same author that relates what was written in the book, specifically to COVID. Both are good reading, with the latter being academic in nature, thus properly referenced and footnoted.
The crux here is that COVID is not just a medical phenomenon. It is in fact a psychological phenomenon as well. Because of the nature of the disease, and how it is spread, COVID advances through our actions and the choices we make. And those choices are influenced by the information we choose to believe.
It’s a scary thought that the information we choose to consume can quite literally kill us, but here we are. The information age created a glut of information available through the internet. And, if we apply basic economics to online information, we understand that when there is too much of something, all of that product is devalued. It doesn’t matter how much of the information is useful or not. The fact that there is so much out there cheapens it all.
And now we have a conundrum. We are now required to judge which information is good, decide which outlets we trust and then make decisions from there. But, even if we are personally diligent about which information we choose to accept, people around us may be using different information and making their choices accordingly. So now we have factions based on who we choose to believe.
So, to the historians who may come across these thoughts in a distant future, it’s not that we let it happen. A lot of things contributed to this period of time. Look to how the value of information changed prior to the COVID pandemic, and see if that helps to make any sense of it.
Beyond Clarity 