Dang, it was weird how a lot of people believed that a relatively-mild disease to which we now have vaccines meant that everyone should basically stay locked inside forever, wasn’t it?

I mean that’s weird, right? I think it’s weird, and I like inside.

To be less flip, I think a lot of the above has to do with the creeping neo-Puritanism of our age, and the extremely low tolerance for risk we have developed. Judging from Twitter the pandemic basically turned a lot of left-y people into self-martyring Howard Hughes figures, content to sit in their small apartments, washing grocery packages off post-delivery and clucking their tongues at anyone who dared to do something bad like go to the beach or walk down the street outside sans mask.

It’s all very performative, too, of course. But much of it is sincere — those people truly are scared in a way that’s impossible for those of us not galvanized by fear to understand. I would feel sympathy for them, but I also hate them too much to really do that.