After my rant below, I thought more about how people do truly seem to enjoy living in fear. It’s not just fear that’s the thing; that might be real or it might be an affectation. What’s beyond the real is the sociality of the fear experience, similar to how a couple might watch a horror movie together to cause them to become physically and emotionally closer.

It seems like now about 25% or so of the population is relying on that pseudo-prosocial shared distress experience for some form of bonding and for a gratification of the need to feel that their life is meaningful and fulfilling. This is a sickness, obviously, and one that will be difficult to eradicate. Just as when one has acquired a taste for some other harmful element, such as heroin or violence, this fear-based pseudo-sociality is and will be extremely addictive. This is the basis of the lockdown worship and the desire to only resume life when everything is deemed “completely safe” (which in reality means never).

I was wrong, mostly, about the hikikomori equivalence. That phenomenon is based on some other lack, some other absence not present in the lockdown lifer types. These new refuseniks are more equivalent to the Saudi Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, and thus even less interesting and more annoying.

I’m getting tired, but will probably have more to say about that later.

But now is the time to resist these anchorite nutters. Now is the time to lampoon them, to torpedo their lockdown life aspirations, to not amplify their aims, to annihilate their ambitions. They have and will harm more people then Covid ever could and they should be shut down fiercely and unmercifully.