Blah

I woke up a little dejected this morning. With a sense of futility and fatigue that eclipses the extremes of physical and mental burnout. The best word for it is probably blah.

I saw the Barstool founder eloquently rant away about the totalitarian lockdown. And then there was banter between him and Musk.

I then read about how Russian doctors are dropping like flies — diseased, either mentally or physically, while somehow falling through windows.

My morning coffee ritual is a conversation with my uncle who I am locked in with. He talked about how one of my grand aunts was stuck in Singapore for a couple of months. She just got jetted into India. And is now held in quarantine for fourteen days. She will be tested, and then “released.” A weird kind of prison. He uncharacteristically philosophized well: “What has life become?”

I thought about my two phone conversations with migrant workers yesterday. Both were organizing large-ish groups of people — family, friends, ten, twenty, forty people. They had just been bussed from Maharashtra to Madhya Pradesh. They had arrived so close to their home yet were forty kilometers away.

They had no money for the last mile, to get them to their homes. It was a weird kind of torture. They needed a few thousand rupees to organize private transport to get them home. Otherwise, they would have two options: walk the forty kilometers, or stay there for the night and figure it out in the morning.

A friend who has been hustling to mitigate this migrant tragedy called frantically to see if I could sort them out quickly. Bless bank transfers in India because the solution was almost instant. After, one of them who I spoke to on the phone said: “You’ve become Godlike for us now.” And I was swept over with shame.

I thought about my introverted, genius uncle who has found a virtual extroversion through LinkedIn. With almost 150,000 followers, he has a voice. He has been extremely anti-lockdown, and not shy about it. He is one the most well-read and informed people I know, and cited evidence and reason to support his claim. He was swiftly banned by LinkedIn for opposing prevailing “best” practices. He has a following of both fans and haters. He has made it.

I thought about the two camps that are growing around a line of control that seems completely out of control. On one side you have the elites yelling “shut everything down”, “lives matter more than economy”, “black swan!”, etc. And then you have the other side where the elites are also yelling “free us!”, “the economy matters and might take more lives”, “<0.5% mortality rate”, “this is an invasion on our freedom”, etc.

It is just so hard to know which camp makes more sense. The answer always lies somewhere in the middle. But even the middle can be slightly skewed one way or the other. What way then? And does it even matter what I think?

And this brings to mind Haidt’s wisdom— once we put our opinion out there in the public — on Twitter, on LinkedIn — we defend it religiously, sometimes beyond reason. Our pride gets in the way of us changing our mind. A fear that we might be framed hypocrites. Because social status is everything. And never has it been easier to gain it. And lose it. So, once you gain it, does it not behoove you to try and keep it? At any cost?

The kicker is that we are not necessarily aware of this. The smarter you are, the better you are at deluding yourself to believe your stance. The better you are at finding evidence that supports your claim. So, what is balance then?

If you are not spared for being wrong, there is no incentive to change your mind, or chase truth. I wonder if my genius uncle, Fauci, Musk, Taleb, Naval will ever change their mind. There is so much to lose.

While us privileged few contemplate what is the best course of action, or try new recipes, and spend more time with our children, or fight the moral dilemma about wanting to spend less time with our children; there is this whole other distant, less fortunate world out there that is only getting more distant. How does our privilege impact our moral obligation?

Never have I felt so strongly about my moral obligation — I am lucky to sleep eight hours every night, in air conditioning, eating delicious food during this unprecedented modern tragedy. All the while, there are billions living their worst days. How can I not try and do something about it?