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Comment by Aloha | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who went thru went felt like a life changing (and life challenging) event, like the pandemic, is not going to behave in the same way people used to (before they had those experiences).

Because of social media, and the media - people felt, quite acutely - the very real risks of COVID - basically people felt (with some truth) that they were lucky to escape the pandemic alive, and because of this, are acting in a YOLO way - you saw people behave the same way 100 years ago from the combined effects of the 1918 Flu Pandemic and World War 1 - all over the world, but particularly in the United States.

I dont think we're really fundamentally understanding the real world psychological effects of the Pandemic and the psychological effects of feeling like we were living in an emergency for 18-24 months - and I think it'll likely take a decade or more to really analyze and process this.

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I appreciate your perspective, but I'd like to provide an alternative viewpoint. I think only a minority of Americans were really effected by the pandemic in the way you're describing. Many Americans did not believe a pandemic was happening, or had ever happened. Many believed the pandemic was real, but worked through it anyway because they had no choice. Only a minority of Americans believed the pandemic was real, and could afford to rearrange their whole life accordingly.

I think there's a lot of reasons for runaway spending, from feeling overly optimistic about the economy, to feeling overly pessimistic about the economy, like the extravagant spending of Russian nobility on the eve of the February Revolution of 1917. It can even be the case that multiple groups are spending a ton for different reasons.

Everyone was affected by the pandemic. Red state, blue state, service worker or constant zoom meetings, everyone was impacted. Local government, personal political views, socioeconomic status and everything else had an impact on how people experienced the pandemic and for how long (in some places things went back to more-or-less normal sooner), but there's no question that the entire world felt the impact intensely.

I think the thing that matters is how people perceive it now. If the US went through another epidemic with a similar mortality rate, I think that there would be greater resistance to masking. I think that people would compare it to Covid-19, say "we already did this once," and just skip it.

How they perceive of it now, and how it effected them psychologically are not the same.

I'm sorry, you're wrong - and I dont say that lightly.

My roommate worked a service job during the pandemic, went to work every day.

He couldn't go shopping at a store for 6 months, he couldn't go out to eat for a similar length of time - there was social pressure on him to not do these things even once they reopened for fear of harming others. Social Media was acidic, and the mainstream media was.. upsetting, to put it politely. I'd also note that we are in Texas, which didn't keep its restrictions as long as NY or CA, and it was still traumatic.

All but the most crazy anti-vax nut jobs believe the pandemic happened, I know folks who would otherwise lean very conservative take it quite seriously - do you know why? they saw the morgue trailers. I know others folks who didn't who behaved the same way after watching a loved one die. The folks who didn't believe are not a small number, I'll admit - around 15% of the country - but polling backs up people believing the illness was real, and that it was dangerous - the level of danger however did vary in intensity by partisan paring.

For the record, I took everything very seriously; I wore masks everywhere and I was fortunate enough to work at home, have groceries/alcohol delivered, etc. We have different sources of anecdotal evidence, sure, but from my anecdotal evidence, I think everyone was very spooked for 1-3 months, and then by the end of 2020 most people were back to "YOLO, whatever". Especially in Texas, I worked a lot there during that time.

> The folks who didn't believe are not a small number, I'll admit - around 15% of the country

I think this is a lot closer to 25%, or higher. I don't know how to explain it, but a stupid number of people just did not give a shit. I guess because at it's peak Covid-19 was 10x more fatal than flu, but still not fatal enough for everyone to care about? I took it seriously, but I learned that a lot of people would literally rather take a chance dying, than wear a mask for an extended period of time.

> I think this is a lot closer to 25%

This is a completely idiotic number, I'm sorry. That's over half of people who claim to be conservative. Half. I live in Wisconsin and know of exactly zero people who deny the pandemic. I know one that still shoots up horse dewormer when he gets the sniffles, but that's one person out of many, and that's blatantly not denial.

Denial that it ever happened vs denial that it was as bad as it was (ie that reported Covid deaths match reality) are two different things.

I know quite a few conservatives that think some combination of: it’s just a flu, not actually a problem, we’ve gotten Covid many times and we were fine, death numbers are all made up, doctors are getting paid to mark deaths as Covid caused, and many other hysterical conspiracy theory beliefs.

I think you’re not in the same circles of folks that believe this stuff.

>Denial that it ever happened vs denial that it was as bad as it was (ie that reported Covid deaths match reality) are two different things.

Agreed. I interpreted GP as referring to the former. The latter is a much larger group.

> I know quite a few conservatives that think some combination of: it’s just a flu, not actually a problem, we’ve gotten Covid many times and we were fine, death numbers are all made up, doctors are getting paid to mark deaths as Covid caused, and many other hysterical conspiracy theory beliefs.

Same, but I know more that then got COVID and changed their tune. Many are close family.

> I think you’re not in the same circles of folks that believe this stuff.

Do not assume you know anything about the people I'm around, you do not.

> Same, but I know more that then got COVID and changed their tune. Many are close family.

Likewise, although unfortunately the folks I know have not materially changed their attitude. I know someone who has gotten it 4 times, apparently, and still spouts conspiracy theories and just shrugs it off. I guess he's gotten lucky that it hasn't caused him a lot of problems.

I had a very similar experience, however it was Nebraska, not Texas.

Pandemic happened and everyone went panic mode for about two weeks. Local government said they were going to base restrictions off one metric, hospital capacity, and then things sort of went back to normal as the city hospitals weren't overflowing for very long.

People did die, but the it seemed like all the people who got screwed had obvious and major pre-existing conditions and the community was generally surprised they had made it as far as Covid in the first place.

No one I knew thought it wasn't happening, but the media response versus the severity of the problem on the ground seemed at odds in the area.

In the US, roughly a million people died of covid during the pandemic. That's ~1 in 340 people, or roughly two Dunbar's numbers (150). Meaning that every 1 in 2 people was 'close' to someone that died of covid. That plus the restrictions and all the other jazz. It was a lot.

Personally, my family lost 5 due to covid. And we lost another 3 during the pandemic that we had to digitally mourn too[0]. The family is still not processing all of it very well, as a fair few members are still at very high risk and travel is still restricted for us. It's as if those years didn't really happen. Personally, I have a hard time remembering 2020-22. There are just gaps in my mind.

I'm not the same person I was after it. My spending is a, to be honest, a bit more free now. There really is a sense of YOLO in my life. Not a very large sense, but a sense all the same. Seeing so many close family members die, sometimes at their bedside, it affected me. I know now, in some very small way, how short my life is. How precious it is, how frivolous it is. I'm personally still dealing with a lot of that memento mori.

[0] I will forever hate zoom because of those horribly dumb, mismanaged, separated funerals. Fuck's sake, digital cruelty.

> That's ~1 in 340

To put that number in perspective, on a regular year around 1 in 150 die.

1 in 340 over 2-3 years is shocking for the individual of course, like every death, but not a huge offset from that number.

It's very hard to properly contextualize the number, however. For example it's true that the total number of deaths only increased by about 10-15% during COVID which is not trivial but also not a catastrophe either... however, you also can't really compare how people lived during COVID where everyone was isolated, to a typical year where people would be exposed to far more risks just naturally.

You could imagine that if hypothetically everyone lived the way they lived in 2020-2022 with little travel, little outdoor exposure, deaths would likely plummet, and yet even with all those restrictions deaths increased by about 15%.

It's very hard to get a sense of how much of a threat COVID posed since there's not much that it can be compared to.

A proper contextualization of the number must include how old the average covid victim was. In my neck of the woods at least, hospitalizations and deaths were heavily skewed towards those in their 70s and 80s respectively.

Those numbers were about the same throughout the USA:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7218a4.htm

For example, in 2021, 95k died were 85+, 110k died were 75-84, another 110k from 65-74. But that rate of death for 85+ was 1.6%, and then .6% (75-84), .3% (65-74), .1% (55-64), .09% (45-54), .03% (45-54).

oh, guess I shouldn't be sad then

I am sorry for your loss, it must have been a horrible year.

You cannot apply that analysis because the deaths were not randomly sampled. They were hyper concentrated on certain demographics that also largely separate social networks.

I would guess Most people did not lose someone close (for conservative definitions of “close”). Given that you did lose someone close, you probably lost more than one.

People in my family tend to die younger for other reasons (cancer, MS), so not many were old enough to be in that category of people who were most vulnerable to it. On the other hand, I knew people with lots of elderly relatives, and they knew and were close to more than a few who died.

yeah, 5

At one point, there were so many people dying some areas, that the dead had to be kept on ice until someone could come pick them up from their families homes. Obviously this happened in low income areas more than elsewhere.

Many people died, and were buried without a funeral or wake. Many people couldn't even visit their dying family members, and had to make do with video calls to their loved ones, all alone and hooked up to machinery as they passed on.

This was definitely a traumatic event. Looking at annual numbers glosses over most of the horror and shock of it. No wonder the Economists don't get it.

Underrated comment.

You hear constantly about how people in the USA who went through the Great Depression became lifelong hoarders, etc.

The idea that folks who went through a massive global pandemic (which, unlike the Spanish Flu, was liberally reported on in the media) wouldn't realize that their life is short and act accordingly is... funny.

I mean the next 20 decades weren’t great for Europe after the Spanish flu. Hope it’s not that

America had a boom then, and arguably so did europe in culture at least certainly.

That said, much of europes economic generation, was the flower of whole nations youths being stolen by flanders fields - either literally in death or psychologically. Nevermind the social and political upheavals seen in around half of europe from WWI - Britain which escaped more unfazed than most of europe from physical damage, still had a mix of cataclysmic change and steady social progress (unwinding of the values and cultural norms of the victorian/edwardian era) - and also suffered vast amounts of deaths.

National identities were formed too, Australia, Canada and New Zealand all or in part formed their national identities out of the cataclysm of WW I. This doesn't even account for the new nations formed all over Europe, The Middle East, and Africa because of The Great War.

I have heard so many people say "life is short, why wait?" in the last 18 months, maybe before that - I've seen people quit jobs, relocate, buy houses - do all sorts of things they wanted to do that made them feel more fulfilled, or just happier. I've even made choices of my own with a very big eye on mortality.

We might have been waiting before, but as I said elsewhere in thread, I've experienced three once in a lifetime type events since a turned 18 - why should I wait? I want to live the life I want to live. Pandemic for me tamped down any FOMO I might have, but did not tamp down the YOLO - because of that, why wait?, do the things you want now, while you can, bring joy and warmth into your life, experience new things - because you never know when the bottom might fall out again.

Didn't read the article, only this thread.

It's a lack of hope. There is no signal in sight that housing will go back to the affordability it had five years ago. The fed and corporations are making inflation worse, and while the government spending of the pandemic seemed wise to keep the circulation flowing while we were on pause, it does seem to have screwed the little guy with no house or stocks.

So if this is as good as it gets, why save or have hope? People getting by will just keep getting by.

At least that's my take.

I see some of that, but I don't think it's all that, there is a lot of YOLO too.

Inflation isn't great for people with stocks, and high interest rates are the main thing that can apply downward pressure to housing prices.

People with lots of debt have it rough right now. The little guy with no house or stocks, but no debt, however, has more of a chance to catch up when hard-earned assets depreciate via inflation and high interest.

Inflation is actually pretty good if you have debt, the debt is in fixed dollars, your wage will likely go up.

the average US wage hasn't kept up with inflation since, like, the 1970s.

Doesn't matter it still goes up, the mortgage note you owe 75000 2003 dollars would cost you 126000 now. Because while it's true in 2003 you made 35000, and now you make about 60000, you're still slightly ahead.

If you had lots of debt and lots of assets even if in 2020 that was a net zero of you made it to 2022 you became insanely rich in the last couple years

Yeah, what's the point of saving? You put money in your bank account, it'll be worth only two-thirds of what it is now, despite nerds on the internet telling you inflation is at 3.5% or whatever. And I look pretty askance at investing on corporations that are not what they used to be, but lumber on.

Obviously the smart thing is to try to make money and then turn around and invest it in Amazon. But to what end? I make pretty OK money but no amount of that will let me afford a house, and I already have a terminal degree. Better to use my money to spend more time with my child.

This is all assuming you have stable employment and a 6-month rainy day fund, not having those things is a little too much YOLO for me.

I feel like people that ask what the point of savings is are younger and haven't experienced a housing crash. Every boom has a bust and anyone who has gone through things such as the housing crisis, dot com bust, or previous crisis know that savings through a bust you will end up really well off on the other side.

Even just the most recent housing crisis as an example. Houses crashed hard and if you had saved you could afford a house. History says that there will be an opportunity to buy and just be prepared for when it is time.

If the great depression lead to hoarders what will Covid lead to? Lifelong TP Hoarders?

I haven't interacted with another human being face-to-face without a good n95 on since 2019, so probably stuff like that

And the fact that the disease itself was mild for most people didn't change the fact that people's lives were put on hold for 2 years. Even if you didn't feel like you "survived" it still put front and center that our current way of life isn't a given.

Yeah, you're capturing my perspective exactly.

It was arguably the psychological impact of the on hold feeling that did more to explain now, than anything about the disease itself - though the pandemic did make me personally acutely aware of my own mortality - and I dont think I'm the only one.

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