Depression and “general anxiety” – not linked to any specific problem or event -- are rising, especially among the young. The link between depression and proliferation of smart phones with front-facing (selfie-making) cameras is a primary topic of Jonathan Haidt’s elegant, engaging and important new book The Anxious Generation.
A sense the world is falling apart and we should feel awful hangs over our moment. This sense is hardly new: in the 17th century, Increase Mather declared everything going irrevocably downhill. But anxiety and depression grow worse at a time objective indicators of American society are mainly positive – less pollution, less discrimination, low unemployment, no food or resource shortages, ease of communication, higher living standards than any point in the past.
This essay will turn to the reasons for rising anxiety. First, a thought experiment.
Suppose the biology, virulence and origin (whatever it was) of COVID-19 was exactly the same, except that rather than masks, governments instructed people to wear a patch, similar to a nicotine patch, dispensing an antiviral therapeutic.
The antiviral patch is hypothetical, and unrelated to nicotine patches some are trying to palliate long COVID.
You wouldn’t know who was wearing the patch. Instead of masks being a clear and obvious political statement -- wearing one meant “I obey government,” not wearing one meant “I support Trump” – the patch would be an invisible private choice.
So you can locate me on the COVID spectrum: I am a firm believer in vaccines, taking them myself and having American Academy of Pediatrics-recommended immunizations administered to my kids. One of the best things to happen to society in our lifetimes is safe and effective vaccines. Many who complain about America are alive to complain because of vaccines.
I’ve had five doses of the Pfizer serum and will take another if my physician recommends it. I contracted COVID once and my symptoms were mild. Probably my inoculations played a role in that good outcome, though it’s impossible to know.
Of course the vaccine did not entirely stop COVID. Anthony Fauci was either a quack or simply lying by saying, “When people are vaccinated they’re not going to get infected.” But the vaccine lowered prevalence of the contagion and reduced severity of cases. Vaccine is the main reason COVID now acts like seasonal flu. The developers are heroes.
On the other hand, from the start I thought masks and lockdowns were a political sideshow. I wore face coverings only when given no choice.
By March 2024, even the New York Times would admit lockdowns did little against COVID, “while causing poor children attending public school to fall even further behind.” Because most private schools stayed open without problems, lockdowns made the rich-poor education gap larger. From the Times article: “‘There’s fairly good consensus we kept kids out of school longer than we should have,’ said Dr. Sean O’Leary, a pediatric infectious disease specialist.”
Now they tell us!
The Times offered these grudging admissions on page A13. The scare stories – the demands for lockdowns, masks and crash programs to build ventilators that would sit unused -- ran on A1.
In the thought experiment about patches, we assume the spread and then decline of COVID happened exactly as it did 2020-2023.
But there’s far less political theater. There is far less of the hard left demanding masks to show the populace is submissive, far less of the MAGA right shunning the vaccine at the risk of the lives of its members.
And there is no hiding of people’s faces.
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