When will it all end?

El_Duderino 09 wrote: »

Did someone say anything bad about people enjoying themselves in nightclubs?

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

Ok, one yes or no question and I'll go from there:

Are you personally willing to countenance the possibility that crowded scenarios such as nightclubs, concerts, festivals etc may be permanently banned because of COVID and potential variants etc?

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

Ok, one yes or no question and I'll go from there:

Are you personally willing to countenance the possibility that crowded scenarios such as nightclubs, concerts, festivals etc may be permanently banned because of COVID and potential variants etc?

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

Firstly, I have repeatedly answered straight questions from you, it's just that you choose to ignore my answers

Secondly: Permanently, no. Fair enough. In that case, at what point in terms of mass vaccination do you personally believe it would be appropriate to allow such mass gatherings again?

Again, this is about what you personally believe. Forget about NPHET, Leo or anyone else. Out of curiosity.

Quantum Baloney wrote: »

You might spare a thought for those of us who are not intending to have the vaccine but who have anyway had to live through a year of restrictions and lockdowns because of gullible individuals like yourself who go along with everything they're told.

Don't worry, you'll be patted on the head like a good dog when you get your vaccine (and annual boosters) and be allowed to travel. Now can you finally leave the rest of us alone.

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

Fair answers, and no I do not.

I do, however, believe that a point will come at which for the sake of not just the economy but the nation's mental health, we will have to make a judgment call on this - and I personally believe that that point is going to arrive before the end of this year. I certainly don't believe that two full years of that kind of lockdown, as has been recently raised as a possibility by Leo and others, should be countenanced at all. I think that's fundamentally where we differ.

I'm saying all of this as somebody who has close family and friends who are severely immunocompromised, by the way. Anyone suggesting that I'm taking this lightly couldn't be more wrong, myself and my family have been overly cautious about COVID since literally the first case was reported in Ireland (close family member's doctor told him that he'd be advised to get out ahead of this before things got bad) so I very much take it seriously and understand the risks.

However, I also understand the serious risks to mental health which come from having the only sources of happiness taken away from people, and for many, many people, being surrounded by people is that source. Therefore I believe in balance on this, and I don't believe "however long it takes" is an acceptable answer. At some point, we have to talk about balancing the risk of COVID outbreaks leading to death by COVID, and existential misery leading to death by suicide. That's all I've been saying pretty much all along.

I think what many here don't understand (and I get this, having been a full-on internet nerd for my entire life I totally get that many of us are far more introverted than others and thus find this situation easier to cope with) is that for a huge proportion of people, life without mass gatherings is genuinely a life not worth living. Maybe it's because some people need a lot of background noise to drown out their inner demons. Maybe it's because some people don't have as many close friends as others and need the experience of a crowd in order to compensate. Maybe it's because some people have never known any other way of socialising since they were young.

Whatever the reason, the bottom line is that there are people - and I know some of them, so I can say this with 100% certainty - for whom an indefinite ban on mass gatherings, as has been either deliberately or inadvertently raised as a genuine possibility by the media over the last month or so, will fundamentally result in a "f*ck this, life is going to be sh!t from here on out and I'm not bothered sticking with it" mentality.

That isn't hyperbole - I've caught myself feeling like this several times since the idea of quasi-permanent social distancing started being raised and I've had to seriously catch myself. I'm lucky though in that I survived a brush with suicidal ideation in my early 20s (when I say ideation I don't mean the vague ruminating kind, I mean coming within a hair's breadth of actually going through with it and surviving honestly by the grace of God, happening to get a random phone call which interrupted me in what I was about to do) and as such, I have a very specific set of coping mechanisms and internal dialogue with myself which I use to talk myself down from such thoughts. What's alarming is that I haven't had to call these into action since that horrible night in 2011. They've been deeply buried inside my psyche for almost ten years. But the suggestion of social distancing being a permanent reality (and thus, by extension, the thought of never getting to sing my heart out in a gigantic crowd of similarly singing people) was more than enough to dig that sh!t up from where I'd buried it.

I have those coping mechanisms from when I felt like this before, so I know I'll survive the current lockdown. I know of many people who never faced this in their lives and are genuinely scared at where their thoughts have been leading them over the last month. I know this because I've been relatively open about my prior experience over the last year and thus people are comfortable texting or calling me to talk about this where they might otherwise hesitate. And I can tell you for a fact that it's been the idea of "mass vaccination by Autumn, yet we still need a lockdown in Winter and "well into next year" -> mass vaccination doesn't solve this -> we might never get to dance again until we're f*cking middle aged" which has directly precipitated that sentiment.

I'm a musician and I grew up surrounded by musicians, so naturally my friend group skews overwhelmingly extroverted - the kind of people I mentioned above who need crowded dancefloors and mosh pits in order to feel alive. And all of us were more than capable of tolerating this quarantine situation for as long as it took to achieve mass vaccination. What isn't ok is the idea that even after mass vaccination, this "new normal" won't go away, and the one thing which makes life worth living for us will never return.

Whether intentionally or inadvertently, that's the conclusion many are drawing from the government and the media's messaging over the last several weeks. And you can tell us we're misinterpreting things or misremembering things, but I think the bottom line is that once such "misinterpretation" is applying to dozens upon dozens of people, not just a few outliers, it's an indication that either the messaging from those in charge has been sh!te, or that they've left so many gaps and vacuums in their discourse that peoples' minds are having to fill in the blanks on their own. And just like watching a horror film, when one is already in a heightened state of anxiety, one's mind will tend to fill those vacuums with worst case scenarios - indeed, this psychological device has been employed by writers in the horror genre since time immemorial, and is one of the reasons many horror movies and stories which never directly show you the monster tend to scare people a lot more effectively than those which eventually have a big reveal.

What I'm basically saying is that we eventually need to have a conversation about balancing the risk of death by COVID outbreak and balancing the risk of death by loneliness-induced suicide. We cannot countenance this "only if this or that" conversation - we need to publicly acknowledge that eventually, mass gatherings must return, COVID risk or not, ineffective vaccines or not, etc, because without them, people will die from another equally potent epidemic.

Right now, the national discourse is skewed far too much in the direction of "as long as COVID remains a threat, we can't gather - and that has no end date whatsoever". We need to have a conversation with the balance of "Eventually, we cannot countenance banning people from gathering anymore, even if we've thrown everything including the kitchen sink at suppressing the pandemic and it hasn't worked". That needs to be acknowledged in the public discourse. Right now, it isn't being, and the fact that it isn't being is causing an unimaginable wave of existential dread among those many, many young people I've alluded to, for whom a life without crowded spaces is a living death.

Eventually, we have to be able to have a conversation around "even if the vaccines don't work and covid is still with us, there's some kind of cut-off point at which we have to allow people to socialise again". That's all I've been saying. The current discourse of "some undefined and vaguely explained date months or years after mass vaccination" is unpalatable to many people and is running the serious risk of causing a cascading series of mental health breakdowns. And folks here can accuse me of being hyperbolic in saying this, all I can say in response is that I know my sh!t for the reasons I've outlined in this post. It's not a theory, it's a fact.

The current discourse is already causing a slide into extreme depression and hopelessness among many young people in that extroverted bracket, and something needs to change fairly rapidly about how those in charge are talking about the future, or they are going to end up killing people. It's as simple as that.

gozunda wrote: »

For myself - those who are in the main making claims 'we will be in lockdown forever' or wtte are those who are using that idea to demand we "open up now".

Batattackrat wrote: »

Are people actually fretting about under 18's been vaccinated. Most of them don't even know they have Covid or might have a slight cough or slight fatigue and that's it.

Once the over 70's are all vacinated it's time to go to Level 2 and no reason why the country shouldn't be fully open when everyone over 55 has go the vacinne.

bucketybuck wrote: »

I believe that what they actually want is the government to recognise and properly discuss the concept of "living with covid", instead of basically avoiding the question like they have done to date.

This government has done nothing except hide its head in the sand hoping that covid would go away, it has improved nothing, answered nothing, implemented nothing, a year later and still we have no response to covid other than lock our doors and hide.

People would not be discussing "lockdown forever" if our leaders had shown any inclination to an alternative.

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

This, exactly. The suggestion of social distancing even after mass vaccination and "well into next year" implies that "living with covid" is somehow synonymous with "never having a proper party or night out again". It implies a willingness on the part of government to take the view that if we can't eradicate the threat from COVID through vaccination or other measures, we can eradicate social outlets, and that this is an acceptable paradigm for those in power. That's what's caused so much fear among young people over the last month - the idea that we have to wait and see if we can reopen social outlets after vaccination implies the possibility that we can't. And for most people, the possibility that we can never socialise without keeping 2m from other people again is something which should not be discussed as a theoretical reality which we might actually implement.