Everyone is Insane Right Now

I'm not trying to be insulting, I really think understanding this is helpful in making sense of the world right now.

My kids and I have been watching the Simpsons, which is genius.

On one of the episodes we watched recently, the family gets an above-ground pool. And suddenly Bart and Lisa are super popular. All the neighborhood kids are over every day.

But then Bart breaks his leg. He can’t swim and has no one to hang out with him. At one point in the episode, Marge worries openly about Bart. What she says is: “he’s becoming isolated and weird.”

When she said that, I thought THAT. That is all of us right now: Isolated and weird. We are all broken leg Bart! Isolation does things to a person, bad, bad things.

To be clear, people have always been crazy. But in the past, we were insulated against this specific kind of weird-isolated crazy, somewhat. Used to be, not that long ago, we lived with half a dozen siblings in modest ranch houses, sharing bedrooms and all eating dinner together. Our aunts and cousins lived on the same block. Mom drug us to church or whatever religious service, and made us sit in pews with dozens of neighbors and next of kin once a week. We were enmeshed with each other not so much by choice, but by default. That was accepted as being good and necessary. Moms, who typically played a role in ensuring all this happened, quietly gluing everything together, still had the muscle to pull that off.

But now everything has shifted. Going to church and sitting in a mind-numbing mass on an uncomfortable bench in itchy clothes and sharing a bathroom with three siblings — we were more than happy to throw those things off. Turns out though, those were the very things keeping (most of) us from being broken leg Bart: isolated and weird.

Now we can’t make institutions like schools work, because we can’t solve problems because we lack the basic social etiquette that makes society function. Everyone is insane. You can continue to go out in public and do your best to try to be a healing presence, but — guess what? — you’re going to get hit with some strays now and then. It’s unavoidable. You can be one of those socially gifted Homecoming Queen types (which I never was, to be clear), it doesn’t matter. You are going to encounter behavior that is so wildly anti-social and so completely out of left field, you truly can’t believe it. This is part of it now. You should expect it.

During the pandemic, the effects of all this could not have been more obvious. People lost their minds. I am more immersed in the lefty side of the social sphere, so again I will pick on them. But we were deeply, deeply unhinged.

We simply COULD NOT have reasoned discussions about serious tradeoffs without it turning into an absolute and total flaming of other people, friends! neighbors! coworkers! Anyone who raised sort of questions about the preferred progressive response — near total isolation! — it did not matter who they were (pediatricians!) was risking being called a “eugenicist!" who “wanted people to die” etc. To be fair, this was mainly weirdos online, but since we were all stuck at home (us “nonessential,” college educated people) that’s how we were mostly experiencing other people. And it was extremely DARK.

I know many healthy young people who continued to isolate AFTER receiving vaccines (the idea being that if they got covid they would surely get LONG COVID and be permanently disabled). People were just mainlining pro-isolation rhetoric on Twitter. People like Ed Yong, who for some reason at the time was the toast of the journalism world (groan!), predicted that as many as A THIRD of Americans would be PERMANENTLY DISABLED by long covid, FFS, before accepting every journalism award known to man and riding off into the sunset. 🥴

People — the people who were mainlining this kind of content, consuming it uncritically (and they tended to be more privileged “non-essential” types) — were absolutely hysterical. New York Times subscribers shared stories of how they isolated young children. “His father and I have been his cellmates,” wrote the New Jersey mother of a three year old, adding that the pressure around it had almost destroyed her marriage.

Young children were always extremely low risk for serious Covid problems. (When my whole family got covid in Dec. 2020, my youngest, who was four never even became symptomatic.)

Still, whether their parents were hyper-anxious NYTs subscribers or their parents were essential workers and their school activities were just closed for long periods, many kids were extremely, unnaturally isolated. In the aftermath, many of them couldn’t function very well in normal social environments like school. My own kid’s behavior — during a period of forced Zoom schooling — deteriorated so totally and rapidly, it was alarming.

There is a New Yorker series that looked at how teenagers in New York City spent this time and OMG is it disturbing. A lot of the kids sat in tiny bedrooms that barely had a window just staring at the ceiling. And the things that went through their minds in that time: no bueno. I recently read an article where a school teacher referred to kids who went through that as “A lost generation.”

An 18-year-old girl said this: