A big question I have seen online and amoung my family and friends is 'when will all these crazy people finally take covid seriously?'. There are plenty of answers out there; when the hospitals get over-loaded, when everyone knows someone who has died from it, when we reach the symbolic number of deaths from 9/11 in a single day. However I think these milestones will only make the deniers even more obstinate.

It reminds me about trying to talk to someone about not eating meat. On average how easy it is to convince someone is directly proportional to how young they are. There are some obvious reasons for that; young people are more open to change, less set in their ways, more idealistic, more impressionable. However in my opinion the big reason is that the younger a person is the less you are actually asking them to do.

When you try to convince someone to not eat meat you're not just convincing them to not eat meat in the future, you're asking them to accept that when they ate meat in the past they were doing something wrong. The younger a person is the less your actually asking them to accept because they have been eating meat for a much shorter time, and most of it has been because they had to eat what their parents and school cafeteria provided.

I see this same dynamic playing out with convincing people to take covid seriously. At the beginning taking covid seriously just meant wearing masks and staying home. As the deaths pile up taking covid seriously no longer just means wearing a mask, it means accepting that our failure to take it seriously is why so many people are dead. The more the deaths increase, the harder it will be for people to accept it.

Anyway thanks for coming to my ted talk I guess. I had this bouncing around in my head and just wanted to get it out