Living through a pandemic - some thoughts

After an initial entry describing some basic aspects of viruses and two entries on how our society was when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, it is time to look a bit deeper into some of the vulnerabilities in our societies that the pandemic has brought to life. The previous entries were looking at the past, while here I intend to add some ideas on how to re-define our lives once the pandemic is over. For today, we will get started with selfishness, something I touched upon slightly in the previous entry of this blog. From selfies to selfishness One of the main words added to our vocabulary in the last years has been “selfie”, intended to define a photo taken of oneself with our own mobile phone. It should be placed in a special location or while we are doing something particularly interesting. In many cases, the selfie is uploaded to social media to show others our achievement. Unfortunately, too often the selfie is more important than the experience itself. For instance, it is...

After the first entry introduced some basic notions on how viruses work and emerge, I want to start talking in this entry about where we were, collectively, in March 2020. I am sure that, when times goes by, we will all remember what we were doing when the COVID-19 hit us, in the same way that most of us remember what we were doing on September 11 2001 (in my case, I was doing some examinations for a job). Collectively, as mankind, we were in a very fragile situation, like the pandemic showed us. I focus here on taking things for granted, leaving for a future post the issue of the shift in values in society and public health and education. Taking things for granted In the evolution of our society over the last decades, we collectively developed a thinking where many things were taken for granted, making us less aware of the effort necessary to keep them working and moving us towards the fulfilling of our own personal needs exclusively. We got used to having our consumption needs ...