Sense of Loss

Normally, when I come up with something for "The Short Form," I create it as an image, and share it that way. I don't really know why I started doing that, other than it seemed like a good, or at least interesting, idea at the time.

But the original idea behind "The Short Form" was that sometimes, what started out as a long and involved post (and some of these can be very long and very involved - if only they were as informative) can be boiled down to a sentence or two. Presenting them as large images really just makes them take up space. So today, I'm going to dispense with it, and just go for the simple bit.

It is a measure of how well off we actually are that certain things foregone due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic are counted as serious losses, rather than trivialities.

As I've pointed out before, I've become fond of the saying from the older episodes of Doctor Who that "I didn't know when I was well-off," and I am reminded of that often by the way people speak of the things given up due to the pandemic. I don't mean to write these things off as "first-world problems," because for many people, they are legitimate problems. But I wonder if the focus on them blinds people to what life needed to have been like previously, for them to have become problems in the first place.