Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Takeaways from one year of lockdown, published by mingyuan on the LessWrong. As of today, I've been in full-on, hardcore lockdown for an entire year. I have a lot of feelings – both about the personal social impacts of lockdown and about society being broken – that I won't go into in this public space. What I want to figure out in this post is what rationality-relevant lessons I can draw from what happened in my life this past year. (Meta: This post is not well-written and is mostly bullet points, because the first few versions I wrote were unusable but I still wanted to publish it today.) Observations Some facts about my lockdown: I have spent 99.9% of the year within 1 mile of my house Up until last month I had spent the entire year within 10 miles of my house Between February 29th and June 15th of 2020, I did not set foot outside of my front gate I have not gotten COVID, nor has anyone in my bubble I have incurred an average of 0 microCOVIDs per week The absolute riskiest thing I've done this whole time cost ~20 microCOVIDs I can only remember talking to a friend not-in-my-bubble, in person, twice Some observations about other people with similar levels of caution: Almost no one I know has caught COVID, even though Zvi estimates that ~25% of Americans have had it (the official confirmed rate is 10%). I know of only one person who caught it while taking serious precautions, and I know a few hundred people about as well as I know this person. (see also) I was recently tracking down a reference in the Sequences and found that the author was so afraid of COVID that he failed to seek medical care for appendicitis and died of sepsis. On negotiations: A blanket heuristic of "absolutely no interactions outside of the household" makes decisions simple but is very costly in other ways microCOVID spreadsheets are useful but fairly high-effort I went on a date once. The COVID negotiations with my house were so stressful that I had a migraine for a week afterwards. On hopelessness: I spent a fair amount of time trying to get vaccinated early, and failed. I now appear to have a belief that I will never succeed at getting vaccinated; and further that other people can succeed but I never can. Related: My system 1 believes that lockdown will last forever. Also that vaccines aren't real – not that they don't work, but that they're a lovely dream, like unicorns or God, that ultimately turns out to be a lie. A vaccine cannot cause me to leave lockdown because lockdown is an eternal, all-consuming metaphysical state. I would have liked to be dating this year, but the first date and the surrounding ~week of house discussion was so stressful that I gave up on dates entirely after that. I notice that I feel the lack of friendships, but wasn't motivated enough about any particular friendship to put in the effort to make it work despite the situation. By contrast, some people I know did do this and have benefited a lot. My house had ~3-hour meetings ~3 times a week at the very beginning of the pandemic, where people did math on the board and talked about their feelings and we tried to figure out what to do. In retrospect, this burned me out so much that I gave up on trying to figure anything out and defaulted to an absolutely-zero-risk strategy, because at least that was simple. The fact that SlateStarCodex went down at the same time everything else in life went to shit destroyed my soul. Oops I have started talking about feelings and will now stop. Taking all these observations together, it's clear to me that my social group has been insanely overcautious, to our great detriment. I think this has been obvious for quite a while, but I didn't and still don't know how to act on that information. It seems like extreme caution made sense at first, when we didn't know much. And by the time we k...