The Awesome Science of Chinonomics

The more you want to get away from it, the easiest it finds you. Bad news and ominous signals have an inexorable way of powering their way to your skull. Regardless of how badly you want to get away from them. Our loss aversion makes us more attentive to bad news, because not acting on negative risk meant literally dying when we were apes.  Wanna know the saddest part of all this? This is still very much true in the year 2022.  I remember telling myself once and again when I heard nonstop reports on Russian amassing troops on the border with Ukraine before the invasion:  "Enough already! This whole 'will-he/will-he-not invade' non sense is getting tiresome. Of course Putin won't invade! I'm sick of this media alarmism. I mean, the costs are massive. Ukraine is too big a country. It's not Syria. It borders NATO, for God's sake! All Putin has to do to win is retreat, don't invade, and say 'See? I told you! Biden's a warmonger. I told you all along...

Another cycle around our star and we're still stuck in the same rut. Still talking about dealing with uncertainty; about counting your blessings; about stopping and smelling the roses because  life is short  and it's better to appreciate the small things when a virus can snatch your life away any second should you dare step outside. Is Omicron deadlier? More contagious? Resistant to Pfizer? To Moderna? How many mutations did you say it had? Does it evade natural immunity? But it doesn't affect your smell? Oh, the symptoms are the same as the common cold? But masks still work, right? Oh, but not cloth ones?  The noise is  maddening .  Our hyper-mediatized, over-stimulated minds can't think of nothing other than what's in our handheld screens. And at the same time, our hyper-cynical minds won't believe those very same incessant, flickering alerts, either. Somehow our collective mind has entered a sort of  Schrödinger -like, superposition state. We  ...