Consider this thought experiment. If you received an elixir that stopped you from ageing and prevented all disease, what would your life look like?
You might think you’d be brimming with excitement and ideas on how to spend your indefinite quantity of time on earth. You could go anywhere, do anything, and literally have all the time in the world to do it.
I would suggest that this is the wrong answer. You would in fact be so petrified at the possibility of having an accident that might lead to your death – perhaps on the road, or on the path of an e-scooter, or even cutting some carrots – that you would be too scared to go anywhere or do anything.
The paradox here is that unlimited life span could actually diminish your quality of life because of the paralysing effect of anxiety, since any accident that could end your life would be too great a threat compared to infinite years of health. The risk of living a normal life would seem too great given how much you could lose.
In a sense, I think this is why the world is going for lockdowns. We have managed to extend human life span right up in to the 80s or 90s, and we can manage most diseases. The greatest idol of the modern age is the cult of health (witness: gym obsession, NHS worship, etc).
So, how do we react when an uncontrollable virus comes along and we haven’t quite got enough time to scramble and create a vaccine? When pandemic strikes – as has happened umpteen times in history – what is different this time about our reaction?
It seems to me that this is the great different: Now that we have drunk deeply the elixir of health, there is no greater threat than a calamity we can’t control or a disease we can’t stop. And so, we have entered a state of collective paralysis and anxiety in the form of lockdown. It is the desperate attempt of those not ready to die to deny the inevitable and control the uncontrollable.