"I have an immune system. It will take care of it."
That's the kind of quack medical assurance I've heard from several middle-aged people who think they got this global pandemic thing licked. Close to 150,000 dead, but they know their immune system well enough to declare victory. Well, blow me down.
It must be nice to have such faith in your body. The same body that betrays you every time you drink one too many or think that burrito will land in your stomach just right this time. Why not go ahead and play in a junkyard or a sewage plant while you're at it? Don't worry, you'll walk out fine.
No one is saying you can't strengthen your immune system, but this is not what these confident idiots are doing. They're simply building up faith in something invisible, something unpredictable, and something even doctors don't fully understand. Why do some people get this virus? Why do some shake it off? And why do others suffer? No one knows for sure.
Leaving your responsibility to a system you don't understand means you're free to do whatever you'd like. The system will take care. And these people are not alone, I'm including myself. Before the pandemic, I thought prolific use of hand sanitizer did more harm than good. I believed jiu-jitsu was one of the best ways to stay healthy, despite the high probability of injury. I figured mediation wasn't for me cause I tried it for a month and saw not one superpower.
Joe Dirt discovered this deflection of responsibility too. In arguably one of my favorite films of all time, Joe finally found himself in front of his parents. He had been searching for them ever since he was young and the family separated during a trip to the Grand Canyon. But when Joe found them, as an adult man, he also found the courage to confront them about how exactly they didn't go right back to the Grand Canyon when they found out he was missing. Dirt's father nonsensically replies, "Hey, how exactly is a rainbow made? How exactly does the sun set? How exactly does the Posi-track rear end on a Plymouth work!? It just does."
But of course we know rainbows are made when the sun is behind you and water particles in the sky refract the sunlight at different angles. And we know a sunset happens when the Earth rotates enough so the sun peeks out its head and wakes up way too early. And Posi-Track? Well, that's a shortened generic term for the GM-branded name "Positraction." It is a type of limited slip differential. Duh.
Just because something has a name doesn't mean we understand it.
Benjamin Hoff points this concept out simply in The Tao of Pooh:
Curious: "Why do birds fly South for the winter?"
Scientist: "Instinct."
It means, "We don't know."
What I'm trying to say this time around is we should all be sure of what we don't know. We don't know how this virus works. Or how our immune system functions. We might know how a rainbow is made, but why? That's only a guess. All we can do is what we've evolved to do - explore. Just like Dirty Joe Dirt, we need to keep searching and never settle for less.
And with that being said, let's check out some other cool stuff I found this week:
A big inspiration for this week's piece was the animation for John Lloyd's TED talk - What's invisible? More than you think.
The YouTube algorithm got me with this title - New Study Reveals Why You Procrastinate (Not Laziness or Time-Management) It's an interesting perspective for something we've all already talked about a million times over.
If you have $4 and you need a 90's action comedy, I highly recommend renting Three Ninjas on YouTube. I watched it like crazy when I was a kid but kidnapping surfer dudes getting murdelized still gets me.
Did you know if you get high enough you can see that rainbow isn't a bow at all? It's a circle. Dude.
Talkin' about invisibility, why is no one rich and powerful acknowledging the horror of Ghislaine Maxwell? Comedian Andrew Schulz might have a theory.
Until next time...