The Atlantic ran a story on Sunday, “Now Is as Good a Time as There’ll Ever Be to Leave Your Pandemic Bubble.” The target audience for this piece are the folks who’ve treated every word out of the mouths of the public health experts as gospel when it comes to Covid and how they should live in light of it. The disconnect for them now is that many of those public health officials are now humming a different tune, and they’re at a loss as to what to do. This piece is well worth reading as it really helps anyone on the other side of this, gain a far better understanding of the struggle these folks are having simply letting go their beliefs and ideas.

In reading this article I did run across a term I had never heard of before, a “risk budget” and the advice of the Atlantic to it’s readers is that they should really stop tracking it. My first thought was “what’s a risk budget” and secondly “how come I had never heard of it till now?” Here’s how it was described in the article:

“People can stop keeping track of their ‘risk budgets’ like earlier in the pandemic and just do things without agonizing over whether saying yes to one thing necessitates saying no to another.”

My first impression was that these folks were giving themselves a little budget for risk and keeping track of how it was spent. So, like a dollars and cents one, once you’ve spent what was in budget to do something risky, like go to a restaurant, you’re risk budget would be spent. You might have a budget of 2X a month to dine out and once you did that, you would have to wait till next month to do it all over again. Not my idea of fun, but I guess it worked for them. However, as it turns out that wasn’t its entire purpose, this budget also demonstrated to your friends, family, and colleagues that you took seriously your social contract with them and humanity at large!

A “risk budget” is much more of a virtue-signaling face saver for when friends catch each other doing something risky, like going to a movie. While you’re both in line grabbing popcorn, you profusely apologize and tell them that you’re only there because even though a movie wasn’t in your risk budget, since you gave up a trip to the mall last week and knowing you can’t go anywhere else the rest of the month, you’re really trying hard to enjoy this night out, which explains the jumbo tub of popcorn, pop and KitKat bar! They need to worry, you’re committed 1000% to your social contract with society!

I’m not sure about you but living in this virtue-signaling Covidian community sounds exhausting to me. But then again, if you’re sense of self-worth and wellbeing comes from how others see you, regardless of whether what you’re doing makes any scientific and or practical sense, then I suppose adhering to Covidian rules and legalism, such as “risk budgets” is worth the “brain damage”