I think people essentially have a responsibility to make sure they have enough slack, so that they don’t burden each other unnecessarily. i.e don’t pursue strategies that’ll reliably make you constantly need help from people around you, if other strategies are available. This includes noting how easily stressed out you are, and accounting for it. But, the thing is that covid was just a huge slack cost that was overdetermined to overwhelm many people’s usual slack buffer.
I think it’d probably have been a mistake to be maintaining enough slack for covid not to fuck you* up (that’d mean you’re just leaving value on the table most of the time. You can’t be prepared for every single type of emergency that might come up. I think people should maintain enough slack to weather, like, 3 minor emergencies coming up in a given week without having to dip into reserves, and covid just continuously soaked up more than that allocation each week, for months on end)
*for many values of ‘you’. Obviously some people vary here.
On the other side of the equation:
I think people essentially have a responsibility to make sure they have enough slack, so that they don’t burden each other unnecessarily. i.e don’t pursue strategies that’ll reliably make you constantly need help from people around you, if other strategies are available. This includes noting how easily stressed out you are, and accounting for it. But, the thing is that covid was just a huge slack cost that was overdetermined to overwhelm many people’s usual slack buffer.
I think it’d probably have been a mistake to be maintaining enough slack for covid not to fuck you* up (that’d mean you’re just leaving value on the table most of the time. You can’t be prepared for every single type of emergency that might come up. I think people should maintain enough slack to weather, like, 3 minor emergencies coming up in a given week without having to dip into reserves, and covid just continuously soaked up more than that allocation each week, for months on end)
*for many values of ‘you’. Obviously some people vary here.