There is a saying I was raised with. “If you save one person, it is as if you’ve saved the entire world”. I think what my community meant by it is that you may feel disheartened and give up because you cannot save the world. But saving just one life is so meaningful, that even if that’s all you can do, that’s enough.
I agree that one human life is of unimaginably high value. I also hold that two human lives are twice as unimaginably valuable.
-Eliezer Yudkowsky
As of today, globally, there have been 5 million, 280 thousand deaths from coronavirus. 5 million, 280 thousand people we failed to save. 5 million, 280 thousand worlds we could have saved.
We know all this suffering and death is bad. But it’s hard for us to visualize just how bad. We feel like it’s worse than one person dying. But we don’t feel that it’s 5 million times worse. It’s hard for us to conceptualize that much pain, suffering, and death.
It would take over 13 days to walk that many feet. That many seconds would be more than 61 days. Approximately that many years ago humans split off from other apes in the tree of evolution. That many miles is approximately 22 times the distance between the earth and the moon.
Each of those 5 million, 280 thousand lives is one person whose life was cut short. One person who had so much potential to do good. One network of people whose lives with never be the same after they lost someone they cared about. 5 million, 280 thousand lost lives that we could have saved. That’s too many.
Those lives are gone; we’ve failed them. We cannot erase our mistakes.
The monster that caused those deaths is not going anywhere. Covid continues to mutate and grow. It will be here. Haunting and stalking us. Wreaking havoc in its path. The world will never be the same.
We’re not playing for a “total victory” any more, we’ve already missed our chance at a “perfect score.”
This is a battle we’ve already lost.
A hundred billion people have already died.
Rome fell. The barbarian hordes flooded through its gates. There were a thousand years of darkness.
We’ve already missed our shot at a total victory. Now we’re just building the best future we can.
So don’t get paralyzed looking for the right thing to do. Just find the best action you can find, and do that.
-Nate Soares
So now, remembering the lives we’ve lost and the people we’ve failed, we move forward. We accept our mistakes and we find the best route forward. The route that does the most good going forward.
But tonight, we sit with the lives we’ve lost and the future we’ve lost, and we mourn. Tonight, we grieve for the world we do not have.
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