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Relative Truth

Very timely reading when feeling sorry for ourselves given what the past few years have put us through. We experienced a variety of problems during the time but having to live in the aftermath of a big volcanic eruption sounds orders of magnitude worse:

The ash spewed out by the volcano likely led to a fog that brought an 18-month-long stretch of daytime darkness across Europe, the Middle East, and portions of Asia. 

And that was before being hit by the bubonic plague. Yet on the hyper-local scale of a person, where they are born, the societal expectations of a what a "good" or "normal" life might be sets the baseline. When you drop and continue to drop further down from there over time, then you have reason to believe you are living in the worst time possible. In 2019 drying of a flu was no longer the expectation so when that started to happen randomly and in large numbers without any cure in sight, it was a bad time unlike any other some people have memory of. 

But the experience has no doubt produced a hardening effect - no matter who you were before this whole thing started you feel less invincible and more resigned to forces beyond your control. Maybe that is the benefit of feeling like you have lived through the worst time in history whether or not that is the objective truth.

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