Offline: #Hantavirus — #surprise, #complacency, and #peril, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(26)00963-3/fulltext

Safe and effective vaccines are needed, but none are available. These events are disturbingly familiar. They invite reflection about whether the lessons learned from COVID-19 have been truly absorbed by political leaders, and even public health authorities.

We Are All Living In A Bubble

All of us here on LinkedIn are living in a bubble.

The majority of the world is not here. They don’t even know about the technologies we keep posting about. The 3D printed rockets being launched out of Sriharikota by a 200 person team in Chennai. The battery innovations being worked on across labs and garages. The carbon fibers being manufactured for everything from aerospace to wind turbines. The vision robots being deployed on assembly lines. And so much more.

LinkedIn has around 150 million users in India. That’s roughly 10% of the country. A loud 10% that thinks it represents the conversation. It doesn’t.

But even within this 10%, we rarely get to know all the mind boggling research we are doing as a country. We are in silos ourselves. The FinTech crowd has no clue what the DeepTech crowd is up to. The startup folks don’t know what the manufacturing folks are building. Product people are blind to policy people. We scroll past each other’s worlds every day and somehow tell ourselves we are “well informed.”

I used to carry this misconception that the majority of Indians don’t have the time to explore and experiment. That people are too busy putting food on their plate. That curiosity is a privilege reserved for those whose stomachs are full and bills are paid.

The reality is starkly different.

Indians do have time. You can see it from the kind of reels that go viral. The kind of content broadcasters now produce, and the sheer quantity in which it gets pumped out. Hours of attention being burned every single day, by hundreds of millions of people. Time is not the bottleneck.

What we are actually surrounded with is complacency.

The world we see around us, or rather, the micro-communities we are a part of, are very tiny needles in a haystack. Silicon Valley is even more distant and far from the reality than we like to believe. The world is very, very different from the timeline you scroll. The conferences you attend. The Slack groups you belong to. The WhatsApp circles you orbit.

And yet, here is the part that should disturb anyone paying attention.

A further small tiny fraction of this ‘woke’ part of society living inside this bubble is the one running the show. They decide whether countries have food on the table or go to sleep hungry. Whether economies prosper or rot. Whether people live or die in wars they did not start. Whether the air is clean or carcinogenic. A small slice of humans, sitting in glass towers and group chats, deciding the fate of billions.

The bitterer reality is that the rest of us are not fighting back together. We are not banding up against the forces that profit off our exhaustion. We are fighting each other, over the same piece of bread.

The opportunity in this world is infinite. Look around. There is enough land, enough food, enough sunlight, enough talent, enough imagination. We are sitting on top of abundance and have somehow convinced ourselves we are in scarcity.

We invented the scarcity. We maintain it. We even defend it like it’s a family heirloom.

We lack critical thinking.

Even this very piece will be read by very few. There is just no clean way to make the masses aware of the narratives being sold to them. The narratives that make us fight over religion, caste, race, gender, geography, language, color, accent. Every single one of these is a human made construct. They were invented. By humans. First to organize, then to divide, then to rule.

The biggest enemy of humanity is humans.

We shut our doors at night not because we are afraid of lions and vultures, but of other humans. Around 440,000 people are killed by other people every year globally. Lions kill around a hundred. Sharks, fewer than ten.

And here is the part that really gets me.

We see more humans around us than any other creature on Earth. In any city, any town, any village, the species you encounter the most is our own. Humans and the animals we domesticated make up about 94% of all mammal biomass on the planet. We are everywhere. There are more of us than there have ever been. The streets are flooded with us. The trains are crammed with us. The malls, the temples, the offices, all us.

And we still can’t trust each other. We still find new reasons to bring harm to each other. We are the most populated species in our daily field of vision, and we treat each other like the rarest threat.

Where have we gone wrong?

Why have we checkmate ourselves into this artificial scarcity? Why does a species sitting on top of the food chain, with infinite capacity for cooperation, with the internet in its pocket and rockets in its sky, choose this?

It honestly feels like a prank stretched too far.

We can come over it in an instant. The moment enough of us stop buying the divisions being sold. The moment we stop seeing the next human as competition for the same loaf and start seeing them as the partner who can help bake a hundred more.

But for some reason, we are very fond of fooling ourselves.

The society is a joke. And the punchline is, we wrote it.

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“Listen to Mr. Complacency long enough and he'll convince you that what you really, really need is a nap.”
― Alex and Brett Harris

#Bot #Quote #Complacency #HardWork

Our society has learned to promote #complacency into a virtue. You call it a "moderate stance", and it's suddenly a good thing. Opposing evil is bad; it's extremist position, almost as bad as the evil itself. Complacency sounds bad too. But "hey, I don't support evil, I just keep an open mind, a moderate position here", and you're suddenly a praiseworthy person. Maybe "just a little, necessary amount of evil" is good, after all.

"I don't support slavery. I just want cheap goods, and I don't want to know how come they're cheap."

"I don't support animal cruelty, I just want cheap meat, and I don't want anyone to point out to me why it's cheap."

"I am tolerant of LGBTQ+ people, I just don't wanna see them."

"I don't want disabled people to die, I just expect that they find a job."

The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about it.
-- Albert Einstein

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #AlbertEinstein #Complacency #Evil

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Sunrise #SacandagaLake #Adirondacks #NewYork

Things I Never Thought I’d Tolerate

https://ericfoltin.com/2026/01/31/things-i-never-thought-id-tolerate/