Lockdowns have been instigated under two premises: they save lives, and saving lives is unconditionally of greater importance than protecting the economy or quality of life. Both of these premises are false. Distancing does not save lives. It will probably kill over 100 times the number of people that it supposedly saves from dying of COVID-19. Regarding the second false premise, it can be easily proven that the length of one’s life is not more important than its quality.
Ask yourself why you want to continue to live. This is not a silly question. Many people do not want to continue to live. If you are one who does, what are your reasons? I want to continue living into my 70s, perhaps longer if my health and quality of life are adequate. When I think about why I want to keep living, I think of things about my life that I enjoy. For me, these include the company of my loved ones, going to church, nightlife, and sci-fi films in the movie theater. Every reason I have for wanting to keep living involves aspects of life which I find enjoyable or rewarding. If I were to die, I would not be able to engage in them. My quality of life would become zero.
Strict social distancing is disagreeable for the same reason that death is disagreeable. Both prevent people from deriving enjoyment from life. The only difference is in degrees.
Continuing to live is desirable to the extent that it allows one to enjoy life. For people who are very advanced in age with very poor health and quality of life, a natural, peaceful death is often welcome. I am not theorizing here. Elderly people with poor health have told me that they wished they would die soon, or had died years earlier when their quality of life reached unacceptable levels.
Surveys have captured this phenomenon. A Pew Research survey in 2013 found that 14% of Americans want to die before they turn 79. A Japanese study found that the average preferred age of death for twentysomethings is 77. Note that the current life expectancy in Japan is 84. We can learn from these surveys that many people feel that there is no point in living if quality of life has fallen too low.
In a lockdown, quality of life for many people is dismal. An April 2020 poll found that half of Canadians saw a drop in their mental health from the lockdown, with many reporting their happiness in the 0-4 on 10 range. In Malaysia, the number of people who rated their quality of life as low pre-lockdown was 35%. During the lockdown, it was 77%. The number of Danish women that rated their quality of life as low rose to 42% compared with 17% before the lockdown. A review of two large-scale national surveys in China by John Hopkins University found a jaw-dropping 74% decrease in emotional wellbeing since the lockdown began.
The collapse in happiness and quality of life arising from social distancing is a worldwide phenomenon. As distancing continues and government paychecks become harder to come by, poverty and lack of social connection will keep pushing downward the dividends paid from being alive.
Strict social distancing is disagreeable for the same reason that death is disagreeable. Both prevent people from deriving enjoyment from life. The only difference is in degrees. For the deceased, enjoyment of life is zero. For people under lockdown, it is a fraction of what it was when they were free. Besides causing people to die early, lockdowns take away life in a qualitative way.
To illustrate how quality of life is the only factor which makes death undesirable, look at comas. Imagine this scenario: you were in an accident that caused you brain damage. You entered a coma which you would remain in until you died. The brain damage also prevented you from having dreams. Ask yourself, if you would prefer this situation to dying at the time of accident. The quality of life of someone in a coma who is unable to dream is zero. The quality of life for someone who has died is zero. With both at zero, one outcome is not obviously better than the other. Someone in a coma is certainly alive, but all of the benefits from living are absent.
There is no such thing as valuing duration of life more than quality because the duration is only valued because of and to the degree that it has quality. Social distancing destroys lives both by causing early deaths and by severely limiting the happiness, personal growth, worship of God, and all of the other components which comprise our reasons for valuing being alive in the first place. In a lockdown, everyone is partially dead.
