Absolute Zero: Aiming for the Impossible Renders Us Motionless

In considering the various ways in which Canada (and the West in general) may be considered broken, I can't help but think one of the reasons we remain so is due to our recent puritanical streak. 

This is part of a general reflection on the fact that while I, like most, am beyond ready to move on from Covid - I think moving on entirely would be a mistake, unless and until we address why we behaved the way we did during that era. Because there were many previously simmering issues that simply boiled over during that time - and they will bubble up again if we don't deal with them properly. 

Take the attitude that led to the pursuit of Covid Zero.

It is an attitude that is at once unrealistically optimistic and deeply cynical. 

Cynical of people's ability to interpret nuance, and optimistic as to our collective ability to overcome the reality of how humans actually behave by the sheer triumph of will (reference definitely intended).

As one example, at the apex of our Covid panic, many experts and the media argued mask mandates should remain in perpetuity because reversing course if conditions change is too difficult for the average person to cope with. 

Yet at the same time, iniitial (realistic) concerns about people’s ability to consistently use masks correctly were memory-holed in favour of a call for total compliance with mandates.

At once, people were thought incapable of adapting to change - yet also expected to comply with drastic changes indefinitely, without error.

There was nothing new about this attitude. Our approach to emergency alerts in Canada might have given us some insight into how we would react to a thing like Covid.

When these were introduced to all mobile devices in Canada, an opt-out option was recommended so that users could disable certain notifications. Our regulators, however, thought it would be too difficult to decide which alerts should be optional. Due to this, our emergency alert system has only one alert level, which sounds like an air raid siren.

If you want to know if there's ever an emergency at the nuclear power plant, you have to accept that you'll be startled awake every time an Amber Alert goes out, too. 

The argument was that either you should bear the "trivial" inconvenience, or turn off your phone completely to stop receiving alerts. It was not acknowledged that while Amber Alerts are important, and people who call 911 about them are selfish - perhaps there was, nonetheless, some merit to considering that the system could have accommodated different alert levels.

Decision makers in our country seem to have forgotten that if everything is an emergency, then nothing is.

Similarly, they've overlooked the fact that goals need to be attainable to be effective.

Vision Zero is a prime example. Introduced in Toronto in 2017, this strategy - part of a global initiative aimed at eliminating all traffic fatalities and severe injuries - has failed to significantly reduce traffic deaths. Even during the pandemic, motorists continued to kill dozens of pedestrians and cyclists each year.

My inclination would be to strive for something less lofty and more specific than “eliminating all traffic fatalities and severe injuries”, which is obviously impossible. For example, we could attach actual consequences to killing someone with your car in Ontario - preferably consequences that can't easily be escaped by saying you were distracted by a water bottle.

Similarly, it would have made more sense to me had we focused our efforts and resources on protecting the most vulnerable from Covid, rather than trying so hard to convince young people who were not at risk that it was nevertheless crucial that they avoid it at all costs. The goal of Covid Zero ultimately led us to make decisions that were far more damaging than if we had done nothing at all.

Real solutions can't be found in platitudes.

Though it may sound motivating in theory, believing we can achieve perfection is quite debilitating in practice. You'll never feel achievement when you set an impossible goal - only like your efforts will never be enough, since there's always so much more work to do. And while it is admirable to strive for better - to never acknowledge or celebrate progress is demoralizing. Only the truly obsessed can remain motivated by a sense of constantly not being good enough.

Clearly, our politicians and bureaucrats still have not learned this lesson.

Consider our recently updated alcohol guidelines, here in Canada.

Prior sensible advice that suggested that men should limit alcohol consumption to 15 drinks per week and women to 10 drinks per week has now been replaced with the recommendation that the consumption of any amount of alcohol is not safe - and if you must drink, you should not exceed two drinks a week, because even the tiniest amount of alcohol can harm your health.

As such, it is a true Zero in the sense that its backers have pretty much no chance of achieving what they intended.

No one will be surprised to learn that pleasure wasn't taken into account. According to one of the experts behind the new guidelines, she and her colleagues placed no value at all on such qualitative benefits.

I'm not sure why so many people seem to be taking this approach lately. We know that fear-based health messages are far less inspiring than positive health messages.

The fact that more reasonable advice often gets buried within the bulk of zealot-style recommendations like these strikes me as particularly interesting. In the opinion of the same expert, the beauty of this new guidance is that it emphasizes that any reduction in alcohol consumption can be beneficial, even if you're only willing to reduce it from 30 drinks per week to 28. That's wonderful, according to her.

So why not lead with that? More people are likely to find it palatable (and doable) to drink less than to never drink at all.

It is true that radical claims, such as the new drinking guidance, generate attention - but they are not likely to result in positive behavioural changes. As people turn off Amber Alerts due to overuse, so will they tune out lifestyle recommendations that don't consider that most people actually value enjoying their lives.

Call me old fashioned - but I believe the point of setting goals is to eventually accomplish them.

At absolute zero, the lowest temperature possible, particles in a substance are essentially motionless. In black holes (regions in space where nothing can escape their pull), when the temperature of a black hole approaches the gravitational singularity in which space-time possibly ceases and entropy is zero, absolute zero or possibly sub-absolute zero may occur.

In the same way, initiatives like Covid Zero, Vision Zero, Alcohol Zero, and the zero-sum approach to Amber Alerts render our energy unavailable to us. As a result, we become unable to move forward with more attainable goals. After all, if nothing less than (impossible) perfection will ever be good enough - then what is the point of doing anything at all?

I plan on reflecting more on things like the Absolute Zero mindset - because while Covid will always be with us, nonsense like this doesn't have to be. It is important to repel draining attitudes like this and focus on more positive approaches that limit or reverse the energy loss we are all feeling in our post-Covid world.

As a society, we must not fall into the black hole that is puritanism, or we will never be able to move forward.