Travels and Timeframes

Hi there. I haven’t written a lot over the last couple of years and thought I should check in, you know? Let everyone know how I’m doing. The last few years have brought about a great deal of change for me. Some of those changes are positive, others not so much.

In the wake of the pandemic, I’ve been travelling more than I ever did before. By now, I've seen quite a bit more of Malaysia, whether it's the big city of Kuala Lumpur, the idyllic Pulau Tioman, or my own state of Sabah. Six or seven states, now that I think about it, even if for some I was only passing through. How about that. I’ve also been to Singapore a few times and have been impressed with the city-state’s cosmopolitan cleanliness. Expanding horizons, that’s what travel does for you. I wonder where I'll go next.

Pulau Tioman, Pahang

Back home, I’m still working at the same job I’ve always had had for more than a decade. Somehow that's led to me becoming senior and experienced. I still live in the same village I grew up in with nieces and nephews running around now, the next generation shooting up like weeds. My generation have become mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles, getting married and having kids and doting on others. Where did the time go? We're still young, but not as young as we used to be. 

On that note, I’m more forgetful nowadays. It's quite timely that 'brain rot' was named as the Oxford Word of the Year 2024. I can relate. I'll bet a lot of us can, and it's all because we're always on our phones.

I read an excellent book a few months ago called The Shallows which lays out the scientific evidence that yes, the Internet is indeed affecting our brains, with smartphones being the primary vector. We’re all being subconsciously trained to sift through vast quantities of information, to flit our attention here and there and focus on something new at a moment’s notice, which has deleterious effects on memory consolidation. Are we getting better at multitasking? Perhaps. Are we losing our ability to do deep work, to focus for long periods when myriad distractions are available on the little screens we carry around everywhere? Absolutely. It is frightening how modern technology is changing us. I haven’t even wrapped my head around the possibilities of AI yet, which isn’t just some dumb internet bubble like NFTs were. AI is truly world-changing. I have been duly impressed by the answers I've gotten from ChatGPT. I've also been intimidated to find that computers can write almost as well as people now, to say nothing about voice and image generation. How will we know what's real?

I’m writing all this while listening to ‘I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues’. My Spotify playlist is a blend of rock bands, anime and video game soundtracks, meme culture songs that I found on YouTube, and sentimental ballads. I guess it's no surprise that I've become a fan of Elton John. His dramatized big-screen musical biography, Rocketman, spoke to me like few movies have, which led to picking up his actual biography, simply titled Me. Sir Elton’s story of escaping into addictions in the face of the pressures and depression of his seemingly charmed life before finally getting sober speaks to me. Humans are the same no matter their culture or background. We all just want to escape our problems. One of my favorite authors, Mark Manson, talks about upgrading ourselves to problems that are better than what we faced before, and I have to wonder about my own: are they?

I’m a few years into my thirties, and I've been thinking about how this decade is different compared to my twenties. There's more pressure now. I’ve gone from having the future stretching out before me in an unknown expanse to living life on a timer. Six months, three months, one month. Always counting down, and then I need to find a way to push it forwards one way or another. Is this sustainable? I don't think that it is. One way or another, something has to change.

 

C'est La Vie

Hi. It’s been a while.

No, I’m not dead or in jail or dropped off the face of the earth. I’ve just been busy living my life. I’m pretty sure 2022 was one of the best years of my life so far. Things changed, I travelled, I pushed some boundaries. But I’m not here to talk about all that. Today I’m talking about how I haven’t been writing for a while.

Oh, I’ll spend ages on Reddit forums commenting about video games. Heck, I spend hours a day on my phone in general. But the kind of long-form, introspective writing that I do on this blog; I haven’t written like that in a while. Every now and then that bothers me. Then a new morning comes around. I get up at dawn to start the day, and before I know it another week passes. Another month, soon another year. A little more distance from the person I was when I was younger, who buried himself in books and dreamed of writing his own. God, that was a long time ago.

It’s something I wonder about now and then, in those moments when I look up from all my duties and distractions: how much do you owe your younger self? If the dreams of your youth no longer appeal to you, are they still worth pursuing? How do you tell the difference between giving up and moving on?

Perhaps the answer to that is obvious. But then every now and then the mood strikes me, like tonight, and I’ll put on some Falling in Reverse* on full blast and give it another go. And guess what: I still like writing out my inner musings like this. Who’d have thought?

The thing is that my life is full now, certainly fuller than it used to be. Which is a good thing, of course. I have more responsibilities. In some ways I’m moving forwards, in others I’m still stuck in place. Such is life. I have a better class of problems, that’s what Mark Manson would say. Problems are a fact of life; what matters is that your problems are getting better. I used to follow that guy religiously, now I barely ever check his stuff anymore. Change is the only constant and all that. I’ve got to go to bed soon, another morning is calling. But I wonder.

*I was just going to post a lyric video, but the official MV is some of the most over-the-top action movie shit I've seen in ages, it's hilarious.

All Things Change

So I’m thirty-one now. What is there to say about that?

You might have noticed that time speeding up has been a recent theme of mine. And I swear, last year’s birthday was just a little while ago. I wrote a tribute to my twenties. We had a party. This year we didn’t, which was just as well: it didn’t feel like much of an occasion. Today is the anniversary of the day I was born? Great, fantastic. Then I blink and it’s a week later. One of my cousins mentioned telling her students why she didn’t want to celebrate her birthdays either: they were growing up, while she was just getting older. That’s pretty relatable if you ask me. 

I always used to look forwards in life. The past only interested me in terms of lessons gleaned from bittersweet memories. It was something to get away from. Now, though, I have this nagging feeling that I’ve lost some innate piece of myself along the way and don’t know how to get it back. I used to read every book on the shelf and dream of being a fantasy author. Now I barely read or write at all anymore. Well, I barely read books; I spend plenty of time on the internet following the news and video game reviews and so on. But that’s a subject for another post.

It’s going on two years now since my mom died. Our lives together weren’t the best. There were so many times that I wish I’d had more empathy or been a better son. But we had some good times too, after the chemo did its poisonous work and cleared the cancer out of her system for a reprieve. We went out for pizza every month for years before that, long before the first tumour began to grow. Those were the good old days. If only I hadn’t taken them for granted.

I’ve been working at the same place for over nine years now, and I’ve seen it slowly decline over time. Vehicles wore out and could no longer be repaired. More and more people retired. Sections were closed off, damaged by landslides, reclaimed by nature. There was a gentle old uncle I used to take the bus with; he died in his early fifties before even reaching retirement. People I knew have had strokes, heart problems, kidney failure. Someone who’d been a little girl when I first joined grew up and had cancer in her teens. She passed away last year.

Entropy is the natural order of the universe, as they say. Change is the only constant.

I’ve been at the same place for nine years, but maybe 2022 will be the last. On Monday I start working somewhere else; temporarily, perhaps. Or maybe this will be the start of something new. I don’t know, and that bothers me, the not knowing. It’s at times like these that I feel unsettled, unsure, lacking in some vague and insidious way. There are things I should have done, that I should have more experience with, at age thirty-one. What does it mean that I don’t? Does it make me less of a person? There’s plenty more life to live, and yet I don’t feel like I’m growing up anymore. I’m just getting older.

I’m thirty-one years old, and if I live as long as my mom, that puts me squarely at the halfway point. Other people my age have gotten married, had kids, built stable careers, travelled to far-off places. What have I done, exactly? Written half-finished novels before losing interest? Carried pythons and handfed hornbills? Memorized animal facts, acted like a frightened tourist, gotten comfortable talking to strangers? I’ve got a lot of stories, to be sure. That just doesn’t feel like enough.

When I was a kid, the land our house sits on now was all paddy fields. My grandparents worked in them before I was born. Then the times changed, and the land was filled in for our different family members’ houses to be built. There are kids running around here now who’ve never known anything different, my nieces and nephew shooting up like weeds. Someday they’ll grow up and find that the world has changed for them as well. I wonder where I’ll be in life by then.

I don’t have a tidy lesson or ending to all this, because, well, there isn’t one. Life keeps moving on until it doesn’t, until an ending which is rarely painless or peaceful in any sense of the word. Normally I’d try to make this into some kind of inspirational bullshit like not thinking the neighbour’s grass is greener when they probably feel the same way about yours. Not today though.

Perhaps this is the human condition; to be constantly dissatisfied, uncertain, wanting just that little bit more out of life. To feel adrift in the ennui of it all. Perhaps tomorrow will be better, or it might be worse than today. We never know, do we.

All things change eventually.

Time Flies Forwards

 

At the end of last year, both my glasses and my smartphone needed replacing. The lenses of one were getting blurry, scratched, and yellow; the other one could no long hold a signal and the battery was draining faster than ever. Both of these items were almost four years old, incidentally. I bought them with my mom. That seems so long ago now.

Anyway, before this I always used basic lenses which corrected my myopia and nothing else. My eyesight there has remained unchanged for the last ten years. Heck, the optician said it might actually have improved a little. That’s something to be grateful for. But my astigmatism has only gotten worse over time, no doubt due to all these screens I’m always looking at. To that end, in December I finally bit the bullet and got Kodak City Lenses. These bad boys filter out UV light, blue light from screens, and improve night vision. They were, ahem, a bit expensive. But I feel like I’m seeing clearer than ever.

One thing stood out when I first put them on: even colours looked brighter, sharper. It was both incredible and mildly concerning to take them off and feel like the world grew faded, not just blurry. The view through my new glasses wasn’t just clearer, it was more colourful too.

For the new phone, I got an Oppo A74, which is a decent midrange entry that will no doubt be outdated in a year or two. A phone with 6GB RAM and 128GB internal storage used to be a huge deal; now I’m just glad it runs smoothly with a dozen apps open. I no longer need to be constantly clearing out my photo album to make space. The camera’s not bad either.

So I ended the year kitted out with new and improved ways of seeing the world. They’re an improvement on their predecessors in every way, and I’m already taking them for granted. It’s making me think about filters. We all see the world through viewpoints molded by experience and personality and perspective, which grow and change as life goes on. The one filter which we all have in common is time.

***

It’s 2022 already, huh. I swear the years are going by faster and faster.

So this is the point when I write something reflective about 2021. It was a year of natural disasters, multiple floods and landslides in Sabah and across Malaysia. Climate change is happening, people.

2021 was the second year of the pandemic, and just like 2020, it was marked by recurring lockdowns. Unlike 2020, it was the year that vaccines became widely available. Though a minority of people remain anti-vax for various reasons, ranging from perceived infringement of personal freedoms to concern over potential long-term side effects to outright conspiracy theories about microchips being planted in our bodies (newsflash people, our smartphones already track us and harvest our personal data); the vast majority of Malaysians are now vaccinated. I’m sorry that that isn’t the case in other parts of the world.

It also saw the rise of multiple COVID variants: Alpha and Beta and Delta and now Omicron, these increasingly mutated strains with alternate symptoms and increased infectiousness. Will there be more? Probably. Booster shots are recommended to defend against these new and improved viruses, I’ll be getting mine soon. But by now it’s clear that COVID isn’t going to go away. Wearing face masks isn’t just required by law, it’s become normal social etiquette. We’re all carrying around little bottles of hand sanitizer and scanning QR codes everywhere we go. This is the world we live in now. You can go with the flow, or you can go against it and reap the consequences.

It seems like 2022 will mark the end of the pandemic. Not a sudden ending, but a gradual fading into the background, the latest addition to our rogue’s gallery of familiar illnesses. Only time will tell.

***

It’s funny how when I was a kid, a single year took forever. Now at age 30, I blink and it’s Christmas again. Me and my generation aren’t kids anymore. We’re uncles and aunts and parents. I look at my nieces and nephews and they seem bigger every time I see them. That line about kids growing up before your eyes; it’s all true. But you have to be there to believe it.

In many ways, I like who I am at 30. I’m more confident now, more articulate in person, not just in print. I still get depressed; life gets me down sometimes. But you know what? I’m alive to experience it all. That doesn’t mean I don’t look back in sorrow. I still miss my mom. I wish I could turn back the clock and spend more time with her, knowing now that she’ll die when she’s barely into her sixties. Pardon my language; but fuck cancer.

Life is always bittersweet, isn’t it? You can’t have the good without the bad.

At the same time, it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of living life on autopilot, forgetting the dreams you used to have because the day-to-day is all that matters. We have so many distractions nowadays. I still love video games and fully intend to write more about them; but then I haven’t been writing much at all, have I. Too much time spent on social media and not enough on healthier habits. We always believe in the fantasy of tomorrow. Time flies forwards, and none of us have as much left as we think.

So here I am, getting back to writing and spinning just a little bit of order out of chaos. Just trying to do better*. Here’s hoping that 2022 will be better to us all, eh?

 

*Yeah, that was totally a Spiderman reference. Have you seen No Way Home? You need to watch No Way Home.

Rhythm of War Review - A Slow Burn Towards Book Five

A brief refresher: the Stormlight Archive is set to be Brandon Sanderson’s magnum opus, the grandest and most ambitious of his many, many books within a shared universe called the Cosmere. Against an ancient threat supposedly defeated long ago, the Knights Radiant must rise again to protect the world of Roshar and its inhabitants. There are sentient ideas come to life called spren. There are giant swords that cut stone and sever people’s souls. And of course, there is Stormlight, the magical power source held in gemstones that are renewed by a massive hurricane which has ravaged the world for millennia. It’s a series planned to have ten books, and Rhythm of War is the fourth.

I’ll avoid specific Rhythm of War plot spoilers for this review, but there will be plenty about the series so far. SPOILER WARNING from this point on. There, you’ve been warned.

***

Anyway, there used to be only one hurricane. Now there’s two; an opposing storm has arisen which empowers the enemy with the dark magic of Voidlight. It’s complicated. The nature of these different forms of Light lies at the heart of Rhythm of War’s storyline, but more time is spent ruminating with the series’ many broken characters.

THE STORY SO FAR

These books have never had the most consistent pacing. The Way of Kings was a slow beginning which set the stage for conflicts to come. A big part of what kept me reading was the sheer uniqueness of the setting. A war playing out over a vast plain of fissures and chasms which require slave-carried bridges to cross, and the former soldier Kaladin’s struggle to save himself and his fellow slaves against impossible odds. There were legendary heroes now revered as deities for fighting an ancient enemy that no one even remembers; once-heroic Knights who betrayed humanity yet formed the basis for a culture in which eye colour determines social status; motile plants and giant crustaceans which evolved to survive the storms. This world was different.

While still largely set on the Shattered Plains, Words of Radiance pushed the plot forwards in oh-so-satisfying ways. All the main characters were actually gathered in one place instead of faffing around on separate quests and only briefly running into each other. (Looking at you, latter Wheel of Time books.) People grow and change. Shocking twists occur. Shallan became a much better heroine compared to the first book. Words of Radiance was truly brilliant.

Then Oathbringer took us on a whirlwind tour of very different locales: the grim darkness of the long-abandoned tower city, Urithiru; the wartorn cities of Kholinar and Thaylenah; and the strange and fantastical realm of spren, Shadesmar. The third book zoomed out in scope in order to pack so much into those pages, sometimes to its detriment. But Dalinar’s backstory tied it all together, the bittersweet tale of a man in the process of changing. The Blackthorn is absolutely one of the best characters Sanderson has ever written, apparently the first he ever wrote. I teared up when he saw the light during the final battle, man. That doesn’t happen often.

And that brings us to Rhythm of War, which returns to the slower pacing of The Way of Kings.

BROKEN HEROES

The Stormlight Archive stands out in how the main characters struggle with trauma and mental illness. Kaladin is crippled by depression. Shallan has split personalities which allow her to escape her horrific past. Dalinar must confront the harsh truth that he was a murderous monster for most of his life, responsible for the death of someone he loved. Watching these broken people overcome their pasts and become better, truly worthy of being Knights Radiant, is inspiring. But it’s also frustrating when they continue to struggle with mental health despite their change in circumstances, even though this is entirely realistic.

This makes up the bulk of Rhythm of War’s core conflicts. Kaladin and Shallan are both increasingly lost in their own minds and must confront the traumas that made them who they are. Navani is raised to a central character as she delves into the mysteries of Stormlight and Voidlight while fighting her own imposter syndrome. I was certain this fourth book would focus on Jasnah after she was crowned queen at the end of Oathbringer. But nope, this time it’s Venli who gets the flashbacks. Through her we take a closer look at how the war with the Parshendi first began, even as she walks the dangerous path of serving the Fused as a Radiant singer.

The book’s more adventurous plotline follows Shallan and Adolin as they return to Shadesmar on a mission to convince the honorspren to join the war effort, even though the long-ago betrayal of the Knights Radiant struck them the hardest and reduced the vast majority of their numbers to ‘deadeyes’, the spren version of the walking dead. I liked the growing bond between Adolin and his Shardblade, Maya, a deadeye herself, along with the increasingly complex interplay between Shallan and her alternate personas. On the other hand, it feels like the author gave her and Adolin short shrift with the husband-and-wife aspect of things. Their wedding happened offscreen, for crying out loud! I don’t know, they’re still sweet and loving towards one another, and he’s remarkably accepting of her split-second personality changes. I guess I was expecting their relationship to evolve once they were married.

Meanwhile, for all his battle prowess as a Radiant, Kaladin has grown increasingly beaten down and internally scarred. Rhythm of War puts him situations where he’s forced to face his past, his depression, and the truth about what holds him back from achieving the Fourth Ideal. Darkness and the struggle to keep fighting were major themes for him in The Way of Kings and Rhythm of War brings them back in spades.

There’s a strong focus on character development in these pages. It's nice to slow down with the characters as they go about the routines of their lives, treating wounds and sketching spren and brushing horses. But what stood out for me was the lack of worldbuilding. Compared to all the unique and interesting locales of earlier books, the settings in this one felt too familiar. Urithiru, Shadesmar, the Shattered Plains, Kholinar, Azir. These are all places we’ve been to before (with some exceptions). Though it is interesting seeing how they’ve changed over time, the settings just don’t feel as groundbreaking as they used to. What happens to our heroes and heroines and yes, villains too, is groundbreaking! Stuff happens, make no mistake. Rhythm of War just takes its sweet time getting there.

It would be remiss of me to leave out the outstanding endpaper portraits of the Heralds and the detailed illustrations throughout the book. The artwork of the Stormlight Archive has always been excellent and it remains so here.

CONCLUSION

Rhythm of War sets up some much larger and more exciting conflicts down the line. Seriously, Book Five is going to be crazy. But Book Four, well. This might just be my least favorite Stormlight title so far. That doesn’t mean it’s bad; none of these books are bad. It’s just outshined by earlier titles.

Rhythm of War was fine. But I have a feeling that the fifth book will be a lot better.

 

A Whole New World

So recently my family discovered the HGTV channel. In the evenings after dinner, we’ll watch shows about fixing, renovating, and discovering new homes. One in particular is called Perfect Home Asia, about American couples, families, and individuals looking for the ideal house or apartment as they move to an Asian country for the first time. They often get work as English teachers, amusingly.

I’m sure that Western audiences find the participants relatable and the differences in culture and design exotic. I do too when the setting is somewhere far away like Japan or India. And sometimes the show will be set in a Southeast Asian country like Thailand, Singapore, or Malaysia. It interests me, seeing how people from the United States react to local fixtures like squatting toilets and dragon fruit. Things that are outside their comfort zone.

Because twenty-one years ago, I was one of these people. I was born in the US and moved to Malaysia at age eight. Most of my teens were spent adjusting to a very different climate and culture. Most of my twenties were taken up with forming a new identity as someone of mixed heritage and coming to appreciate my Sabahan roots. And now here I am entering my thirties, having lived most of my life on this culturally and ecologically diverse island called Borneo.

Isn’t that curious? I was born on the other side of the world, and now I call this one home. Life is strange sometimes.

The other reason I like the show is that it awakens a bit of wanderlust in me. For all that I moved across the world as a child, I’ve stayed in one place since. For one reason or another, I was always at home, guarding the fort while others have traveled to other countries and continents. Heck, I’ve barely even gone anywhere within Malaysia.

The jungles of Borneo are among the oldest in the world.

I talk about books and video games because that’s where I’ve spent a lot of my time over the years: with my nose in a book or my hands on keys and controls. I’ve also talked about psychology, self-improvement, and addiction. These are topics that interest me; the ways we think, grow, and become hooked on things. And of course, I value imagination and creativity. Whether it’s fantasy and science fiction, words and bright colours, or emotion and thought, I’ve spent much of my life thus far exploring other worlds.

The irony is that I’ve hardly explored at all in real life.

And over the past two years especially, with the pandemic keeping borders closed and all of us hunkered down, wary of even going to the mall, I’ve come to realize that I don’t want to just stay in one place when this is over. When my mom was my age, she’d left home on her own adventures a long time ago, flown across the world and back again. My life has been pretty localized by comparison – although growing up in Malaysia has been an adventure all its own.

But don’t get the wrong idea. It’s not a bad thing that I’ve always been home. I got to spend these years with my mom.

Because we were together, we made so many memories throughout the years. Going out for pizza, movies, all the quiet dinners at home together. Struggling with her illnesses, her cancer diagnosis, sleeping on the hospital floor at her bedside during chemo. Through the good times and the bad, my mom and I were together until the end of my twenties. I’ll always be grateful that we had this time together. Not everyone is so lucky.

I can’t believe it’s been over a year now since she passed away. Time speeds up as we get older, and it sure as heck isn’t slowing down.

My mom is gone now, and I know she wanted me to spread my wings, so to speak. I’m entering a new phase of life. Everything that’s happened over these last few years – my mom’s illness and passing, the pandemic keeping us all locked in place – makes me realize that I want to experience life. To see new horizons, storms, and sunsets in other parts of the globe. There’s so much out there that I haven’t seen or done. Not yet, anyway.

I’ll still be talking about fantasy worlds, to be sure. But nowadays…

I want to explore the real world too. 

Why Anti-Vaxxers Are Nothing New

We’re more than halfway through 2021 and the COVID-19 pandemic rages on throughout the world. Malaysia has just passed the grim milestone of 20,000 cases a day. More infectious variants such as Beta, Delta, and Lambda are on the rise. Repeated lockdowns have taken their toll on the economy. Amidst the threat of the virus, people have lost loved ones, livelihoods, and even their will to live. Things are looking bleak.

But unlike in 2020, we now have an effective, non-economically damaging way of fighting back: vaccination. Multiple COVID-19 vaccines worldwide are in various phases of rollout, such as Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca, and Sinovac. In Malaysia, the process for getting one varies from appointment via the MySejahtera app to outreach programs for more rural areas. Walk-ins are now allowed in certain parts of the country. What matters is that more and more people are getting vaccinated.

Including me: I had my second Pfizer dose last month. I am now considered fully vaccinated. That does not mean I can’t still get infected, because I can. I’d just be much less likely to end up in the hospital. If anything, we’re only in the pandemic’s second act. The Delta variant moves fast; you can get it from breathing the same air as an infected person for a few seconds. 

And yet amid so much turmoil, some people remain convinced that this is all a conspiracy, that the vaccines are a scam to inject us with microchips and turn us into sheep or whatever. These people believe that COVID-19 doesn’t exist. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But a glance back at history shows us that reactions like these are nothing if not predictable.

Today I’m talking about why anti-vaxxers are nothing new.

First, let’s go over a brief refresher on how our bodies’ immune systems work and what, precisely, these vaccines actually do.

How Does the Immune System Work Anyway?

There’s an old Disney movie called Osmosis Jones that characterized the immune system as our bodies’ police force. It’s close enough. The immune system is the collective term for the various organs, tissues, and cells that work together to combat threats to the body. These could be germs, foreign substances, or mutations within the body itself, e.g., cancer.

More specifically, there are two distinct subsections to the immune system: the innate immune system, which activates a blanket response against common viruses and bacteria; and the adaptive immune system, which learns to target specific threats which have been encountered before. The latter is integral to how vaccines work.

Let’s take a common childhood disease, chickenpox, also known as varicella. Everyone knows that if you’re infected once you’ll almost always be immune for the rest of your life. (I caught it when I was ten or eleven, no idea how.) But why? It’s the adaptive immune system to the rescue! Having suffered through the first infection, your body has learned to recognize the varicella-zoster virus (VZV) and will unleash a blistering assault on any future incursions.

The History of Vaccination

This is where vaccines come in: they intentionally activate the adaptive immune system. ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ isn’t just a quote. As early as 16^th century China, a method called variolation involved exposing healthy people, often children, to scabs and secretions from those infected with smallpox as a means of inoculation; this caused them to contract a milder form of the disease. The practice became common in many parts of the world. Because individuals treated this way could still transmit smallpox to others, variolation sometimes led to further outbreaks and public backlash. But anyone who survived would be immune.

Source: The History of Vaccines

An English doctor, Edward Jenner, developed the first true vaccine in 1796 based on a similar insight: country milkmaids who’d had the mild disease of cowpox never contracted its far more dangerous cousin, smallpox. (The word ‘vaccine’ is derived from vacca, or ‘cow’ in Latin.) His experiments with inserting pus from cowpox-infected individuals into the arms of children granted them immunity. Jenner was widely mocked and ridiculed for his work, but the results were undeniable. Within 150 years, this once-deadly illness had been completely eradicated.

The same story can be told for many other historically terrible diseases such as polio, measles, and tuberculosis. Through vaccines, antibiotics, and modern medical treatments, these illnesses either no longer exist or are far less of a threat than they once were. COVID-19 is just the latest in a long, long line of illnesses attacking vulnerable human bodies which haven’t had a chance to develop immunity before some form of effective treatment was developed.

But getting people to believe in those treatments could be an uphill battle. From the 19^th century onwards, reasons for vaccine hesitancy have ranged from religious and sanitary concerns about inserting foreign matter into the body to resentment towards government laws requiring it, to wilder ideas about sterilization and biological warfare. Anti-vaccination organizations, protests, and beliefs have been around as long as vaccines themselves. 

An anti-vaccine poster from the 19th century.

In fact, many modern safety practices were once the subject of heated debate.

The Problem With Public Opinion

Did you know that seat belts, of all things, were once considered controversial?

During the mid-twentieth century, there were major debates about them in the United States where they were first introduced. They were restrictive and uncomfortable, detractors claimed. These restraints could trap passengers in a burning car or prevent them from being thrown clear of an accident to safety. The government had no right to impose these ridiculous laws impinging on people’s freedoms, they said. Using a seat belt should be an individual’s personal choice.

An instrument of tyranny.

The reason this sounds like nonsense today, of course, is hard evidence. What are the odds of surviving being ‘thrown clear’ headfirst into oncoming traffic? The effects of sudden and immediate deceleration on the human body are common knowledge nowadays. But this wasn’t always so. Once, the idea of having to restrain yourself in a moving vehicle was radical and dangerous.

Or for a medical example: washing our hands. Since childhood, we’ve all been taught this most basic of personal hygiene practices. Everybody knows how germs spread through contact and that keeping your hands clean is a smart thing to do. But this wasn't always the case.

In 1847, the spread of diseases was still poorly understood. A Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis was struggling to understand the high mortality rates among women giving birth in his hospital. Eventually, he realized that these mothers were far more likely to fall ill and die if attended to by doctors and students who’d come to deliver the baby fresh from an autopsy. (Gross.) Midwives were not required to deal with dead bodies, and their care alone in an alternate ward led to a much higher chance of survival.

Semmelweis mandated a new rule requiring handwashing with chlorine for doctors. Death rates in his maternity ward fell dramatically; this was the first evidence ever that washing hands could prevent the spread of disease. But the practice was unpopular. Some doctors disliked the implication that they were to blame for the deaths and gave it up. Semmelweis attempted to spread his doctrine of handwashing to other parts of Europe only for it to be considered controversial. The practice only truly caught on after his death.

Fast Times and Fake News

There have always been, and always will be, resistance to new methods, technologies, and new ways of behaving. In the face of nationwide lockdowns, economic hardship, and being told that we need to behave in certain ways for our own safety, the more individualistic of us are bound to resist. Wild ideas have always flourished in the face of change. That is nothing new.

What is new is how interconnected humanity has become. Information travels fast nowadays. Propaganda, fake news, and misinformation are all too easy to disseminate for a susceptible audience. Online communities provide social validation for beliefs that most people would rightly call crazy, encouraging budding conspiracists to fall deeper down the rabbit hole. And the sheer volume of information that the internet affords us is overwhelming. How do we know what to believe?

I’d say taking an interest in the actual science and data, for starters. Do your own research, the conspiracy people cry. And I agree with that. I also believe in a healthy dose of skepticism and paying attention to who’s doing the talking. A health director-general with decades of medical experience is going to know more about treating illnesses than, oh, let’s say a billionaire politician telling people to drink bleach. Putting our faith in the professionals, not just some quack with a YouTube channel.

Yeah, maybe not this guy.

But conspiracy theories will always be around. Just like demonic possession was so often blamed for mental illness, people will always invent sinister reasons for what they don’t understand. Because at least that way, there’s a plan. Someone’s behind all of this; somebody’s in charge.

It’s a lot scarier to think that no one is in charge. That the world is complete chaos, plain and simple. You could get hit by a car or find a cancerous growth or fall and break your leg tomorrow. Nobody knows how the future will play out. No one ever knows.

Conclusion

When I got my first Pfizer dose, I barely felt a thing. Was this it, I wondered while waiting in the hall for my second appointment. I didn’t feel faint or dizzy. No allergic reactions, thankfully. What did happen was that my shoulder began to ache throughout the afternoon. By nighttime, it hurt a lot, and numbness had set in. But the next day, the pain was already receding. I felt fatigued and out of breath for a day or two. Then I was fine.

After the second dose, my arm didn’t even hurt as much. Instead, I had prolonged palpitations twice in the days afterward. I’ve had them in the past due to too much sugar, caffeine, and stress. But I'm pretty sure these two times were because of the vaccine – because I haven’t had any palpitations since. None at all. The Pfizer vaccine is supposed to affect a minority of young people’s hearts. But hey, I’m not dead yet.

Any long-term effects of these new vaccines remain to be seen. I don’t deny that. None of us should. What we do know is that COVID-19 is real, present, and killing people right now.

Vaccination is not a silver bullet, but herd immunity is what will beat this thing, starve it into more manageable numbers. It remains to be seen whether COVID-19 can be completely eradicated like polio and smallpox. But we can and will turn the tide. I look forward to the day when we can move around freely again, stop wearing masks, and meet far-off loved ones face to face.

That day isn’t here yet. But it will be. We just need to do our part for now.