This is a genre of writing that I, a historian by training and an around-the-clock worker by disposition, consume like Lay’s potato chips. I’ve waded through these swift waters accompanied by everyone from former Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman’s 2021 Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, to ancient Stoic philosopher Epictetus’s Enchiridion — keenly aware that no moment of immersion is the same as any other and none of them will ever recur. The one thing that history doesn’t do, for good or ill, is repeat itself. What I have sought is something I will never have: more time. Not better nor more meaningful time, as Odell is proposing to find, but merely more, in terms of sheer quantity. Because while I don’t want to live forever, I do hope to live long enough to do everything I’ve committed to do, such as help my daughter enter adulthood and support my parents and spouse in their old age.

Odell is a writer about whose prior work, How to Do Nothing, I have decidedly mixed feelings. It starts promisingly enough: the opening line, “Nothing is harder to do than nothing”, is, as the kids say, a “banger”. But it soon becomes clear that Odell, an admittedly privileged person who has had lots of free time across various academic residencies, has nothing to offer me, a person who has been working 40 hours a week since his 16th birthday. Nothing, you see, is the easiest thing to have in your bank account, but you cannot subsist for long on a diet of zero income and birdwatching in Oakland’s Morcom Rose Garden. Odell, having been freed from being “occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff”, as Thomas Jefferson would have wanted it, she is able to fill an inordinate amount of it.

Bubbling below the surface of How to Do Nothing is a sense of climate emergency, or climate apocalypticism. Odell is constantly out and about in nature, and conversant with all the worrywart liberal commentary about the heat death of the planet — which, like Jesus’s return in the Gospel of Mark, is always already imminent. This concern deeply informs Saving Time, giving it some of its urgency; it otherwise does the usual yeoman’s work of citing people such as British labour historian E.P. Thompson on the development of time and work-discipline, Frederick Winslow Taylor on industrial efficiency, and German philosopher Josef Pieper on leisure — all names you will encounter frequently if you have found the time to bathe in the waters of the time genre.

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Odell, to her credit, seizes upon the opportunity to situate the climate emergency in a discussion of the ways ancient Greeks delineated time: Chronos — time as a sort of forward, linear progression — and Kairos — a “crisis” or rupture in time. We all live in linear time, yet experience reminders — floods and famines — of the perpetual crisis in which we have found ourselves. Odell, in prose that betrays the vast condescension of our present, seems to think of this as a 21st-century phenomenon.

It most certainly is not; Walter Benjamin’s oft-quoted “Theses on the Concept of History” reckons with a similar dichotomy of time: the “history of organic life on earth” as opposed to “Messianic time, [which] comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgement”. For Benjamin, the powder keg that was Germany’s war on Europe — which, as an expatriate Jew facing repatriation in 1940, drove him to suicide — was the crisis, his “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage” in front of him as he is propelled into the future. Humans from the emergence of civilisation, have always perceived themselves as living on borrowed time — because, of course, we are; we have always been, as J.R.R. Tolkien put it, “mortal men doomed to die”.

It is the approach to mortality that separates Odell’s work from, say, Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks — a title that references the average human lifespan. Odell, an atheist, is concerned with climate damage to the entire ecosystem; Burkeman, who is at least culturally Jewish, is concerned with trying to lead a balanced, moderate life in the amount of time allotted to him. It is the latter view that has always appealed to me — the Earth might be ending, but to those of us raised with anything resembling a coherent religious worldview and now struggling to raise a family, everything is already ending. As Father John Misty sings in “Holy Shit”, “Carbon footprint, incest streams…planet cancer, sweet revenge…but what I fail to see is what that’s gotta do with you and me.”

It is interesting, yet unsurprising, to see discussions of personal mortality get so little attention in a work like Saving Time. As my father lay on his deathbed — he died in his own bed, at home — he remarked to me that he had always thought it easier to die alongside millions of others in a meteor strike or global conflict than quietly and at home as an old and feeble man. This, he admitted, was a narcissistic strain of thought he inherited from his own father, who despised the civilian life that followed his time as a Second World War submariner, because it offered no promise of a collective death that would serve as a coda to some grand heroic saga. Today, as Odell acknowledges, we are bombarded with daily alerts of one crisis or another. So it requires an act of will to remember that one’s own death is not an event so significant that it must coincide with the end of life as we know it. It will only coincide with the end of life as you know it.

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By Doug Coupland

It seems odd, then, that Odell cites Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper — not his description of Leisure, the Basis of Culture, but the fact that preparation for death is behind everything written therein. This is because, for the devout Pieper, as for Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, life is a preparation for eternity. “As a teacher usually says to the youthful student, who is even now finding the time of schooling too long, ‘Now, just don’t you get impatient, you have a long life before you,’” Kierkegaard writes in The Gospel of Sufferings, “so eternity speaks with more reason to the sufferer: ‘Just wait, do not become impatient, there is plenty of time, there is eternity.’”

I am, per my earlier admission, a workaholic. The clocks that inaugurated the Industrial Revolution rule my every waking minute; right now, as I type this, it is 2:04am in Pittsburgh. I have a Zoom meeting at 9:30am and another at 11am. This is not a complaint; it is the life I have made for myself. I have read Pieper and Thompson and all the rest. I understand how time, per the historian Fernand Braudel, passes both slowly for the unbending structures of society and quickly for individuals like me. But most important, in a way that none of these books on time emphasises, I know I am going to die. My father and mother never ceased with these reminders, which echoed those of Epictetus: “What harm is it, when you are kissing your little child, to say: Tomorrow you will die?”

When my mother and I would read Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth — my favourite book in the early years of my homeschooling — we would linger lovingly over the passages about time. (There are many: one of the main characters is Tock, a “watchdog” with a clock embedded in his torso.) She would point out the inanity of the main character Milo’s early thoughts about wanting time to pass — “wherever he was he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he’d bothered” — given that each moment we are bestowed by nature or heaven is a gift, the “present” (another cliché, of course). The great takeaway of the book, which brilliantly skewers the ways we waste time, was that we have as much time as we’re going to get: “Time is a gift, given to you, given to give you the time you need, the time you need to have the time of your life.” Or, as Kierkegaard puts it in Concluding Unscientific Postscript: “To be finished with life before life has finished with one, is precisely not to have finished the task.”

For those of us who have already watched our parents and a good many of our close relatives die — particularly for people, like me, who do not share Pieper and Kierkegaard’s belief in eternity — this is cold consolation, but consolation nevertheless: we’re given the time we need to have the time of our lives, and no more. Our lives, as the German philosopher Martin Heidegger puts it, are defined by “finitude”, even as “a world is worlding around us”. We exist in a state of “being-towards-death”: a fascinating state, if only to us personally or to our families and friends, that will endure until it doesn’t. There is no way to buy more time, to waste time, or even, in the final analysis, to save it. You get what you get.

But the knowledge that my immune system was so shot that were I to catch Covid I would almost certainly die was a sudden jolt of terror. I had no idea what the next few months held in store; only that the most sensible thing I could do if I wanted to see my children grow up was not to see them. (To be specific: I could see them, but not be near them.) One slip that let Covid in would in all likelihood be my last slip.

Well, here I still am. So let me tell you about the past year. I doubt any of the other 3,792,969 people who have been advised to shield over the past year will disagree with me when I say that it’s been what my younger self would have called a “headfuck”. Each of our stories is obviously different, but we all have one thing in common: that, weird and awful as the lockdowns have been for everyone, shielding is a different level of weirdness and awfulness.

At its most basic, it is a form of solitary confinement. For most of last year, while shielding was in place, I was living with my then wife and our kids. Living with, in the sense that we were in the same house. But I was in a room. Alone and specifically told not to interact with them. That is, let me tell you, not easy. I am by nature a stoic, but even stoicism has its limits. Hearing my children’s giggles and not having a clue what they were laughing about does not sound like a big deal. But when it lasts weeks — and then months — it is soul-destroying. It is a pretty visceral reminder that you are not part of their lives.

And much as I never really experience traditional boredom — too much to see, read, or listen to, always — the same four walls for months on end, without any change, generates a different, overwhelming sense of intense tedium. Throughout the months of shielding, the only change of scene I had was a three-week stay in hospital when it seemed my chemo had started to play tricks on me. (It turned out to be something else altogether, but the care and attention I received from the doctors and nurses was truly astonishing, given how on the floors above and below me they were dealing with genuine catastrophe.)

Then the cloud lifted in August, and shielding was suspended. When I nervously asked if that really meant I could go outside, my consultant said it was about assessing risk; if I took proper precautions, I had his blessing since it was relatively difficult to be infected in the open air. So for a few weeks I felt a sense of relative freedom.

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By Stephen Pollard

It could not have come at a more appropriate time because, throughout all this, I had been in the final stages of divorce. The house was being sold and I was due to move. I rarely offer advice but here’s some for free: try not to schedule a divorce while shielding during a pandemic in the same house. God knows how I (or, to be fair, my ex-wife) would have coped, either mentally or practically, had shielding still been in place. As it was, I was able to view some flats, found one, bought it, and moved in on 30 November.

Then, after I had barely caught my breath, back came shielding. And I have been here, with only my cat for company, ever since. The first couple of months were a bizarre mix of freedom and desolation. Free, because instead of being stuck in my room I had the run of a three-bedroom flat. But what use is that, when the other two rooms were for my children who couldn’t use them because if they did, they might, er, kill me?

So when, three weeks after having the jab in January, I saw my consultant, I asked him the only question I really cared about: was it now safe for me now to see my kids? Well, he said, we simply don’t have the evidence yet as to whether the vaccine works in people with suppressed immune systems. We can only hope it does, at the moment. But then there’s the emotional damage of not seeing them — and to them of not seeing their father. So we decided I should bite the bullet, and they have been coming to the flat.

One thing I have realised over the past year, however, is that nothing is straightforward about this bloody disease. If it can find a way to screw with us, it will. Two weeks ago, a study was published showing that the vaccine is effectively useless for people with blood cancer. It’s not been peer-reviewed, I told myself. It involved a tiny number of patients; it might be deeply misleading. There were any number of straws at which I clutched.

But the results of the study were entirely in keeping with the expectation among many experts that the vaccine does not work for those of us whose immune systems will not react to it. So last week I took an antibody test to find out. It came back negative. I have, as the lab report puts it, “no serological evidence of immunisation”. Back to square one.

But that’s not quite the full story. Because this is where, for the first time since the start of the pandemic and all that has happened, I have moved from stoicism to fury and an anger so intense I sometimes need to sit down and take long breaths.

At the moment, we have almost no hard evidence to go on — just that one study and some random blood tests. And while there are some scientists who say the vaccine simply won’t work for immune-supressed patients, there are others who say it’s not that simple. For them, the issue is the gap between the first and second jabs.

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For the vast majority of people, the decision to prolong that gap is of little consequence — and it has enabled the astonishing success and speed of the programme’s reach. But for 250,000 blood cancer patients, it may well be critical. The supposition is that while one jab may not be enough to trigger the right response, a second within the originally planned time frame might be. The fear is not that the vaccine is useless for us, but that the delay to 12 weeks between jabs could undermine any chance whatsoever that it could be effective.

And this is where it gets surreal. This has been pointed out to the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation, which takes the scientific decisions on roll-out, as well as to the Department of Health’s scientists and the Government. Surely it makes sense to give the vaccine the best chance of working, goes the argument, and speed up the second jab for the relatively tiny number of blood cancer patients. The response, I am told, is that there is no evidence that it needs to be done quicker than 12 weeks — the pandemic equivalent of “computer says no”.

Of course, there is no evidence: almost no one with blood cancer has had both jabs, so it is impossible for there to be such proof either way. Exasperating doesn’t come close.

I worry that writing this makes it seem as if I am after some sort of special status, when I am well aware so many have had it so much worse. But it’s surely not much to ask that 250,000 people are given their second jab a few weeks early. We have — willingly, of course — put up with a year of bizarre existence. And now, after all the other blows, here comes an entirely needless one. Which makes me wonder: when will it ever end?

When cats come up against human stupidity, they don’t try to change it. They simply walk away. The cat that was the subject of a philosopher’s experiment in moral education was out of doors much of the time, I discovered. As well as hunting for her food, she had most likely found a second home. If the philosopher persisted in his moralising enterprise she would depart permanently. The follies of philosophers are entertaining, for a time. But they are also rather repetitive, and after a while it seems best to move on. Part of the purpose of my book is to deflate the anthropocentrism of philosophers, but it’s not philosophers I’m concerned to persuade. Rather, my aim is to dispel some illusions regarding philosophy itself.

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Of course philosophy has served many human impulses. Contrary to what is commonly supposed, an interest in truth has rarely been dominant. In its western variant, the subject seems to have begun as a search for ataraxia — a state of mental equilibrium that cannot be disturbed by the accidents of life. In other words, philosophy is used as a calmative throughout much of its history. There is some evidence that the ancient Greek Sceptics may have been influenced by contact with Indian practitioners of meditation they called gymnosophists (“naked sages”); the Epicureans and the Stoics followed the Sceptics in making tranquillity the endpoint of philosophising.

The Meditations of the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius reads more like a funereal ode to resignation than a guide to living well. Epicurus was more cheerful, but his philosophy of reducing human desires to a satisfiable minimum would cut out much of the passion that makes life worth living. Knowledge would not be pursued for its own sake; sex would be engaged in medicinally, as a form of exercise. Happily, most human beings cannot sustain ataraxia for very long.

That philosophy originated as a search for mental quietude tells us something important about human beings and how they differ from cats. A sense of uneasiness about their place in the world seems innate in humans, whereas contentment is the default condition of cats. The evident satisfaction with which cats inhabit their skins is one reason — possibly the main reason — that so many human beings enjoy being with them. It is also why some people hate them. Nothing is more aggravating to those who creep through their days in misery than knowing that other creatures are not unhappy. Medieval and early modern fairs in which cats were chased, tortured and roasted alive were festivals of the depressed. Cats have as their birth-right the freedom from unrest that philosophers have vainly tried to achieve.

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A few philosophers have recognised that there may be something to be learnt from cats. The greatest among them, the sixteenth century essayist Michel de Montaigne, famously asked: “When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her?” Montaigne is conventionally classified as a humanist philosopher. In fact he was as sceptical of “humanity” as he was of the Deity, and considered other animals to be superior to humans in their inborn understanding of how to live. He was also refreshingly sceptical about the claims of philosophy. He questioned any idea that practising it could produce inner peace. Even the Sceptics, who believed inner calm could be attained by suspending judgement, attributed to philosophy a power to heal the soul that it does not possess.

Instead Montaigne recommended relying on nature, together with a little artful diversion, to give us balance in life. He recovered from the melancholy that followed the death of a beloved friend, he writes, by allowing himself to fall in love again. Thinking provided no remedy, and too much thought could be harmful. A cat can leap across an abyss without turning a hair. The more a human being thinks about the fearful drop beneath, the more likely they are to fall into it. An examined life may not be humanly liveable. Like Ludwig Wittgenstein some centuries later, Montaigne seems to have thought the chief purpose of philosophy was to rid oneself of the need to philosophise.

Cats have no need of philosophy because they already know how to live. Dull, commonplace folk will say the reason cats do not philosophise is that they lack the capacity for abstract thought. But imagine a species of cats that possessed this capacity while retaining the ease with which they live in the world. They might even give humans guidance on how to live. My book contains a list of 10 feline tips or hints on the subject. Of course these are not pieces of moral advice. Cats know nothing of morality as we understand it. They obey no commandments and feel no obligation to improve the world. Yet if we think of ethics as living according to one’s nature — as the ancient Greeks and Chinese Daoists did, along with Montaigne and also Spinoza — these feline philosophers could have something useful to tell us about the good life. To be sure, they would not expect us to follow their advice, nor would they care if we did. If they engaged in philosophy, it would be as a form of play.

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Why humans suffer chronic disquiet is a deep and difficult question. Pascal thought it pointed to the divine origin of the human soul. Inherently restive, human beings spend their lives escaping from themselves in what he called diversion — activities such as sport and war, love and politics — when their true home is beyond this world. Montaigne also believed humans spent much of their lives in diversion, but regarded this as a flaw in the human animal. Enough of a sceptic to leave open the possibility of religious faith, he nonetheless thought human beings could temper their anxiety by learning how to surrender to their natural condition. Here I side with Montaigne.

One source of human unease is the awareness of mortality. In order to stave off the fact of death, we make stories of our lives and these stories become the meaning of life for us. But time and chance break up the tales we tell, so our days pass in fear of tomorrow. Humankind is the death-defined animal. In contrast, cats show signs of knowing when they are nearing death, but they do not spend their lives in dread of dying. Cats do not turn their lives into a story. Instead they know only the day, and seek no meaning beyond it. If the soul is untouched by death, the feline soul is closer to immortality than the human soul can ever be. That may be why cats have been worshipped as gods. Immortal mortals, they live without thinking of death. We humans cannot forget our mortality, but by observing the ways of cats perhaps we can forget some of our fears.

The best way to learn from cats is by living with them. My book reflects 30 years of feline company, 23 of them with a cat who was with me, still enjoying his long life, when I was writing it. But as I detail in the book, memoirs and fiction can be very illuminating. An eminent war correspondent writes of how he adopted a hungry kitten in the ancient Vietnamese city of Hue (soon to be destroyed in the course of the war). The cat grew up to be an intrepid traveller, accompanying the war correspondent across the world and living out its fierce, joyful life in New York and London. An American writer tells us how her world was undone and remade when she lost a tiny, dauntless, one-eyed cat she adopted in Italy. The pleasure cats take from our company, she suggests, may be a truer kind of love than the mixture of dependency and vanity, neediness and resentment, which so often shape the attachment of humans to one another.

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For those of us who love them, a large part of the charm of cats is that they are not domesticated. They live with us and may cherish our company. But unlike dogs they have not become part-human, and while they may come to love us they do not at bottom need us. If they can no longer rely on human beings they soon re-wild. Rather than being domesticated by humans for their practical usefulness, cats domesticated humans by teaching us to love them. They seem to have begun co-habiting with us around twelve thousand years ago, when they discovered rodents in grain stores that humans had created, in shifting to our more sedentary way of life. Cats have been prized for their skills in pest control ever since, though they are not always very efficient in this capacity. There are photographs of cats and mice together, with the cats showing no interest in the mice. In return for our giving them a home cats give us their company, but never become our servants.

The cliché that humans project their own emotions onto their animal companions is the opposite of the truth in regard to cats. People who love cats do not do so because they imagine cats resemble them. They love cats because they know cats are very different from themselves. Without contact with something beyond their world, human beings soon go mad. By entering our world, cats have given us a window looking out of it.

Cats teach a paradox. If you pursue ataraxia you will spend most of your life in turmoil. Not craving inner quietude, cats revert to it whenever they are not practically threatened. Not looking for meaning in their lives, they are free to live them as they come, without looking for distraction or consolation. It is life itself that they value.

Human beings may be too frail to emulate the fearless lucidity of the feline mind. Philosophy, after all, is testimony to human infirmity. Better take up a religion, or return without regret to the common world of diversion. But whatever you do, consider: you will live more lightly if you pass some of your time with a cat.

Feline Philosophy: Cats and the meaning of life will be published by Penguin

She was intimately acquainted with mortality. She’d been a doctor and a farmer, and had by old age outlived her brother, two husbands and three of her four children as well as most of her friends. Even so, confronting her own decline into Alzheimer’s took tremendous courage. While she still had capacity, my mum and I helped her go through the details of a document that listed her medical preferences, for when she no longer had the capacity to advocate for herself.

It was not easy reading: a grim catalogue of scenarios such as seizures and strokes, defibrillation, ventilation, and the circumstances in which she would like medical treatment or palliative care. Despite her tough pragmatism, and her faith in life after death, I remember how tense and miserable she was the day we got the document notarised.

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Some time later, after dementia claimed her once razor-sharp mind, she fell out of bed in the nursing home and broke her finger. Under safeguarding guidelines, the staff were obliged to call an ambulance, and the paramedics were in turn obliged to take her to hospital. These rules could not be sidestepped, despite everyone involved knowing that for someone in their 90s, with advanced dementia and a minor injury, transfer to hospital was likely to cause extreme distress and could even be a death sentence.

Happily, the document detailing her preferences absolved staff and paramedics alike of their reluctant obligation to follow these rules even against their own clinical judgement. They splinted the finger in situ, it mended just fine, and she was spared a confusing and frightening experience.

We have been considerably less clear-sighted than my grandmother about facing the implications of coronavirus. On the surface, much of the response to the government’s measures has treated the situation as a continuation of the Brexit wars. But beneath this displacement activity lurks a consensus that cuts across culture war lines for all but the youngest and most staunchly libertarian: swivel-eyed horror at the realisation that we haven’t, after all, vanquished death.

Of course we know in theory that death comes for us all eventually. But for the most part, our culture treats death as abnormal, even outrageous — not the inevitable fact it still is. While volunteering as a bereavement counsellor, I learned that some GPs will prescribe antidepressants barely days after a loss, as though normal grief at the death of a loved one is a medical condition. And one of the most contentious areas of debate among doctors is how to manage relatives’ pleas for life-prolonging interventions for a patient, even in cases where there is no hope and such measures will only cause pain and distress to a dying person.

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Or consider the way fatal accidents are often described in tabloid headlines as ‘tragic’. If we read that in the Aristotelian sense, it would imply such fatalities came about due to a flaw in the character of the deceased, and that the pity and fear evoked by their demise should be treated as a moral experience for readers.

Of course, applying Aristotle to tabloid idiom is overkill, and in contemporary usage ‘tragic’ commonly just means ‘very sad’. But the term retains a trace of the classical understanding of a tragedy as more than simply random misfortune. We can see this in the way that random misfortunes described as ‘tragic’ in tabloid newspapers often seem to prompt a search for a moral lesson. ‘Tragic accident’ stories frequently trigger a campaign for new safety regulations, designed to prevent any such misfortune from recurring. Over time, this dynamic has made a substantial contribution to the regulatory environment of daily life, from sensible measures such as compulsory seatbelts to more contested ones such as councils ripping up cobbled streets.

But if we apply it to a pandemic whose mode of transmission is unclear, for which we have no vaccine and no very reliable treatment, and which kills people, it’s clear we’re going to run into trouble. What kind of rules can forestall misfortune on the scale of Covid-19?

This quandary in turn helps explain why the government’s initial response to the pandemic (which arguably it is still following, albeit more circumspectly) was so politically unpalatable. This initial response followed roughly the lines set out in the government’s pandemic flu planning documents. The assumption was that transmission would be impossible to contain, so the aim was to slow the spread, ensure healthcare systems are not overwhelmed, and over time to reach a state where enough people are immune that replication would fade away: ‘herd immunity’.

But from the outrage that erupted when Boris tried to explain this, you’d think it was a calculated plan to kill off the old and frail. Surely we could do more. ‘More’ turned out to be total lockdown — an approach that still commands widespread support with the British public. A recent Opinium survey suggested that even the barest hint that the government might be considering relaxing lockdown has caused public approval of Johnson’s handling of the crisis to dip. Most of us, it seems, want rules that will prevent any further tragic deaths.

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Except lockdown won’t prevent coronavirus deaths, just slow down their rate of occurrence. Unless a vaccine is discovered, any relaxation of lockdown will result in a new spike in infections, followed by further lockdowns, and so on until we reach — yes — herd immunity.

In earlier centuries, everyone experienced the death of loved ones, often of ailments that are preventable today. Funerary practices reflected this familiarity with death, and my grandmother’s wishes belonged in this tradition. When she died, at the age of 96, my mum laid out and washed her body — an ancient practice traditionally carried out by female relatives of the deceased, but barely followed today. Grandma believed that souls stay close to a body for three days after death, and asked for a wake at my mum’s home, with an open coffin. I stayed with my mum for those three days, and it was a surreal but strangely intimate time. Grandma did indeed feel very close to us.

Her death came shortly before my own wedding, and I remember sitting at my mum’s kitchen table, with Grandma in her coffin in the adjacent room, making table favours from tiny packets of wildflower seeds for the wedding breakfast. Joy and sorrow seemed woven together, in a strange in-between time when Grandma wasn’t quite gone, and my new phase of life hadn’t quite started. It was where I said my goodbyes to someone I’d loved very much, and for me the funeral seemed almost an afterthought.

Over my grandmother’s lifetime, hygiene and medicine advanced so dramatically that it must have seemed for a while as though life expectancy would go on rising forever. As recently as 2018, breathless articles were imagining humans living to 1000, while transhumanists continue their quest to defeat death by uploading human consciousness to a computer.

As death has receded, so too has our willingness to look it in the face. Today, barely 10% of families keep a corpse at home between the death and funeral. Funerals themselves have become arms-length affairs, with the deceased mostly whisked away shortly after death is confirmed and only reappearing for a swift ceremony before vanishing again on a conveyor belt to be cremated.

But now, like nothing since the two world wars, the pandemic has brought us into a mass confrontation with the mortality we imagined we’d conquered, or at least indefinitely postponed. And as death has returned to hover at the edge of our peripheral vision, our habitual mass aversion to it has shaped the field of acceptable political response to the virus.

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It's worth taking a risk over Covid-19

By Timandra Harkness

It’s no coincidence that less wealthy nations have in many cases weighed the risk of pandemic against the certainty of starvation for subsistence communities, and decided against imposing lockdowns. When death is already a familiar presence, the risk calculus of virus transmission looks very different.

But in nations where death seemed on the back foot, it’s all very well for scientists to repeat that the only way out is via herd immunity, but it’s not something we seem willing to countenance. Not yet, anyway. Accepting it means allowing risk and death back into the room. So almost without exception we remain crouched in lockdown, a frozen state that addresses our terror of death by banning nearly everything that makes life worth living.

If we’re to find a way out of this state, we’ll need to face not just the likelihood of successive waves of infections, but also the fact that some misfortunes are not tragic in the classical sense, just very sad. Sometimes there isn’t a moral lesson.

No rules can be devised that will banish death altogether. And no amount of prophylactic regulation will stop the coronavirus in its tracks, only slow it and try to ensure medical facilities are not overwhelmed. There’s no guarantee we’ll ever have a vaccine or cure. Until that changes, if we are to begin living again, we may need to re-learn some forgotten lessons about how to walk in the valley of the shadow of death.

For most of us, this is entirely sensible. In developed countries, healthy people are very unlikely to die before retirement age. If you’re under 60, the chance of somebody your age dying in the next year is less than one in a hundred, and that includes the skydivers, the trawlermen, and those with serious health conditions. For women, your cohort won’t hit the 1% mortality rate till your 70th birthday. In your twenties, the risk of not reaching another birthday is less than one in a thousand, even including the idiots who drive too fast, take illegal drugs, and fall off things while taking a final selfie.

But that was pre-Covid-19. Now, young nurses are dying horrible deaths, and daily briefings from the Government come adorned with hazard warning signs: Stay Home. Protect the NHS. Save Lives. The majority of Britons are not only happy to comply with lockdown rules, but are in favour of continuing them for the foreseeable future.

According to an Ipsos Mori opinion poll at the beginning of May, around two-thirds of UK residents would not feel comfortable using public transport or going to bars or restaurants, even if the government said they could. More than a third are not keen to send their children back to school, and nearly a third don’t want to go back to work. It’s not easy to go from existential terror to a balanced approach to personal risk.

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If you want to get ahead, take a risk

By Timandra Harkness

There’s still too much we don’t know about coronavirus. But we now have enough UK, as well as international, data to see some patterns emerge. For example, the general rule that average risk of death doubles every eight years after childhood is mirrored by the danger to people who catch Covid-19. Your chance of dying if infected also doubles every eight years.

Professor David Spiegelhalter, of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge, describes catching Covid-19 as “packing what amounts to your current annual risk into a few weeks”: whatever your risk of dying in the next 12 months, you add the same risk again as a one-off event.

You could think of this in the same way as going skydiving, which brings a 1 in 100,000 chance of dying with every jump. A woman in her twenties could double her annual risk with three jumps. For a man in his forties, it’s 20-odd jumps. If you land safely every time, the risk is over and you are back to your normal, underlying risk levels.

“This is an additional risk, of course,” says Spiegelhalter, “and certainly does not mean that these deaths would have occurred anyway in the following year (although some would have).”

If you were not worried about the prospect of your own death as you cut your last birthday cake, because life experience or familiarity with statistics told you that few people like you would die before you got to do this again, you should also view Covid-19 as a minor risk to you, personally. If you are not in a higher risk category, doubling a very small chance still gives you a very small chance.

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The risks of scaremongering

By Tom Chivers

But there is much more to risk than mathematics. We play roulette, but not Russian Roulette, because the stakes are infinitely higher. Existential, in fact.

We wear seat belts, though we hope we’ll never need one to save our life. We observe speed limits while driving, more or less, because we know that breaking them could endanger unknown others more than ourselves. We view the morality of taking risks that affect others, like unwittingly hitting a frailer person with a Volvo or a virus, more severely than taking risks on our own behalf.

Personal willingness to accept risks varies. As a motorcyclist, I am not happy to say that an average 100 mile journey gives me a 12 in a million risk of dying. Though I comfort myself by thinking that as I am neither an under-experienced moped rider approaching a junction, nor an over-confident middle-aged man taking a powerful sports bike around a left-hand bend, I have avoided the two riskiest situations. In a car, I would be 100 times safer. Nevertheless, I continue to ride a motorcycle.

You may be more of a Volvo driver than a motorcyclist, willing to forego pleasure, freedom and opportunity in return for enhanced safety. To you, one Covid-19 bullet in a chamber of 1,000 holes may still sound too many. Comfort yourself by comparing that risk to others you take all the time without worrying. Like riding a motorcycle for 10,000 miles, doing 100 skydiving jumps, or living another year.

It’s also true that in a pandemic we are often acting to reduce risks to others more than to ourselves. By staying at home we have been slowing the rate of infection, and keeping demand for medical treatment below a threshold the NHS could manage. Just as we adhere to 20mph speed limits for the benefit of children and cyclists, we have (mostly) been willing to endure lockdown to help our more susceptible neighbours and relatives avoid serious illness.

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Boris must be bold: it could save lives

By Ian Birrell

But we don’t impose 20mph speed limits on motorways. Reducing all transport speed that drastically would save more lives, but impose vast costs in human time, spent on motorways instead of doing all the things that make life worthwhile. As a consequence, economic costs would make anything involving road transport far more expensive; congestion and pollution would rise as vehicles crawled along; civilisation itself would slow down.

We don’t close down the whole road transport network in order to save a few thousand lives every year. We recognise, as a society and as individuals, that the benefits of road transport are proportional to the risks. We try to make it safer, but we accept a degree of risk for ourselves and others whenever we travel by road.

Coronavirus has already claimed ten times as many lives as the roads do each year in Britain. If current measures work well, the total death toll may be similar to that of seasonal flu. If not, it may be closer to heart disease, still the leading cause of death in the UK, at one in ten of all deaths each year.

Nevertheless, we would have done better to talk about Covid-19 more like road accidents, as a risk that can’t be eliminated altogether, but can be mitigated. Instead, the Government invoked the language of existential threat, in the face of which no measure is too great. Now, weighing the risks of resuming more normal life against the risks of continuing in suspended animation, they are struggling to coax a fearful population out of lockdown.

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Coronavirus is the wake-up call we need

By TOm Chivers

It’s easy to turn on the tap of fear as a motivational force, and much harder to switch it off in the absence of concrete reassurance. But the Government could have foreseen that we would need to resume more normal activity before any medical breakthrough could reduce the risk of Covid-19 to zero. Why did they not use the language of risk to communicate their policies, and the thinking behind them?

Risk is a useful and much misused idea.

We tend to view it as a symptom of the terrifying uncertainty of the world, instead of as a way to analyse, even quantify, that uncertainty, in order to decide and act. It’s most often invoked against taking actions with unknown consequences, which in practice means any new or experimental action. We tend to see it as a state of existence beyond our control, something that happens to us rather than an action we decide to take — being At Risk, not taking a risk.

We would do better to see risk as an unavoidable aspect of life, often an opportunity to explore the unknown and find new possibilities. Without our forebears taking physical risks we would not have aeroplanes (now the safest way to travel), or vaccination (which we hope will be our way out of the coronavirus trap).

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Voters don't need protecting from political ads

By Timandra Harkness

Instead of trying to frighten us all into staying at home, the Government should have harnessed our altruism, inviting us to join a grown-up conversation about risk. That would have left the door open to invite us all, now, to weigh the risk of Covid-19 against the lost opportunities of continuing to hide from the world.

For some, that will mean personally deciding to take risks in order to get society moving again. For most, those additional risks will be small, probably less than a daily bacon sandwich habit, or motorcycling to work to avoid the train.

For all of us, it means accepting that to be human is to live in a risky world, where we must act without perfect knowledge of the consequences of our actions. Mathematics can help us put our fears in perspective, but the only thing that will let us take control of risk is courage.

Human beings constantly take risks for causes beyond themselves, whether that’s protecting the weak or trying to achieve great things. We call those people heroes. Today, we urgently need to rediscover our appetite for heroism, for taking calculated risks, and for valuing something higher than staying safe.