I've heard that humans are scope insensitive, and that seems right to me; how good and how bad things seem to me doesn't scale much with how many people are affected and how severely.
I think this is behind an odd and sort of beautiful effect I noticed today: the world seems both fractally good and fractally bad. As I zoom my frame of view to different sized things -- a moment, a song, a book, a person, a people, a pandemic -- each one gives me feelings of good or bad (or more complicated feelings) at similar strength, regardless of size. Zooming in and out and seeing similar valence at every level, and then realizing that this just keeps going, is a pretty cosmic-feeling experience.
Happy 2020!
