He went on to say "check out this sweet deal I got on these sony WH-1000XM3's via my Amazon afilliate link below. Don't forget to smash that like and subscribe for future philosophical updates."

To be fair, the Sony WF-1000XM3's are awesome and I love mine. Living in a big city is so much more pleasant with noise canceling. It can be surprising to take them off and realize how loud the environment around me actually is.

Pretty much the only good thing about the lockdown was the massive reduction in sound levels in London. Just off Old Kent Road which means traffic noise dropped, plane noise disappeared[1], general hubbub of the feral children vanished, no late night parties at the community centre, etc. It was as close to blissful as I've encountered in London.

[1] Normally one every 5-10 minutes from 0500 to 23000 since we're on Heathrow approach and not far off City's path.

Lots of good things about the lockdown from the aspect of peace, quiet, nature, clean air, reduced light pollution, and more. It just comes at a cost that society isn’t willing to bear.

It looks like you may have misunderstood what I was saying. The polls pictured that linked to say America is united to defeat coronavirus even at such a high cost. My argument is that this price that nets us these wins of peace, quiet, reduced pollution, etc etc comes at a price that society would not sustain past this crisis.

Ah, sorry, I get it now. And I suspect you're right.

FWIW, my big hope is that we can reconfigure our economy to work without conflicting with those wins. (The climate is still changing, so we have to reconfigure anyway.)

In LA, the city has used the downtime to ramp up road and metro construction, and buildings have been shooting up at a faster pace. I drove past one of the neighborhood pits that will turn into an apartment eventually and they had six excavators at the site all digging at once. Instead of road noise, now I get to hear drilling and hammering and dump trucks backing up and having rocks tossed into them at 7 am.

"Escape From Noise"'s cover art is now even more appropriate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_from_Noise