Living under authoritarian regimes is both relatively boring and normal AND incredibly corrosive to the human soul. These things can absolutely co-exist.
This is why everyone needs to resist authoritarians, even people who privately assume they’ll be just fine.
The damage this causes across generations (even if the regime is short lived!) is so hard to grasp if you haven’t lived with it. It touches every aspect of life. It makes trust impossible, and without some level of trust and a belief in the possibility of justice, *nothing in society works.*
I have spent a lot of my life anticipating one major disaster or another, and when Covid hit, I found it was a completely different kind of fear and dread than I had been expecting. Fear and dread becoming a kind of background radiation in my life, rather than constant panic.
