The journalist Anne Helen Petersen recently asked, on Twitter, for articles about the “long-term psychological effects” of the pandemic. She soon noticed that many of the replies were about the damage it was doing to children.

Seeing this crystallized something I’d been dimly aware of. The strange politics of the coronavirus have created a taboo, at least in certain progressive circles, in talking too much about the emotional suffering wrought by nine months of purgatorial isolation. It’s easier to discuss what it’s doing to our kids, because we feel justified in trying to spare them pain.

If, before this year, I felt for a day the way I now feel all the time, I’d consider it an emergency and do anything I could to fix it. Now that I’m waiting out a pandemic in a small apartment with small kids and winter closing in, most things I’d need to do to be less miserable are proscribed, though sometimes by suggestion rather than decree. In many cases, it’s up to each of us to decide how much seclusion, how much joylessness, how much boredom and frustration we can tolerate, even though the pandemic means that whatever risks we take for relief aren’t ours alone.

So emotional respite has become a public good. Many conservatives, not surprisingly, feel entitled to make whatever use of the commons they want. Throwing gratuitous holiday parties is like the social equivalent of “rolling coal,” modifying vehicles to be extra polluting and thus own the libs.