 My name is Sam Vaknin and I'm the author of Malignan Self-Lover, Narcissism Revisit. In another two to three weeks, the pandemic will be over. Infection rates will go down, deaths will continue for a while, but it will be largely over. Probably social distancing will end, people will be allowed back to work. And then we will start to face the real problems. Pandemic is the least of our problems. Let's start with the basics. How do we know who carries the virus and who doesn't carry the virus? Even people who had recovered from COVID-19 may harbor, may contain a viral load, viruses in their bloodstream, like in AIDS. Many people are asymptomatic or pre-symptomatic. They carry the virus in their bodies, but they are showing no symptoms. Children and animals are the perfect vectors of transmission and reservoirs. So our own children, and to some extent possibly our pets, might be the most threatening factors in our lives. We have no idea if the virus is endemic, like the flu, in other words, if it will recur time and again, or if the virus will mutate into oblivion, like its cousins, SARS and MERS. We don't even know if the virus is susceptible to ambient temperature and humidity. In other words, we don't even know if the virus is seasonal. The experience in Singapore actually indicates that it is not. OK, you say, but there's bound to be a vaccine. The vaccine will be available in two years as a minimum, possibly three. So during this period, you could safely anticipate a chilling effect on sex, social gatherings, parenthood, schooling, workplaces, public transport, tourism, and frankly, all other forms of human contacts. We will have seen the enemy, and it will be us. The economy will recover in two quarters, and this is due to packages of unprecedented fiscal stimuli and reckless monetary expansion. But human societies and human relationships will never be the same. The real pandemic will involve soaring post-traumatic mental health problems, such as anxiety disorders and mood disorders, depression, coupled with paranoid and agoraphobic self-isolation and anomic atomization. This is a fancy way of saying people will never leave home. Technology and climate change, for example, rising sea levels, will exacerbate all these trends until we either disintegrate into the zombie apocalypse or in a backlash, we reboot our civilization to render it less narcissistic and less psychopathic. COVID-19 is an opportunity to make our choice. As a species, we have been running out of time for a long time now. Why has all this happened long before COVID-19? I've been warning that our civilization is becoming narcissistic and psychopathic for well over 20 years. Why has this been happening? For one and only one simple fact, we don't need any additional human beings. At 8 billion, we have reached the planet's maximum capacity to sustain us. It cannot take any more. The birth rate, birth rates have declined precipitously across the world, with contraceptives and abortion as means of birth control. The majority of people now marry very late, or more commonly, not at all. Procreation is dead as we transition to the age of solitary recreation, from procreation to recreation. Most of our social institutions are in trouble, because our social institutions were rendered obsolete by this tectonic shift. If we don't need children, we don't need most of our institutions. There is no further need for marriage, monogamy, sexual exclusivity, family, parenting, love, intimacy, long-term relationships, and non-casual, emotionally meaningful sex. All these have to do with children, and the raising of children. Gender roles have been effectively abolished, as men and women act and think exactly the same way. Disparate genitalia, notwithstanding, today we have a uni-gender world. There's only one gender, with different genitalia. Since we don't need to procreate, we don't need to have children. There is no reason to cohabit, no reason to bond, to form attachments. Technology rendered us utterly self-sufficient. We don't need anyone. Casual sex is an ample solution to our urges, and it is soon to be replaced by humanoid sex dolls and holographic porn. The very concept of society is antiquated. Society was meant to provide a safe environment for the raising of children and for the transfer of wealth to future generations. But there are no future generations, so there's no need for society. The individual is now the only viable organizing principle, which would explain the old-drowning tsunami of grandiosity and disempathic egotism that is sweeping across the globe indiscriminately. The individual is king. Damn the rest. Indeed, language itself has to adapt. There is no future without children. Only an everlasting, carpe diem hedonistic present. It is no wonder that mindfulness is all the rage. As all this leads to an explosion in casual sex, instances of casual sex will erupt after the pandemic is over. But too much casual sex can impair your ability to associate sex with intimacy. If you do it with strangers often enough, your own partner is rendered just another stranger, a statistic. One night stands become the norm, and how you think about sex is molded by them. You see, habits mold our neuroplastic brain. Meaningful relationships become impossible in a world of meaningless, physical, often drunk sex. You bond to your mate in every way, except sexually. People under the age of 35, the generations of hookups and dating-ups, are already experiencing this self-inflicted disability whenever they try to have a more significant liaison. They're incapable of forming long-term relationships. They keep failing. They keep trying. They keep failing. Here are some psychosexual rules to follow in order to mitigate this risk. First of all, never spend too much time with your casual sex partner before you hit the sack. Time shared engenders attachment and intimacy, and transforms what should have been a harmless one-off experience into a more meaningful variant, replete with budding emotions such as affection or even gratitude. If you spend too much time with your casual sex partner, you're not having casual sex. You're beginning to have meaningful sex. Confronted with these mixed signals, our brains react by linking casual sex to intimacy. Henceforth, you will pursue intimacy only in bars and via occasional romps. From that moment on, if you linger with your sex partner too long, you develop intimacy and friendship and gratitude and affection and comfort and support, then you will connect in your mind casual sex with intimacy, and you will not be able to have intimacy outside casual sex. Second rule, exclude certain sex acts. Reserve certain sex acts only for your loved ones. Don't do absolutely everything with everyone, promiscuously and indiscriminately. Refuse to realize all the sexual fantasies of your casual sex partner. You should always maintain an island of exclusivity and oasis of uniqueness. Your body should be used in order to tell your intimate partner how special he or she is to you. If there is nothing you hadn't done before with total strangers or acquaintances, in which way can you make your maid feel chosen and unprecedented in your sex life? If you've done everything with everyone, then you can do nothing with your chosen one. And the last rule is don't have too many one-night encounters too often. Don't sever the neural pathways in the brain that connect sex to deep and abidantly profound intimacy. Do not overuse your sexuality off-handedly, transforming it into just another bodily function. Do not convert your sex into a mere exchange of excretions, a form of masturbating with other people's genitalia. Do not debase sex to the point that you will think nothing of cheating on your partner. Because if sex to you is meaningless, why not cheat on your partner? Or why not do it when you are drunk, wasted or stone senseless? Respect yourself and be mindful of the trust issues and real life hurt and pain and dangers that a totally carefree, anarchic attitude to sex can create. Don't misunderstand what I'm saying. Casual sex can be fun once in a while and can restore one's sense of well-being and self-esteem. If it conforms to one's values and upbringing, casual sex is egocintonic and not disruptive. There's nothing wrong with casual sex inherently. But like everything else in life, overuse can be detrimental to your psychological health and to your ability to nurture a future connection with that other special person. You can overdose on casual sex like you can overdose on water. Recent statistics show that young men have six and young women a little over four casual sex encounters a year. Women are catching up to men. And this is way too much. It is toxic. It will ruin your future.