It's an interesting dynamic. As you say, I work to unplug to the greatest extent possible. I've been trying this for years.

What I am noticing is that every time I pull back, they become that much more invasive. They feed on our attention. We must give them legitimacy. When we ignore, that causes real damage. So they force us to pay attention.

With this perspective, the societal Covid reaction (note: not remotely the same thing as the bug itself) appears to me more than anything else a vehicle to force us to react to them. When we start figuring out how to operate our lives in a way that we don't need anyone's input, the establishment will go out of their way to fuck things up and make such independence impossible. Then people look to the same people who are quite intentionally fucking things up to solve the problems they created. As a metaphor for this, I highly recommend the film "How to Get Ahead in Advertising". It describes this dynamic beautifully.

Attention and validation whores creating their market by making chaos for people then to ask them to fix. An uglier system I cannot imagine.

One thought that helps me regain perspective when I spin out too far:

The world's been going around the sun for millions of years. It will continue to do so whether any of us is on it or not. And with or without humans, such process and organization will remain unimaginably beautiful.