Prompted by a link to an article that popped up in my social feed. In The Atlantic. The Evermaskers. The isolation of people who take precautions against Covid has only gotten more intense. By Daniel Engber.
I can relate to this. I avoid indoor meetings when possible, but it’s not always possible, and I’m really frustrated that people have indoor meetings unnecessarily. There’s a lot of times when we could be meeting outdoors or by zoom.
I had Covid once, it wasn’t a bad case but I think I got long-term effects. I’m not worried about dying but I am worried about worsening effects if I catch it again. And there are other viruses too.
And it’s not just about me. I am a relatively healthy person after all. But I’ve met a lot of people via social media who constantly have to mask and avoid any kind of close contact with people. Add, all of us in my household have had health challenges and I don’t want to expose anybody unnecessarily.
One time I was indoors and masked, expecting others to be masked because most of them are older than me. Nobody was masked, one person sort of speaking for the group said they feel protected enough by the vaccine. I belatedly had the thought also that it might be they felt protected because they have good healthcare access.
And of course there are times when I take my life into my hands willingly, to go see a film be in a social situation. It’s a bit crazy, navigating all this.
I do think my immune system recently got better after I dealt with some long-term emotional junk that had been weighing on me.
I don’t like that people who mask and practice distancing are labeled the weirdos. I hated watching things get back to normal because it seemed like such a blatant ploy to restore consumer spending and prop up office real-estate.
One of the most generally conscientious people I know, who recognizes & acknowledges the situation re communicable diseases (as well as various other situations in the world), said to me, “I’m just tired of thinking about it.”
That made me draw a sharp breath.
And boy, once people who are cushioned by wealth and social status get tired of thinking about something, that’s just that. Don’t look up.
And I realized how many things that’s true for, including the signs of biospheric collapse. That even people who share a common recognition, many of them are just plain “tired of thinking about it.” And for whatever reason, they don’t have to think about it if they don’t want to.
Nobody is pretending the shutdowns were a glorious good time. but they had some unexpected silver linings, both ecologically and socially. I mean in terms of social movements but also maybe even in terms of prodding us to find ways to deepen our social connections even while we were physically constrained from gathering.
One thing for sure, the rise of widespread teleconferencing enabled activists from around the world to participate in conferences that we never would have been able to afford to participate in person, and maybe wouldn’t even have been invited to or otherwise had access to (even if we had been able to justify the eco-footprint, which I would not have).
BTW I lived in Japan for five years in the 1990s, it was a revelation to me at the time that people would choose to wear masks in public simply to protect others from catching a cold etc. How refreshing to have lived in a culture where it was normal to be so considerate of others.
On a related note, a recent article in I believe it was The Guardian highlighted a study showing that people will take more action on climate if they believe that others care as well. Makes sense. Behavioral contagion (or at least attitudinal contagion even when people in this consumerism-infected society struggle to find ways of matching their behavior to their beliefs) does matter.
Yes, here you go, it was in The Guardian. Spiral of silence: climate action is very popular, so why don’t more people realise it? By Damian Carrington.