Looking at the recent discourse has made me really upset.
Covid is still a massive problem that is killing people, and almost no one is taking it seriously
It so so hard to do anything when you’re worried about dying, and not in an anxiety disorder way. edit: stop speculating about what medical conditions I have, thank you kindly
I’ve accepted that there is basically nothing I can justify doing during bad weather that involves people outside my 3 person bubble (it used to be larger, but folks have decided to be less cautious without communicating about it) both in a moral obligation and a personal safety sense, and that’s despair inducing because the way things are going this is a “live with it the rest of your life” sort of thing
I want to go out, I really do. I miss hanging with friends. I miss going to concerts and parties and drag and commie shit. But I can’t, and not in a “something is wrong with me” sort of way. I’ve tried to find new social circles who take the pandemic seriously. It’s been an exercise in having my boundaries pushed and my (these next two words are the one part of this post I encourage you to make fun of) evidence based perspective on the pandemic pathologized.
And I know this will be alleviated when the weather outside is suitable for outdoor masked stuff, but god, I haven’t been able to see people besides my partners since the holidays, and there is still months and months left until I can hang out with friends again.
I’m so fucking tired. I can’t keep going on like this without my mental health deteriorating and I can’t stop acting like this without being reckless with my body and abdicating my responsibility to others
Honestly? I think we’ve been beaten, and nobody wants to admit it outright. So we couch it behind mental health and vaccines or paxlovid or whatever, when there’s no reason it has to be this bad. A year or more ago you absolutely wouldn’t have this response, it would have been “wear a fucking mask.”
But now that the death drive has spoken the tune is different. I say that as someone who rarely masks anymore because I simply cannot deal with the social pressure, expense, etc. I stopped looking at the numbers knowing that they would never be acceptable.
I know it’s a semi shitty answer, but have you tried nature? Something you can do alone, but not accessible to everyone of course.
have you tried nature?
Winter hiking, yee. Unfortunately hard to socialize while you’re huffing and puffing
I agree with you about the cope
I wasn’t trying to be shitty, sorry. There’s absolutely something to be said about reconnecting with nature even alone. I’ve also had my personal fill of it for the time, and trust you to make your own judgement there. Apologies if I came across otherwise.
I think it’s false dichotomy to suggest that people either take the pandemic seriously and never go out, or don’t take the pandemic seriously and go club all the time.
Like it’s not really true that there are health risks to covid but not health risks to staying inside all the time and not having a healthy social life. They both are associated with serious negative health outcomes.
It is possible to mask up in most of your life, but also engage in moderate social gatherings to connect with human beings. Mental health is health too.
I think it’s false dichotomy to suggest that people either take the pandemic seriously and never go out, or don’t take the pandemic seriously and go club all the time.
I don’t mean to be impolite but I think you’re shadowboxing here. cw:sex metaphor
spoiler
I’m not preaching abstinence here, I’m preaching “use protection or get tested and keep your partners informed” except when it comes to covid, protection means outside and masking (or well ventilated indoors and both parties masking, but no one agrees to that), and the weather can be shitty for months on end
I’ll schedule hanging out with a person, and the day of I’ll check in, and they’ll say “oh yeah I went out to a busy restaurant two days ago” cw sex metaphor (because this is absolutely how I conceptualize this shit)
spoiler
It’s the equivalent of scheduling a hookup, going through the effort of getting tested, and then the day before they’re like “oh yeah, I went to an orgy last night and had unprotected sex with 30 strangers”
And it’s impossible to find people who are reasonable about this stuff! It keeps happening over and over again, if they’re willing to be honest in the first place!
or don’t take the pandemic seriously and go club all the time.
i disagree with your analysis. the discourse was on a big party night during winter so the timely context of that is “go to an indoor gathering to eat and drink” which is pretty automatically going to spread covid.
You think there’s no way to have an indoor gathering with friends that doesn’t spread covid?
It’s not nearly as bad as last year, stop pretending like it is when it’s clearly not.
wild that you talk about how the conditions in your location are different that i might expect and then immediately turn around and generalize about the rest of us, who probably live somewhere that cases are up year over year.
good job your country not fucking it up… assuming they’re actually still collecting data in a way that’s comparable to previous years unlike here where the reporting has gone to hell
Or for that matter, political organization. How is political organizing going to look like in a Covid world because not everyone’s going to have the luxury of having open physical space to congregate. You’re most likely going to have to hold meetings in closed rooms, many times with poor ventilation, where the odds of at least one person having Covid in that room being fairly high. Some of the rhetoric here seems dangerously close to being, “We shouldn’t organize because organizing spreads Covid” even though political organizing is the only real solution out of this fucking mess. No one will say this explicitly because it’s blatantly counterrevolutionary, but I have already seen rhetoric on Twitter where some people expressing what their vision of proper Covid precautions de facto preclude all forms of political organizing.
People who de facto preclude all forms of organizing are counterrevolutionary full stop. Not everyone has the labor aristocratic salary to have a working microphone with a stable Internet connection to hold Zoom meetings. Meetings need to be done in person. Immunocompromised people have a place in any org, but you also need boots on the ground, even if it means a higher risk of getting Covid. I guess every single union member needs to stay home and let the scabs cross the picket line because they might get Covid from the scabs, which is completely ridiculous.
