"wearing a mask during a deadly pandemic" is a really simple thing to do to demonstrate willingness to sign on to a social compact. Fortunately, almost everyone I see in my neighborhood does. I generally feel positively towards my actual neighbors. But based on conversations with friends elsewhere, this is not universally true.

I don't know if I could ever move to an area that didn't have high mask compliance during all this.

It's like living with someone who doesn't think playing with matches is a stupid risk to take. One day the house might burn down. It would be safer to live alone, or with people with similar attitudes to not playing with fire.

> "wearing a mask during a deadly pandemic" is a really simple thing to do to demonstrate willingness to sign on to a social compact.

Interestingly, I wear none, and use that for signaling: I find that I associate more easily with people who also refuse the masquerade!

So you may have a point: mask offer the possibility to signal, which we can both use to refuse to associate given our difference in values.

The words could be changed from "sign on to a social compact" to "sign on to this particular social compact" to be more accurate because chances are good that folks who don't wear masks probably ascribe to any number of other social compacts. Living in a diverse, heterogenous society means living within a variety of social compacts formed from differing cultural perspectives and different individual risk evaluations.

If one would not live in a place without high mask compliance, why would one live in a place without 100% mask compliance? If not 100%, what is the number? Why stop at mask compliance?

The problem is that we have to share the same air at the laundromat and the grocery.

I also wouldn't want to live somewhere with a high rate of drunk driving for similar reasons. Someone else's cultural comfort with getting behind the wheel while sloshed puts me at risk because we unavoidably share the same physical space.

What are you and other people doing going to the laundromat, grocery and drink driving? That's nuts in the middle of a pandemic--how are those places even available for walk-in business? Since I don't commonly leave my house I had no idea people were out there "unavoidably" sharing physical space. No wonder the pandemic isn't contained, its full of people with unavoidabilities.