I totally agree with this. I feel the more bullshit that gets piled on top the more I naturally just want to stubbornly resist. Even if it’s against my best interests.

Sometimes I wonder if a certain subset of the population is just naturally like this. The more authority applied the more people resist, even if they intended to do the action they authoritarian insists they do to begin with.

If you tell me to do something my automatic reaction is to say no. Childish I guess and find myself having to evaluate why I have this impulse from time to time.

One has to wonder if the media/social media shut the fuck up about the vaccines/mask arguments compliance rates would be actually higher…

In other words “reverse psychology works”. I don’t think very many people are actually trying to harm others by exaggerating about covid issues, but the results are the same.

If you find yourself in the position of stubbornly refusing to do what people insist you do, the good thought process is realizing they aren’t the boss of you whether you’re making your choices to go along or against what they want.

If you do exactly the opposite of everything someone wants you to do, they’re still controlling you.

We've banned this account for posting flamewar comments. Not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Excellent summary. I'm double-vaxxed and generally wear a mask. My social circle (work/ friends/family) is the upper-middle-class liberal set. My life is pretty set with this group of people and I'm not throwing anyone out of it over covid-opinion silliness. However I'm routinely disgusted by their self satisfaction on this topic. An exchange I heard yesterday between two people close to me, spoken with no irony:

Q: "Why won't people just get the vaccine?" A: "Fear of Democrats."

Back in 2020 when this was all new, I encouraged them to wear masks while shopping, because that's what I saw people in asian countries doing and figured it wasn't unreasonable. They wanted none of it!

Them: "The CDC says we shouldn't wear masks." Me: "Fuck the CDC! They don't know what's going on any better than we do. Wear masks, they will probably help"

Now, they conveniently have no memory of that exchange and regularly evaluate others on whether or not they're properly 'masking'.

After all the BS around this, I don't at all begrudge people their choice to not get vaccinated, even though I recognize that is probably responsible for hospitals hitting capacity.

IMO the way to avoid being resentful to an arbitrary half of people is to continue distancing yourself from the herd until you're at odds with most everyone. From my perspective, people who don't wear masks AND people who continue to wear ersatz surgical masks are all ignorant. Since this ends up being 97% of the population, I obviously cannot carry this opinion prominently. I just wear my own functional respirator in public, quietly model them as the petri dish they are, and deflect their questions with empathizable breadcrumbs.

>functional respirator What do you use? N95?

Half face silicone (3M 7503) with P100 filters (#2297). When/where masks are mandated, I disable the valve functionality by removing all the check valve flaps and sealing up the output with gaff tape. When they're not, I wear a second one without that mod because breathing is much easier.

I'm aware this isn't perfect and I'm not invulnerable - it's not a bunny suit with PAPR. I coast on my glasses taking care of most face droplets (similar to how I coast using many power tools), and admittedly haven't done the work to go beyond that.

It's definitely an impediment to appearance and speaking, and in medium-engagement social situations I do have an N95 I fall back on to not be too obtuse.

This is what I did at the beginning, but as the risks became more clear I see no reason to keep it up. I’m happy to take many much more serious risks than catching covid and it’s become clear that covid is never going away and I’m not going to spend my life in a darth vader mask.

I don't see a reason to stop doing so for errands (eg grocery store) - public places are high fan out, with people that I don't particularly need to socialize with, and keeping defenses up there helps my main goal of being more comfortable within my close circle. Furthermore if the pandemic did disappear tomorrow (I agree it won't), I would still wear something in public to mitigate facial recognition.

Close friends and family I've come around to wearing no face covering (vaxxed) - you're kind of already committed by being in each others' homes - and separating such visits by time. I agree that heavyweight masks don't really work for medium social engagements (like say a hobby group, or incidental conversation when picking something up from someone, etc), which is why I've moved towards the N95 on that front. I hate their small tight bands though. At least it's not a KN95 with the over-the-ear straps.

Neat