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