sailors fighting in the dance hall

[the_siobhan]

Today was the quarterly Town Hall at work, which meant going into a team meeting with the entire department at the Mothership. My first time there. I got lost. And I never did figure out how the passcards work.

It's days like today that make me wonder if I really am from fucking Mars.

There are thousands of people working in that building. The floor I was on was crammed solid - people sitting in rows and rows of desk, chairs jammed shoulder to shoulder. I was the only one in a mask.

They served snacks and coffee over break, my boss wanders by. "Aren't you having any coffee?" Um. I'm wearing a silicon sheath over the entire lower half of my face, do i look like I'm going to have a coffee?

This is where I start wondering if I'm the one who's crazy. How can it just be me? 

Comments

[dissectionist]

There’s something more to it than just lack of access to information, for two reasons:

1) At the time when mask mandates were lifted, there was still a lot of Covid discussions in the popular media, including a great deal about long-term Covid effects, and pleas from scientists and doctors about how this was too early. The information was very popularly present (in a way it no longer is). People still chose to abandon their masks anyway.

2) With my own friends’ group, I’d been acting as an informational resource through the whole pandemic, and many people were engaging with and using my information to help guide their decisions during much of the first few years of the pandemic. I continued to make new information available long after the mask mandates were lifted, but I saw engagement and interest drop massively. People no longer wanted it, because what they _wanted_ was to tell themselves things could go back to “normal” now. Then they actively began ignoring and avoiding anything that didn’t support that desire.

It may not be a conscious decision (I don’t think it is, in most cases), but I do believe there’s still been a decision made by many people to embrace what they want to be true and ignore anything that would go against that. It isn’t as simple as “they’d make better decisions if they had better information”. I wish it was, but all I have to do is look at my own family and friends - who definitely did have better information but chose en masse to ignore it - to know there’s more. I can’t even get my parents to keep masking around my antivax sister, despite them having had a terrible time the first time she gave them Covid, and me keeping them up-to-date on new research relevant to their age group. I believe they just got tired of the fear involved in having to care.

cognitive dissonance are us

[the_siobhan]

Conversation that happened a couple of days ago that I am still goggling over:

A group of people in a chat where one person starts talking about how they are experiencing low key kidney failure along with all the cascading health effects. They hypothesize that this is probably due to a recent covid infection.

Not twenty minutes later the entire group is talking about a planned get-together that will largely centre around clubs, pubs, restaurants, and concerts.

This is the kind of thing that makes me wonder if I'm the one who is missing something. How does my brain work so differently from other people?

Re: cognitive dissonance are us

[dissectionist]

I’ve read that neurodiverse brains are more likely to process risk appropriately, in that we think risks apply to us and are more likely to preemptively act appropriately to avoid the risk.

Neurotypical brains are more likely to subconsciously think, “Wow, bummer that that bad thing happened to you. It’s a good thing that that won’t happen to me because I Am Special and Somehow Protected.” Sometimes that sense of being above risks gets disrupted by having something bad happen to them; other times it just shifts to, “Bummer that that bad thing happened to me, but now that it’s already happened it’s finished and won’t happen again to me.”