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

[the_siobhan]

I think one of the things that is so jarring is that people don't know that they are making that choice. I'm sure that every single person I interacted with today would say they would rather protect their co-workers, given the choice.

One of the people on my team was recently off work for several years because he was going through cancer treatments. He wasn't wearing a mask today.

My father just turned 80. He finished a round of chemo less than six months ago. His wife isn't vaccinated. Last time I talked to him he said he was glad the pandemic is over.

I really think the problem is just ignorance. It's not like anti-vaxxers where I can say WELL YOU KNOW THIS WOULD HAPPEN when they get sick. They really don't know.

[jo]

I really think the problem is just ignorance. It's not like anti-vaxxers where I can say WELL YOU KNOW THIS WOULD HAPPEN when they get sick. They really don't know.

This. The government -- all levels of it, have pretty much abandoned the "public" part of public health. And you have to work really fucking hard to find the right people to follow on social media to learn about and keep up on the latest findings about Covid and just how much even a "mild" case fucks up every part of your body. People can't make informed choices when not provided with actual information to inform those choices. I read a CBC piece the other day that said over 76% of Canadians have had at least one Covid infection. That just floored me.

[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.”

[dissectionist]

I first read this article a couple months ago but I feel like some of the concepts they discuss, like the disruption of anomie (well-explained in the article) and widespread desperation for normalcy, more closely get at what’s going on than ignorance. People who need others to continue respecting the pandemic are up against powerful psychological drives that are driving many people to do the opposite and “move on”.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/02/22/magazine/covid-pandemic-oral-history.html

[the_siobhan]

New York Times paywall blocks me far more often than I think is warranted by how infrequently I read New York Times articles.

[dissectionist]

Ugh, I thought that one was un-paywalled since it didn’t bring one up for me either of the two times I looked at it.

I use this to get around paywalls when needed. https://txtify.it/

[the_siobhan]

Sorry, I wasn't kvetching at you, I just find NYT totally random about whether or not they block their site.

Thank you for that link! I will definitely be bookmarking that site.