When I focus my efforts on covid-conscious people, I know at least that they believe in caring for themselves/others so strongly that they are willing to not only reject the dominant culture, but be materially harmed (harassed or assaulted in public, fired or not hired, verbally abused, shunned, denied services) because of it. This is a good start for being able to love in a friendship, even though it's not everything.

This was my original goal during the height of the lockdowns. I was wearing actual respirators to the grocery store lol. But it was basically pointless in my situation because I live with other people who didn’t care and got all of us sick, and they still held parties (and told me not to tell any of the guests we had covid because they delayed it like 3 times for different reasons).

After 3 years I eventually mostly gave on masking. Not because I think it’s “just the flu bro” or that vaccines cure everything, mainly out of selfish desire for a better social life and because my efforts were wasted by a household of indifference. During those 3 years, things were relatively the same when everyone masked, but then after I became the few remaining ones, I realized how the odd the interactions were. Non maskers wouldn’t say a word to me, most maskers wouldn’t say a word to me, and the few maskers that did talk to me - well, 80% of our conversations were about masking and it seemed there was 0 progression in our relationships. Giving up didn’t excel me to popularity or anything, but it brought me back to the baseline.

What’s paradoxical about all of this is what I don’t know if I can fully trust the people I develop friendships with moving forward because they’re likely to be non maskers like me. In the subsequent, inevitable crisis, will they just ride the stream as we do now and leave me behind if I can’t or won’t catch up, just as I’m doing now with others? Will we risk it all just to maintain our relationships with each other? The other party likely doesn’t have this dilemma to think about because they believe we’re built different and don’t need to worry about any crisis.

It maddens me because when I see news and footage of poor countries or just generally non-west countries, people have respect for each other’s health and their own and continue to mask. Even in countries where it’s no longer mandated like China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, people still mask because it’s been a norm forever and because many health officials continue to promote it. There are few stigmas and awkwardness with socializing because it’s just a routine rather than a rare oddity like it is in the west.