I met up with my ex last week. When she broke up with me, it really broke my brain. But I was able to say to her “having a typically attractive* girlfriend opened doors for me with the beautiful middle class people I was always trying to fit in with, and when you left me those doors slammed shut.” It was nice to just voice it out after all these years and put all the weird recrimination behind.
I sorta wonder what the younger comrades feel. I grew up before the internet, in the 80s when we actually believed that everyone was going to be middle class. Back when I was a kid, every TV show and movie was about trying to get into the cool people group. Life from school to through uni through the early naughts felt like everyone was angling to get in the in-group.
I spent my 20s and 30s repeating the same cycle: meet a group of people, feel accepted, try really hard to be part of the group, then get burned from said normie group for various reasons. The older I got the harder I tried. Like guys, I GOTTA make this group work because I’m running out of time.
Now those same people are boring as fuck to me. I can barely maintain the emotional labour to listen to them. If you’re not marxist/anarchist, activist, vegan, and/or mask wearing, I can’t honestly force myself to talk to you. It does help that most of the normies outed themselves as sociopaths during COVID times. Most people who know me IRL probably think I’m cold. I make a real effort for the actual proles I meet tho.
I suspect you younger comrades probably figured it out much earlier than I did. But if you’re still searching, I hope this helps you out.
*Sorry I know that “typically attractive” can be problematic and arbitrary. In this story, I’m referring to the irrational standard enforced by the mainstream culture and media.
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.