For a very long time I could not understand why some of the most brilliant and kind individuals I know stopped wearing masks despite the rampant COVID numbers and the detrimental effect it has on our brain, bodies, and long term health. It has been an isolating journey of self discovery and observation of others, and I would like to share some of my theories, produced from a place of curiosity and zero judgement. The targeted readers of this summary are intellectually honest and curious members of the community, regardless of their mask-wearing behaviour.
Yesterday I found out about another friend in tech who is no longer able to do software engineering work due to long covid, and the subsequent cognitive decline. This adds to the increasing handful of newly disabled professionals within my own community, I imagine others have heard similar cases.
I do not intend to persuade those who stopped wearing masks to begin wearing masks again, that is a personal choice and we should respect everyone’s decisions after receiving data and doing their own processing. The power of being seen without judgement is incredible, and I wish to do my part in beginning to close a gap between the mask-wearing/ maskless communities with this write-up.
Even the smartest and kindest individuals have stopped masking – I believe it is the outcome of a composite of issues all mutually reinforcing each other in complex ways. These may or may not all apply to the reader, I acknowledge there is inaccuracy and incompleteness.
Why Smart and Kind People Stopped Wearing Masks
Global Official Mismanagement of Information
I will spend the least amount of time on this section, as this is something everyone knows. Across the entire western world there have been different levels and formats of obfuscating information dissemination around active COVID numbers and its long term health effects.
This is the outcome of the capitalistic desire to sustain the economy, at the cost of a long-term public health crisis. However – capitalism and governmental policies drive each other in our systems, and oftentimes results are driven by desired quarterly, annual, and election term outcomes.
With the entanglement of health authorities, revenue generating machines, media outlets, and policy making processes at all levels, it is only natural the outcome to be: COVID numbers are not collected/disseminated well, and COVID research outcomes are not disseminated to the public at all.
Acceptance of Risk
Some friends I’ve spoken to have expressed their acceptance of the risk levels. This is something we all do on a day-to-day basis: some of us smoke, some of us drink, some of us go do exciting adrenaline driven activities that bring superior joy at the risk of bodily harm. It is a set of tradeoffs we have internally evaluated and made a choice with various levels of explicit intention, and we all have different needs.
It is ok to accept the risk, but accepting the risk without adequate data could have negative outcomes. Unfortunately, Global Official Mismanagement of Information is resulting in elevated difficulty in passive consumption of information around COVID outcomes: there is elevated risk in detrimental cognitiveco and physical health outcomes even with mild covid infections in young and healthy populations. That information is driven to us via algorithms, and Human Coping Mechanisms for Minimizing Catastrophe prevents many of us from actively seeking out information that could deal damage to our day during an on-going crisis we are attempting to ignore.
Human Coping Mechanisms for Minimizing Catastrophe
Studies of disasters and failure to brace and respond to disasters have produced consistent outcomes around this: we use previous data we collected around similar events to inform our response to a current event, and this is to our detriment when the current event is significantly more impactful.
During the Japanese Tsunami in 2011, many lost their lives as an outcome of miscalculated risk. Many residents had experiences with tsunamis, but never one of this magnitude, yet that experience in responding to smaller tsunamis led to their detriment in evaluations: move to high grounds or higher grounds? Leave now or leave later?
The researcher Reiko Hasegawa described it succinctly: “While risk perception based on former experience did indeed help to save lives of many, in the face of an extreme disaster that exceeded all assumptions in terms of its magnitude, it also produced the reverse effect by creating false assumptions as to the level of risk.”
When we hear “it’s just like a flu” and have anecdotal evidence of ourselves and others getting COVID and recovering from it with minimal effects, it is evidence feeding into our confirmation bias. Due to Global Official Mismanagement of Information, many of us are not aware that even mild COVID infections impact T cells and have an overall impact on all of our physical functions and organs: across all demographic groups, even mild covid reinfections has a significant impact on elevated heart, liver, respiratory, and cognition (1, 2, 3). COVID is to a flu is roughly comparable to the Japanese 2011 Tsunami is to previous smaller, less disastrous tsunamis. COVID and flu share a set of symptoms and behaviours, but the former is vastly different in the mechanisms of infection and its superior ability to evolve and adapt. Using our experiences with influenza to evaluate our responses to COVID may lead to mismanagement of risk, yet it is just an outcome of the way our brain works.
It is my experience that even the most astute, analytical, and intellectual of us are susceptible to the Human Coping Mechanisms to Minimize Catastrophe across all situations of varying degrees of impact. In fact, I do not feel like I have found the best scholarly reserach available to link for this blog due to my own anxiety and desire to think about COVID— we are all susceptible. Without research data actively presented to us by a collection of government and corporate bodies, which are motivated to publicize an alternative reality of “there-is-no-catastrophe” and continue Global Official Mismanagement of Information, no wonder so many of us stopped wearing a mask.
(Faultless) Alienation & Miscommunications from the Mask-wearing Community
I have received casual and hostile remarks from strangers and acquaintances around my mask wearing, which can roughly be categorized into “you think you’re better than us huh” or “you’re living in fear”. The former struck me as a surprise, because I was wearing a mask out of a desire to protect my own health, and I do not assign moral goodness to mask wearing. However, it appears the early pandemic stages of equating mask-wearing with community care has created that perception: “mask wearers are virtual signalers”. It does not help that many of us who are still wearing masks are also coping with the frustration and isolation from our friends and family who are no longer wearing masks, and I have seen social media content criticizing those who have stopped wearing masks.
It is a common human desire to resort to coping mechanisms when we are feeling hurt, isolated, and criticized. Mask wearers have reason to be angry at those who stopped wearing masks, and in feeling judged, those who stopped wearing masks have reason to feel alienated and hence resentment towards mask wearers. In an attempt to resolve the cognitive dissonance, those who do not wear masks either quietly distanced themselves from mask wearers, or began to actively criticize them with the reason they have found to be sensible - “they must be wearing masks out of fear”.
In response to a global pandemic, we have divided ourselves in more ways than one. With the political and socioeconomic factors being out of scope for this discussion,the choice to wear a mask and remain COVID cautious has alienated everyone on both sides of the fence, to different degrees, as a result of how the human brain chooses to cope.
Narrative building is a powerful tool to recover from trauma, and the pandemic has traumatized us as a whole. Building a narrative of why masks can be such a point of friction within people who are otherwise aligned in other ways has been helpful for my own mental health, and I am sharing this narrative in hopes of helping others who have found the confusion around not understanding behaviours different from that of our own. I am also hoping to show those who make different choices from myself: you are seen, you are valid, I empathize with your choices and I respect you regardless.
Nihilism
Lastly, I have observed some friends tossing reason out the window. They are astute observers of life who have keenly recognized the awfulness of it all, and they have simply given up and resorted to a “whatever happens happens” mindset, especially since mask-wearing can be so isolating, and there is at least the joy of community gathering and regular daily operations without the construction of a mask in the alternative.
For those who feel nihilistic around the state of our world, I hope reading this gives you some small amount of renewed strength. You are also seen, and your path is also respected and empathized with. I hope you find strength in you to hold good regard for the world again, but I also think it is incredibly poetic and awesome to choose the path of “fuck it, I want to live and enjoy life while I can”.
But Life Has to Go On, What Now?
While this was therapeutic to write, it was also devastating and anxiety-provoking. My brain raced through a series of reactions to this writing from different types of readers, and I feel like a common question for those who made it through the last sections would be: ok, thanks for the narrative, cool story but I’m now depressed and you’re not offering me a solution.
I do not have solutions, but I have some methodologies that have begun to work for me and those in my community, mask-wearers and maskless alike.
More Understanding, Less Isolation
This past summer of 2023 was when I began collecting these thoughts. My best friend of 1.5 decades, who had stopped wearing masks, flew from the other side of the country to stay with me for a week. After discussing our levels of risk evaluation and my reasoning for mask-wearing, he and his partner both chose to social distance and wear masks for 10 days ahead of his flight.
It was the first time we got to see each other face-to-face since 2020, we caught up and had a transformative week of bonding and mutual growth. Two of my local best friends, who also stopped wearing masks early in the pandemic, met up with my best friend, myself, and my child. We did mask-wearing friendly activities, and shared an evening of patio dinner, drinks, icecream, and coffee. I returned home that evening feeling community joy that had been missing from my life for 3 years, and I realized the path to resolution and joy in a terrifying new world is more understanding and communication with those who are otherwise aligned with me.
I am grateful for my friends who have different risk calculations from me for accommodating my need for outdoor activities, and I hope to encourage the readers to have similar discussions with friends you have been missing due to different COVID cautiousness practices. Ultimately, it is all of us and our desire to enjoy community and life again versus the devastating impacts of a virus that is not being managed well by governing systems, and we can talk about how we cope these problems in the format of:
What are the outdoor activities that we can do together? What are the seasons in our locale that are appropriate for these? How can we plan our social schedules around those constraints?
How can we make each other feel comfortable in each other’s presence? How can we demonstrate understanding and respect for different choices around COVID caution practices?
What are the best patios around in the city? How can we better improve indoor ventilation for shared indoor spaces so hanging out again may be achievable?
Harm Reduction and Risk Mitigation
Mask wearing does not completely eliminate COVID risk, respirators make it better, and better mask hygiene further improves that. HEPA filters help too, and better mental health as an outcome of mitigating community division will boost our immune systems.
When it comes to the manifestations of COVID infection, the amount of virus that ends up in our system matters, and the statistical likelihood of being exposed to the virus matters based on Settings. An example of risk mitigation for those who may not wish to wear masks everyday might be having a mask on in high traffic indoor places with poor ventilation, like transit and air ports. Another example of risk mitigation could be placing HEPA filters in office spaces and homes to reduce viral load in the air.
These are my starter pointers. If we come together as a community, I believe we can produce more creative and systemic solutions of risk mitigation.
Protecting Our Collective Intellect
Those of us who are system thinkers realize the significant long term impact of wide-spread cognitive impact across all demographics. This was a dense write-up, readers who have made it to this section are likely intellectually curious folks who have a desire to protect their cognitive capabilities. This is my contribution to the collective facilitation of community joy, understanding, problem solving, and healing from our trauma in a devastating new world ravaged by unmitigated COVID, and also my canary call to the intellectual community who may wish to join me in preventing further crisis.
I have found myself wishing for a write-up like this to aggregate these narratives in a way I could share with my own community. Mine are not unique observations, and many others have probably written or talked about it in different formats, it is likely due to my own ignorance that I have not found one. I am a big fan of “when there isn’t a solution you want, make one” – hopefully this is the beginning of many solutions to be produced by those of you who have found some small joy, strength, and inspiration in having read my analysis.