I’m Not Scared to Reenter Society. I’m Just Not Sure I Want To

Really glad to see people opening up about this. I've been saying for a long time that lockdowns were a green light for some people to stop trying to resolve their various neuroses and to just accept them. As long as they aren't trying to impose it on the rest of us anymore, I don't have an issue with it. Though, if the author was a friend or family member of mine, I would suggest that they seek help.

It&#x27;s hard. A lot of office workers are so happy not just about the lack of a commute but also avoiding office politics and office jerks. At the same time I do feel for people in the lunch, transportation industry or those office workers that depend on staff being in an office to function.<p>Personally I really hope I never go back to an office. Its so much easier to work with others online than in person.

At what point do we say &quot;Fine, stay inside and live your life as a hermit, but the rest of us are returning to normal.&quot;? I feel like these neurotic people have way too much clout and are holding back reopening progress.

I&#x27;m surprised by the hand wringing angst at this &quot;unproductive member of society&quot;. The article was a lark - a bit of exposition on thinking about things differently. Does the author say you need to lay about? No, he just described what it means for him. Is he privileged? Sure, I suppose. We just went through a global pandemic - cut society some slack. This anger at someone expressing an opinion sounds a lot like fox news faux drama.

Take away covid itself and reinstate travel, and this quieter, commute-free existence is perfect for me.

I’ve seen a number of trend pieces along these lines.<p>This is not my experience so far. Nor my friends’. If anything, I feel like we need trend pieces along the lines of “whoa, slow down, don’t dive in nose-first”.

Every so often in the US you’ll hear of people with neuroses that stem from the Great Depression (quite frequently, with hoarding among the elderly population). I think COVID will have a similar impact on a significant subset of the population today.<p>Sure, the vast majority will move on, but some will continue to live with a vague fear of being too near to other people. Personally, I find this thought very saddening, but I’m bracing myself for it and doing my best to make sure it doesn’t happen to me.

I&#x27;ve always found the real world to be infinitely more stressful than the world of work and school. I also recognize how this is somewhat absurd.<p>During COVID my to-do list was basically to work, spend time with family and get some exercise. Now my to-do list is to move back to a major city, get a new job to support an increased standard of living, make new friends in a new area. I have to carefully budget my &quot;keeping up with the Joneses&quot; energy because there is no way I can do it all at once.<p>The absurdity is that I don&#x27;t really need a new job or to move to a huge city in order to be happy but I&#x27;m doing it anyway.

Wow, it&#x27;s funny reading the comments (and the article). Everyone is saying &quot;The world is like X now&quot;, with a different value of X.

I saw some historian last year say, &quot;there will be a world before covid and a world after covid&quot;, and I thought that was hyperbolic. But now I see the truth in the matter - it will not be some obvious, monumental, instantaneous change, but rather the slow, creeping change where a few years from now, we&#x27;ll look back and see that society is just different. In the US, we&#x27;ll see some people wear masks all the time when out in public, and others will wear them when sick or during cold&#x2F;flu season. Others will remain gravely offended by masks. Masks will be a <i>thing</i>.<p>Other changes I can&#x27;t see yet, but they will become apparent later. Definitely work will somehow change. Maybe the &quot;everyone back to the office&quot; crowd will realize that is less competitive. Or the opposite, and there will be a snap back to office work. (My money is on the former). The white collar world has been through Zoom School this past year, and, as a remote worker, that benefits me tremendously, as people now understand how it works and the etiquette around it. Plus Zoom is waaay better now than it was - latency is much less, quality is way up.<p>In the US, maybe some of the outdoor dining, the closing off of streets, will remain. Many marginal restaurants closed, some of which I&#x27;ll miss greatly, but that gives a chance for new ones to open.<p>mRNA vaccines are amazing, and I&#x27;m betting they&#x27;ll impact our lives in profound ways from here on out.<p>Lastly, I have this sense that there are a number of changes happening and that have happened that I can&#x27;t quite make out, but will become obvious in retrospect and I&#x27;m curious what they are.

For lack of better word: I&#x27;ve gone feral. Maybe I already was; but now, I&#x27;m pleased to announce that the transition is complete.

FYI: The author is Tim Kreider, who wrote &quot;Lazy, A Manifesto&quot; years before the pandemic (which is actually an interesting little book).<p>So little has changed in his attitude due to the pandemic. I just think that&#x27;s kind of relevant, as the reader might tricked into thinking he was a quintessential go-getter pre-pandemic. But this has always been his beat.

Honestly I don&#x27;t want to go back for precisely the opposite reasons. My productivity and general wellbeing during quarantine has skyrocketed to heights ive never seen before. And i definitely felt it go down in the short few months quarantine was being eased.

&gt;Service personnel are apparently ungrateful for the opportunity to get paid not enough to live on by employers who have demonstrated they don’t care whether their workers live or die. More and more people have noticed that some of the basic American axioms—that hard work is a virtue, productivity is an end in itself—are horseshit. I’m remembering those science-fiction stories in which someone accidentally sees behind the façade of their blissful false reality to the grim dystopia they actually inhabit.<p>All of this is spot on. The issue with government unemployment and minimum wage programs was never that they didn&#x27;t work; the problem is that they <i>do</i> work. How are you going to get millions of people to work shit jobs for long hours with a smile once you&#x27;ve lifted them out of poverty? How would you keep people in jobs (or marriages) they hate if they got free health care? And how do you get all those poor people to sign up for the military if they got a free college education?

&gt; “For the last year,” a friend recently wrote to me, “a lot of us have been enjoying unaccustomed courtesy and understanding from the world.” When people asked how you were doing, no one expected you to say “Fine.” Instead, they asked, “How are you holding up?” and you’d answer, “Well, you know.” (That “you know” encompassed a lot that was left unspoken: deteriorating mental health, physical atrophy, creeping alcoholism, unraveling marriages, touch starvation, suicidal ideation, collapse-of-democracy anxiety, Hadean boredom and loneliness, solitary rages and despair.) You could admit that you’d accomplished nothing today, this week, all year. Having gotten through another day was a perfectly respectable achievement. I considered it a pass-fail year, and anything you had to do to get through it—indulging inappropriate crushes, strictly temporary addictions, really bad TV—was an acceptable cost of psychological survival. Being “unable to deal” was a legitimate excuse for failing to answer emails, missing deadlines, or declining invitations. Everyone recognized that the situation was simply too much to be borne without occasionally going to pieces. This has, in fact, always been the case; we were just finally allowed to admit it.<p>A bit harsh but to me this is one long keening whine.<p>This is the new elite in a nutshell: extremely privileged but obsessed with their own psychological frailty which they flaunt like it&#x27;s something to be proud of.

He is a whining man-child who refuses to grow up, the writing does not suggest a mentally ill person - and I believe that lots of people who started receiving government checks, now don&#x27;t want to go back to work - the employment numbers were dismal, and employers are having a hard time finding people to take up jobs. Most people work dead-end, meaningless jobs anyways. So why not just drop out?

Tl dr; The author, with all his pandemic-granted free time, has been mulling over the tenants of nihilism and is struggling to adapt.<p>&gt; More and more people have noticed that some of the basic American axioms—that hard work is a virtue, productivity is an end in itself—are horseshit.<p>Yes, despite what some tell you, values aren&#x27;t universal truths - they are matters of opinion. Does that really mean you should refuse to adopt values in your life -- resigning to lay in your bed unmotivated to get out? Do you also refuse to have a favorite flavor of ice cream?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hikikomori" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Hikikomori</a><p>- <i>Nothing ventured, nothing gained.</i><p>- <i>You have to take the shit with sugar.</i><p>- <i>The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotion, and spends himself in a worthy cause; and if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that he’ll never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.</i> - Theodore Roosevelt<p>One who hides, wastes this short life addicted to screen distractions, actively avoids everyone, and misses-out on life for their lack of backbone has a name: coward. It&#x27;s better actually that they stay inside so others don&#x27;t have to waste their time on disappointments from people who aren&#x27;t reciprocal, social, or respectable.

Your tax dollars at work. Job is supposed to be about addressing needs of others, not optimum personal enjoyment. There are plenty of people who prefer restful, solitary passtime for enjoyment - watching Netflix, reading, cocktail on the beach, meditation. They still need to do something in return for people who work on Netflix app or serve them cocktails, otherwise none of the stuff that we enjoy will get made. There are a small number of adults who are truly too mentally or physically disabled to earn their upkeep, but a lot more can improve with a combination of treatment and stimulus checks going away.