Conversation

Went for first walk in the neighborhood in 3 weeks (last couple of outings have been in the car) Really bleak, like a ghost town. Maybe 1 in 20 people wearing masks. Depressing af. A few young people out on runs or dog walks, but otherwise half-dead morgue like energy.
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Wearing a mask (I have a surgical mask I’m reusing, and we’ve ordered a couple of cloth ones off Etsy) really alters your perception of the environment. You feel like an invalid even if you’re fine. When only a minority are wearing masks, the perception is of paranoia/illness.
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I’m not a high-energy type person myself but I like my social environment to be high energy and bustling. That charges me a bit. This was... not that. Worst walk ever.
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There’s no real pattern to who is wearing masks. The nicer looking cloth masks are middle class people. The surgicals are all over the place... homeless, poor, middle class, young, old, service people, cops, regular people. Spotted a few scattered N95s. Again no real pattern.
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Doesn’t help that today is a slightly muggy grey day. What really hits you is the silence. People are walking around, at perhaps 1/5th tegukar density, but nobody is talking to anyone else. Couples out together seem to speak more softly, in funereal whispers.
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The body language is grim, dour, joyless. No smiles. Even the runners have a workmanlike energy to their run. There is none of the exhilaration you generally sense in people exercising. Emotionally this is definitely apocalyptic.
I’ve never experienced an environment quite like this. The closest is curfews during communal riots or general strikes in India in the 80s, or public spaces in authoritarian countries I’ve visited like Chile. It’s quite awful. The Great Indoors is truly great in relative terms.
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Makes me think that if this were to become a long term, persistent condition — years, even decades perhaps if climate change creates long-term uninhabitable public spaces, life will be literally forced underground.
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The mood here, if not specifics, vaguely reminds me of J. B. Priestley’s post WW2 novels. I read 2 as a teen” Three men in new suits (1945) is about 3 demobbed soldiers returning to civilian life and funding it empty Festival at Farbridge (1951) is a sort of “reboot life” story
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I think restarting public cultural life will take some effort. I suspect towns and neighborhoods will likely mark the occasion ceremonially with some sort of public festival or something. Might be in 3 months or 13, but they will. People need moving-on myth making ceremonies.
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Even though people are doing social distancing based on deference to authority and intellectual prosocial considerations, and in theory to help others rather than themselves, it is getting internalized as a habit rooted in personal fear and a conditioned aversion to contact
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My actual unconscious need for personal space has increased with just 3 weeks of distancing. Reminds me of how quickly I got used to arms length queuing in the US, when I moved from India where the norm is inches rather than feet, including contact in a crush.
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Ie it’s going to feel weird standing close to others when we get back to doing that. It’s not rational, but I suspect personal space is a very basic knob in the human psyche. Social distance *is* the right term. It’s not “just” physical distance because the physical is social.
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And I say this as someone generally averse to physical contact to begin with. I dislike presumptive huggers, arm-around-back-ers, etc. Tbf I don’t even like shaking hands. So if distancing feels like psyche reprogramming to me, I imagine it must be like PTSD to touchy-feels types
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Replying to
Wow grim neighborhood. Up here in the small city of Chico lots of neighbors out walking and biking with smiles and hellos. Maybe we’re still in the delusional stage and wait a week or two.
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