Psychology has nothing to do with 99% of my problems which are external and material. If therapy helps you, that is wonderful. It’s only ever been an obstacle for me on my way to inject my legs with juice my body should have made when it was born. It has not given me comfort nor hope for living in peace in a fascist country ignorant of suffering and community.

My wife’s coworker complained to her recently that she’s gotten sick like twice since she started working there about a month ago and since we are the only people who ever wear masks 100% of the time we are outside of our home we have gotten sick maybe that many times total since 2020. They don’t care.

Howhave you managed to get by that long? Unemployment caps out at 18 months, at least where I am.

I had a nice savings built up that lasted us about 6 months or so and then unemployment capped for me at 6 months as well, but since then my wife was lucky enough to get a min wage job to cover us; she assured me it’s no trouble and that she’s just repaying me working and supporting us for years on my own but I still feel pretty rotten about it often because I was just sitting at home safely and she’s in crowds of hundreds of people coming and going daily as the only one masking.

We got really, really lucky and found a rent-controlled apartment with a roommate who is just as serious as us about Covid thanks to my connections in our city’s Covid activism Discord, which was a genuine miracle with the timing. I’m not sure what else we would have done otherwise. We have only been surviving, not anywhere near what we had prior to the RTO mandates starting around 22-23, and I am very bitter about it. I’m already at a disadvantage for being a woman in tech, and this shit definitely doesn’t help. I don’t need to be in a building full of sick assholes who will kill me because I’m immunocompromised; guess what else employers discriminate against?

So I agree, I hope they all leave this earth violently. If they keep this up maybe I’ll get my wish.

This is what has kept me unemployed for almost two years. I’ve been a software dev for almost 15 years and I can’t get hired now because I must love the office, worship the office, schmooze at the office. No. Fuck the office. We did it before and we can keep doing it.

Fun story, pre-Covid I tried to be remote only like some of my other coworkers because of my medical needs which are much better managed at home and I was told no. then a year later Covid happened and we all went remote anyway. Almost like we don’t actually need to be in an office to do stupid fucking office jobs!! Wow!!!

Truly.

Like they just refuse to understand the initial premise of masking - that it was to protect others from you first.

Not only do they do it for half-assed reasons in the first place (“you do you, except you keep your sick away from me”), they half-ass it in action by wearing the most ineffectual masks that are not adequate to prevent aerial spread, and then they pull them under their chins to talk or eat and wear them under their noses all the time like you said! That last one is actually mind blowing to me, I will never, ever understand it. At that point I don’t even know what it’s for. Is it virtue signalling? To whom? No one wears masks anymore, and in lots of places they’ll sneer at you for it. So whatever reason they do it, if they do it and they can feel the air go in and out of their face holes when they breathe then certainly, certainly they know this isn’t doing what it’s supposed to be doing even a little bit, right…? Do they think at all?

In the before-times no staff anywhere, at least that I knew, would ever have refused to wear a mask for a patient request. It is absurd how blatantly politicized this genuinely unprecedented virus is to where all social norms are essentially evaporating to a collective trauma around… a few weeks of very lenient stay-home policies in some places, I guess. We’re so cooked lol

Thank you. I wanted to say something similar but didn’t have the numbers readily on me, and call this a hunch but I suspect you’ll want to have any citations handy for the rest of the stats that are unrelated to the CDC survey.

Sorry I am physically incapable of engaging with most of the real world because none of them will protect me from the plague and my own precautions are a thin plank against a tidal wave of plague rats so a video game and books are pretty much all I got to keep me sane in this compulsory asylum you all have me locked in. There would be no greater joy on this good green earth for me to touch grass as you all love to say but every other fucker on that grass will kill me by simply breathing on me and none of them seem to give a shit no matter how nice or mean I am about it, so back to Etheirys I go…

quick edit to apologize to OP because I know this is a joke post but there are some very heavy-handed, not-very-jokey “video games suck and you suck too” responses floating around here that I can’t abide. Video games do suck, sure wish I could go volunteer at my Communist Org For Building Communism like you and all your badass friends, except they (and probably you too bitch) are all carrying airborne death and won’t do anything about it. Fuck you.

the current “covid is over” can and should be seen like the ancient Romans knowing that lead was poisoning them and using it anyway.

I think it’s even worse tbh because, and I suppose charitably, lead had/has an actual practical use and Covid is literally just a virus. We can’t make it into pipes. We can’t make it into anything except death and disease. There is no reason for things to be like this regarding pure illness other than everyone sees everyone else in the world as disposable NPCs and themselves as invincible.

Today also marks a day where my roommate tests positive and has to take an ambulance for Covid and a guy leans out of his car to fake sneeze at me on my way back from the grocery store. See you all in hell, there ain’t no comin back from this shit.

It’s actually just a real McDonald’s. I am not eating that shit anyway but it’s there. First time I’ve seen something like this in the wild.

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I can only think that people who are happy in this current social climate are fooling themselves or selling something, because my experience since 2020 as an immunocompromised person has been the same. Friends that have told me they “care about” and “want to help” people will not wear a mask and have stopped talking to me. It is an incredibly alienating life and I’d be lying if I said it hasn’t irrevocably changed my opinion of the notion of a broader public goodwill. I have made concerted efforts to find reading material on the history of the medically vulnerable and marginalized and, ideally, its intersections with Marxist principles if I’m lucky, and the few things I have managed to find paint a dour picture. Hundreds of years - thousands, even - and the disabled are still seen exactly as they were then: nuisances at best, a rot to be cleansed at worst. To call me doomer is an understatement at this point. No one sees me as human, no one sees me with any value, or they would do this very simple thing that everyone at this conference seems to have done without spontaneously combusting or whatever it is everyone thinks happens when a venue enforces rules. So when I see things like this, I am relieved, and pleased, and I hope people take the message: you all can do it, you just don’t want to.

Right on. For what little consolation it is living in this awful ableist world I am right there with you.

Even with all our scientific and social advancement, we’re still stumped.

I don’t think this is true, this is the most researched virus in history. I have been told from numerous people in epidemiology & virology that if everyone did what China and NZ did it would be a matter of two or three weeks before this thing was completely eradicated. Since there are animal reservoirs now even though it seems less contagious through those means I’m not sure this is possible anymore. Vax and relax will not work. We have a wealth of research and the knowledge of what we need to do, but the social & political will is not there. That should be the part that gets you feeling because as far as I’m aware the science actually seems very optimistic in a vacuum.