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

179 points by one2three4 5y ago

chitowneats 5y ago
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.
- coldtea 5y ago
  >to stop trying to resolve their various neuroses and to just accept them Why would that be good?
  - one2three4 5y ago
    Because, sometimes, it's easier to accept that you're built in a certain way rather than spend a lifetime in denial. "Sometimes" is the key word here. And the one that I wouldn't know how to quantify.
    - Snoozle 5y ago
      It seems to me that the "way people are built" these days is just a lack of discipline. We have grown up soft and effortlessly, and we did not grow the tools to cope with self regulation as it was never necessary. I don't see how "accepting" this behavior does anything to solve it. Ostracization is a valid social regulation for enforcing certain qualities in a society and it's not always wrong to use it.
      - Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
        Perhaps it is you who grew up with too much discipline? Ostracism is shown to be a precursor to terroristic ideation, if your goal is to see less mass shootings and similar extreme events we would all be better served to consider rehabilitative and inclusionary practices instead of punishing people that you deem too soft or ostracizing t them. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323393438_Ostracism_promotes_a_terroristic_mindset https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323393438_Ostracism...
        AlexandrB 5y ago
        In my experience, pro-strict-discipline ideas don't care about effectiveness or consequences. The ideology of discipline itself is the point and the virtue being pursued.
  - chitowneats 5y ago
    The part that is good is that they are admitting that their continuation of shut-in behavior is not about the virus. Like the old saying goes: Step 1 is admitting you have a problem. The author didn't quite go that far. But they gave enough of an idea of what's going on in their head that someone else can start to diagnose it.
  - geofft 5y ago
    "Neurosis" is no longer a well-defined term in the relevant professional community these days, but to the extent it has a specific meaning beyond being a vague synonym for e.g. "worry", it's an unresolved mismatch between your mental behavior/personality and the expectations of society. There are two ways to resolve that - change your mental behavior/personality and change the expectations upon you - and there's nothing in the definition to prefer one over the other.
- mariodiana 5y ago
  Some of us would argue that the year-long (and counting) lockdowns are the result of neurotics imposing on the rest of us. Some of us have been arguing since the beginning of all this that the old and infirm should have been the ones to isolate themselves — with accommodations and support from the rest of society — while the rest of us took sensible precautions and continued on with the business of life. Some of us trusted that "two weeks to slow the spread" was the sensible policy and what our governments would follow. Instead, what happened was an extended and irrational panic by some forced on the rest of us. So, I think it's terrific if people would accept their neuroses and not bother the rest of us. But there is no evidence that that's how things work.
  - everdrive 5y ago
    >Some of us would argue This is a tenuous link at best. China does not have the same cultural makeup of the United States, and they shut down more aggressively than any western nation. (bear in mind this is not a compliment, I would not like to see US officials literally weld people into their apartment complexes.)
    - phone8675309 5y ago
      You'll get a fine or a short jail stay in the US if you defy the mask orders/social distancing orders. You might just get a bullet in China for defying those orders.
  - starlust2 5y ago
    This might be true if American society as a whole embraced safety measures to keep the rest of society safe. That didn't happen. A significant portion of the country believe the pandemic was a hoax and took no precautions whatsoever.
    - chitowneats 5y ago
      Is this your explanation for the recent COVID waves in Taiwan, Vietnam, and Guangzhou as well? I thought they were strictly adhering to protocol?
- watertom 5y ago
  > As long as they aren't trying to impose it on the rest of us anymore, But that's what you are doing. > I would suggest that they seek help. Maybe the right help is for the world not to be driven by the extroverted, over confident, and thoughtless. I'm a physically imposing person, I'm tall and muscular, so I can get away with being introverted because nobody tries very hard to bully me to be extroverted, they try a little bit but back off quickly. Most introverts aren't afforded the same luxury. Forcing introverts to adapt to an extroverted world can really mess with your head. To the extroverts of the world they don't see any issues what so ever, and all the introverts should "just get over it".
  - chitowneats 5y ago
    Can we not agree that what this person is describing is a little more severe than introversion? I am 100% in favor of calling an extrovert/introvert truce. You let me go to the office, run my bar, see my dying mother in the nursing home, and in return you never have to come to the office or interact with the public again. Deal?
    - kuratkull 5y ago
      I was just think of how to say what you said. He's not talking about introverts.
  - kuratkull 5y ago
    As an introvert I do not appreciate your incorrect characterization of introverts.
- Consultant32452 5y ago
  Another large pool, at least in my circle, are very boring people who like having an external justification for their inaction. I would spend time with family, but there's a pandemic. I would take the kids to the park, but there's a pandemic. I would go to happy hour after work, but there's a pandemic. I would start exercising and losing weight, but the gym is closed, pandemic. Frankly, I don't care if people aren't interested in spending time with their family or going to happy hour during regular times. But the people who did so previously out of obligation find it convenient to have an external justification.
perardi 5y ago
I’ve seen a number of trend pieces along these lines. 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”.
- atatatat 5y ago
  Congratulations on having friends!
- vmception 5y ago
  Exactly my experience too pre-Covid, people would say "hey do you mind if I double-dip this food into the sauce?" going out of their way not to inadvertently share spit now seemingly everyone is like "lol... spit!? really? you think anybody is worried about that?"
  - perardi 5y ago
    Yeah, I live in a weird bubble, but Saturday’s bar excursion was “no masks, no shirts, no distancing”, and the 1-hour wait in line would suggest that there’s plenty of demand for that.
    - vmception 5y ago
      no shirts? I haven't seen any businesses running that promo, but the house parties I've been to last weekend weren't so dissimilar
      - perardi 5y ago
        I mean, that wasn’t stated, but when the bar leads with the line “Circuit music returns…”, it’s implied.
        vmception 5y ago
        I'm not familiar with what that is or what that implies, I think your weird bubble is a bit obtuse but I do understand the general experience of people being less inhibited
FredPret 5y ago
Take away covid itself and reinstate travel, and this quieter, commute-free existence is perfect for me.
gilbetron 5y ago
I saw some historian last year say, "there will be a world before covid and a world after covid", 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'll look back and see that society is just different. In the US, we'll see some people wear masks all the time when out in public, and others will wear them when sick or during cold/flu season. Others will remain gravely offended by masks. Masks will be a thing. Other changes I can't see yet, but they will become apparent later. Definitely work will somehow change. Maybe the "everyone back to the office" 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. In the US, maybe some of the outdoor dining, the closing off of streets, will remain. Many marginal restaurants closed, some of which I'll miss greatly, but that gives a chance for new ones to open. mRNA vaccines are amazing, and I'm betting they'll impact our lives in profound ways from here on out. Lastly, I have this sense that there are a number of changes happening and that have happened that I can't quite make out, but will become obvious in retrospect and I'm curious what they are.
- perardi 5y ago
  Politico just had a decent piece on some of the smaller societal changes… https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/31/covid-rules-liquor-pot-telemedicine-491388 https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/31/covid-rules-liquor-... …though arguably expanded telemedicine isn’t “small”.
- aphextron 5y ago
  >I saw some historian last year say, "there will be a world before covid and a world after covid", 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'll look back and see that society is just different. One thing to keep in mind is that this is nothing new. Plague has been with humanity for as long as we have existed. And yet, here we were in 2019 living our lives "normally" after dealing with those in the past. I think there will certainly be a generational cultural divide caused by this which separates us from those who were too young to remember, much like the Depression was for our grandparents. But people will go back to being people regardless.
decremental 5y ago
Pfft. This article is so lame. This guy wrote like 10,000 words to describe all his emotions about basically living like a NEET for a year. Self-indulgent baby. I hope this isn't representative of most people because how pathetic would that be. A nation of infants.
- ggcdn 5y ago
  I haven’t heard of NEET before, so I looked it up. NEET, an acronym for "Not in Education, Employment, or Training", refers to a person who is unemployed and not receiving an education or vocational training
  - hellbannedguy 5y ago
    I'm getting tired of obscure acronyms, or people who abuse them? Thanks for looking it up though.
  - Mountain_Skies 5y ago
    Don't get into the habit of using it. Just like incel, it's a trendy pejorative that for some reason is currently socially acceptable to use for people who mostly do not identify with the label. It's a reminder that the no-bullying campaign and war on slurs is a one way street.
SunlightEdge 5y ago
It'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. Personally I really hope I never go back to an office. Its so much easier to work with others online than in person.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  How does wfh avoid office politics? I feel like it has only been accentuated and most employees have vastly reduced visibility.
  - NortySpock 5y ago
    Yeah, it just hides office politics behind private slack channels and zoom calls. I certainly have reduced visibility to what's going on. On the other hand, not having a ~40 minute commute is a real perk.
  - foobiekr 5y ago
    I work for a very political company but have a high, broad-in-scope role. The politics have gone to eleven. I think most employees who think politics has _diminished_ in the last year are just demonstrating how remote can lower your ability to read the room.
  - mumblemumble 5y ago
    It gives one the freedom to choose not to actively participate. In person, it's not considered polite to take a breath and step away to think for 10 minutes before responding. So it's easy to get caught up in the whirlwind. Remote, there's room to pause, reflect, and decide how to respond. That makes it a lot easier to choose not to engage. Does that mean that you're often letting the white collar Machiavellis have their way? Yes. But perhaps that's not your problem. It's often easier to choose not to have it be your problem when you're physically removed from the situation.
  - SunlightEdge 5y ago
slibhb 5y ago
> “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. A bit harsh but to me this is one long keening whine. This is the new elite in a nutshell: extremely privileged but obsessed with their own psychological frailty which they flaunt like it's something to be proud of.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  > This is the new elite in a nutshell: extremely privileged but obsessed with their own psychological frailty which they flaunt like it's something to be proud of. Absolutely this. Middle/upper class America has been doing this for the last decade, and it's left a horrible impression on our youth. I'm not going to teach the next generation of kids to give up so easily.
- skystarman 5y ago
  IMO it's preferable than the macho BS of pretending any and all vulnerability makes you a sissy incapable of ever amounting to much.
  - cupofcoffee 5y ago
    I guarantee you that they are decimated by trauama on the daily and hide behind thin veneers of "just do it".
jdhn 5y ago
At what point do we say "Fine, stay inside and live your life as a hermit, but the rest of us are returning to normal."? I feel like these neurotic people have way too much clout and are holding back reopening progress.
- helen___keller 5y ago
  > At what point do we say "Fine, stay inside and live your life as a hermit, but the rest of us are returning to normal."? Has this not already happened? Where I live all covid restrictions have been dropped, sports games are at full capacity, masks optional everywhere but public transit and hospitals, and so on
- SyzygistSix 5y ago
  I don't think most of the people who feel this way are neurotic. I think most of the people who feel this way are treated very poorly and are forced to work more than 40 hours a week and don't get paid a living wage. We don't hear from them because they don't write for The Atlantic. I don't hear people on HN who want to continue working remotely being accused of being neurotic or being molly-coddled, and they get get paid well and have very good work conditions. I agree that the author is courting some kind of depression or neuroticism. But the subtext I heard in the article is that a lot of the things that people have not had to deal with during the pandemic are things we have known are bullshit for a long time. And now that we have seen proof that they aren't necessary, people are reluctant to go back to accepting those bullshit conditions. Especially when we saw how poorly healthcare workers and service workers who did work during the pandemic were treated. And again, those people don't write for the Atlantic but I have a feeling they were well represented by this article.
  - __blockcipher__ 5y ago
    I have the opposite interpretation. Only this class of people was actually able to "not participate in society" for 18 months: > I don't hear people on HN who want to continue working remotely being accused of being neurotic or being molly-coddled, and they get get paid well and have very good work conditions. By "this class of people" I don't literally mean people on HN but people in the typical yuppie lines of work. Someone who's actually working class has not had the luxury of doing so. Even if you got every stimulus check that covered maybe 10% of the expenses over the last 1.25 years. So the people who could stay inside indefinitely either never lost their job (transitioned to remote or already worked remote pre-pandemic), or they lost their job but had such a massive nest egg that they were able to weather it. Actual working-class people have not been sheltering inside for 18 months. In my opinion it's unhealthy to do so, so I'm not alleging that it would be a good thing if the working class hid inside too, but rather that the "I'm not ready to return to normal" crowd is driven by neuroticism and a crippling fear of life itself rather than it being some actual necessary result of this respiratory virus pandemic.
cat_plus_plus 5y ago
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.
- helen___keller 5y ago
  > Your tax dollars at work. What does this article have to do with taxation, may I ask?
  - NelsonMinar 5y ago
    Absolutely nothing, unsurprisingly.
fairity 5y ago
Tl dr; The author, with all his pandemic-granted free time, has been mulling over the tenants of nihilism and is struggling to adapt. > 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. Yes, despite what some tell you, values aren'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?
uhtred 5y ago
Looking at the comments and their ranking on here enforces my belief that hackernews community is quite Conservative.
- fallingfrog 5y ago
  There is certainly a vocal contingent that will jump in and attack working people, young people, or poor people as being crybabies anytime corporate profits are in question. Get back to work, peons!
- fallingfrog 5y ago
  It’s for good reason of course: these are people who want to be the boss, so they’ve already in many cases started to see regular people through that lens. From the point of view of the boss, regular people are objects of contempt; never doing what you want, you have to pay them more than you’d like, etc. So you see them as beneath you. The ironic thing is that many of the people with that worldview probably think of themselves as libertarians, even though that attitude is purely authoritarian.
- fuzzylightbulb 5y ago
  You see a lot of angry young men who are convinced of their own genius, convinced that they alone are responsible for their accomplishments, deeply offended that someone else might received care and compassion for what they consider to be weaknesses. It is all an effort to justify their own juvenile selfishness and to recast it as a virtue. But sometimes there is a link to a cool github repo so here we all are.
  - dang 5y ago
    "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." These things are mostly just projections and comments like this do nothing but make the place even worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- dang 5y ago
  This is a classic cognitive bias. People with political passions perceive HN as being slanted to the opposite politics. Many examples here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870
gpsx 5y ago
Wow, it's funny reading the comments (and the article). Everyone is saying "The world is like X now", with a different value of X.
fallingfrog 5y ago
>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. All of this is spot on. The issue with government unemployment and minimum wage programs was never that they didn't work; the problem is that they do work. How are you going to get millions of people to work shit jobs for long hours with a smile once you'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?
zests 5y ago
I'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. 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 "keeping up with the Joneses" energy because there is no way I can do it all at once. The absurdity is that I don't really need a new job or to move to a huge city in order to be happy but I'm doing it anyway.
- dwaltrip 5y ago
  If you don’t need it or want it then why are you doing it? Just tell people you don’t want to.
thorough 5y ago
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. 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.
tyrrvk 5y ago
I'm surprised by the hand wringing angst at this "unproductive member of society". 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.
- nate_meurer 5y ago
  I think a lot of the tense reactions come from the notion that governments have leveraged the opinions you speak of to impose extremely illiberal sanctions on liberties we used to take for granted, such as telling us whether and how we are allowed to see our own families.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sharadov 5y ago
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'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?
penguin_booze 5y ago
For lack of better word: I've gone feral. Maybe I already was; but now, I'm pleased to announce that the transition is complete.
doggodaddo78 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori - Nothing ventured, nothing gained. - You have to take the shit with sugar. - 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. - Theodore Roosevelt 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's better actually that they stay inside so others don't have to waste their time on disappointments from people who aren't reciprocal, social, or respectable.
Tomminn 5y ago
FYI: The author is Tim Kreider, who wrote "Lazy, A Manifesto" years before the pandemic (which is actually an interesting little book). So little has changed in his attitude due to the pandemic. I just think that'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.
ED_Radish 5y ago
Honestly I don'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.

179 points by one2three4 5y ago

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.

coldtea 5y ago
>to stop trying to resolve their various neuroses and to just accept them Why would that be good?
- one2three4 5y ago
  Because, sometimes, it's easier to accept that you're built in a certain way rather than spend a lifetime in denial. "Sometimes" is the key word here. And the one that I wouldn't know how to quantify.
  - Snoozle 5y ago
    It seems to me that the "way people are built" these days is just a lack of discipline. We have grown up soft and effortlessly, and we did not grow the tools to cope with self regulation as it was never necessary. I don't see how "accepting" this behavior does anything to solve it. Ostracization is a valid social regulation for enforcing certain qualities in a society and it's not always wrong to use it.
    - Red_Leaves_Flyy 5y ago
      Perhaps it is you who grew up with too much discipline? Ostracism is shown to be a precursor to terroristic ideation, if your goal is to see less mass shootings and similar extreme events we would all be better served to consider rehabilitative and inclusionary practices instead of punishing people that you deem too soft or ostracizing t them. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323393438_Ostracism_promotes_a_terroristic_mindset https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323393438_Ostracism...
      - AlexandrB 5y ago
        In my experience, pro-strict-discipline ideas don't care about effectiveness or consequences. The ideology of discipline itself is the point and the virtue being pursued.
- chitowneats 5y ago
  The part that is good is that they are admitting that their continuation of shut-in behavior is not about the virus. Like the old saying goes: Step 1 is admitting you have a problem. The author didn't quite go that far. But they gave enough of an idea of what's going on in their head that someone else can start to diagnose it.
- geofft 5y ago
  "Neurosis" is no longer a well-defined term in the relevant professional community these days, but to the extent it has a specific meaning beyond being a vague synonym for e.g. "worry", it's an unresolved mismatch between your mental behavior/personality and the expectations of society. There are two ways to resolve that - change your mental behavior/personality and change the expectations upon you - and there's nothing in the definition to prefer one over the other.
mariodiana 5y ago
Some of us would argue that the year-long (and counting) lockdowns are the result of neurotics imposing on the rest of us. Some of us have been arguing since the beginning of all this that the old and infirm should have been the ones to isolate themselves — with accommodations and support from the rest of society — while the rest of us took sensible precautions and continued on with the business of life. Some of us trusted that "two weeks to slow the spread" was the sensible policy and what our governments would follow. Instead, what happened was an extended and irrational panic by some forced on the rest of us. So, I think it's terrific if people would accept their neuroses and not bother the rest of us. But there is no evidence that that's how things work.
- everdrive 5y ago
  >Some of us would argue This is a tenuous link at best. China does not have the same cultural makeup of the United States, and they shut down more aggressively than any western nation. (bear in mind this is not a compliment, I would not like to see US officials literally weld people into their apartment complexes.)
  - phone8675309 5y ago
    You'll get a fine or a short jail stay in the US if you defy the mask orders/social distancing orders. You might just get a bullet in China for defying those orders.
- starlust2 5y ago
  This might be true if American society as a whole embraced safety measures to keep the rest of society safe. That didn't happen. A significant portion of the country believe the pandemic was a hoax and took no precautions whatsoever.
  - chitowneats 5y ago
    Is this your explanation for the recent COVID waves in Taiwan, Vietnam, and Guangzhou as well? I thought they were strictly adhering to protocol?
watertom 5y ago
> As long as they aren't trying to impose it on the rest of us anymore, But that's what you are doing. > I would suggest that they seek help. Maybe the right help is for the world not to be driven by the extroverted, over confident, and thoughtless. I'm a physically imposing person, I'm tall and muscular, so I can get away with being introverted because nobody tries very hard to bully me to be extroverted, they try a little bit but back off quickly. Most introverts aren't afforded the same luxury. Forcing introverts to adapt to an extroverted world can really mess with your head. To the extroverts of the world they don't see any issues what so ever, and all the introverts should "just get over it".
- chitowneats 5y ago
  Can we not agree that what this person is describing is a little more severe than introversion? I am 100% in favor of calling an extrovert/introvert truce. You let me go to the office, run my bar, see my dying mother in the nursing home, and in return you never have to come to the office or interact with the public again. Deal?
  - kuratkull 5y ago
    I was just think of how to say what you said. He's not talking about introverts.
- kuratkull 5y ago
  As an introvert I do not appreciate your incorrect characterization of introverts.
Consultant32452 5y ago
Another large pool, at least in my circle, are very boring people who like having an external justification for their inaction. I would spend time with family, but there's a pandemic. I would take the kids to the park, but there's a pandemic. I would go to happy hour after work, but there's a pandemic. I would start exercising and losing weight, but the gym is closed, pandemic. Frankly, I don't care if people aren't interested in spending time with their family or going to happy hour during regular times. But the people who did so previously out of obligation find it convenient to have an external justification.

perardi 5y ago

I’ve seen a number of trend pieces along these lines. 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”.

atatatat 5y ago
Congratulations on having friends!
vmception 5y ago
Exactly my experience too pre-Covid, people would say "hey do you mind if I double-dip this food into the sauce?" going out of their way not to inadvertently share spit now seemingly everyone is like "lol... spit!? really? you think anybody is worried about that?"
- perardi 5y ago
  Yeah, I live in a weird bubble, but Saturday’s bar excursion was “no masks, no shirts, no distancing”, and the 1-hour wait in line would suggest that there’s plenty of demand for that.
  - vmception 5y ago
    no shirts? I haven't seen any businesses running that promo, but the house parties I've been to last weekend weren't so dissimilar
    - perardi 5y ago
      I mean, that wasn’t stated, but when the bar leads with the line “Circuit music returns…”, it’s implied.
      - vmception 5y ago
        I'm not familiar with what that is or what that implies, I think your weird bubble is a bit obtuse but I do understand the general experience of people being less inhibited

FredPret 5y ago

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

gilbetron 5y ago

I saw some historian last year say, "there will be a world before covid and a world after covid", 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'll look back and see that society is just different. In the US, we'll see some people wear masks all the time when out in public, and others will wear them when sick or during cold/flu season. Others will remain gravely offended by masks. Masks will be a thing. Other changes I can't see yet, but they will become apparent later. Definitely work will somehow change. Maybe the "everyone back to the office" 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. In the US, maybe some of the outdoor dining, the closing off of streets, will remain. Many marginal restaurants closed, some of which I'll miss greatly, but that gives a chance for new ones to open. mRNA vaccines are amazing, and I'm betting they'll impact our lives in profound ways from here on out. Lastly, I have this sense that there are a number of changes happening and that have happened that I can't quite make out, but will become obvious in retrospect and I'm curious what they are.

perardi 5y ago
Politico just had a decent piece on some of the smaller societal changes… https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/31/covid-rules-liquor-pot-telemedicine-491388 https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/31/covid-rules-liquor-... …though arguably expanded telemedicine isn’t “small”.
aphextron 5y ago
>I saw some historian last year say, "there will be a world before covid and a world after covid", 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'll look back and see that society is just different. One thing to keep in mind is that this is nothing new. Plague has been with humanity for as long as we have existed. And yet, here we were in 2019 living our lives "normally" after dealing with those in the past. I think there will certainly be a generational cultural divide caused by this which separates us from those who were too young to remember, much like the Depression was for our grandparents. But people will go back to being people regardless.

decremental 5y ago

Pfft. This article is so lame. This guy wrote like 10,000 words to describe all his emotions about basically living like a NEET for a year. Self-indulgent baby. I hope this isn't representative of most people because how pathetic would that be. A nation of infants.

ggcdn 5y ago
I haven’t heard of NEET before, so I looked it up. NEET, an acronym for "Not in Education, Employment, or Training", refers to a person who is unemployed and not receiving an education or vocational training
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
  I'm getting tired of obscure acronyms, or people who abuse them? Thanks for looking it up though.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  Don't get into the habit of using it. Just like incel, it's a trendy pejorative that for some reason is currently socially acceptable to use for people who mostly do not identify with the label. It's a reminder that the no-bullying campaign and war on slurs is a one way street.

SunlightEdge 5y ago

It'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. Personally I really hope I never go back to an office. Its so much easier to work with others online than in person.

s1artibartfast 5y ago
How does wfh avoid office politics? I feel like it has only been accentuated and most employees have vastly reduced visibility.
- NortySpock 5y ago
  Yeah, it just hides office politics behind private slack channels and zoom calls. I certainly have reduced visibility to what's going on. On the other hand, not having a ~40 minute commute is a real perk.
- foobiekr 5y ago
  I work for a very political company but have a high, broad-in-scope role. The politics have gone to eleven. I think most employees who think politics has _diminished_ in the last year are just demonstrating how remote can lower your ability to read the room.
- mumblemumble 5y ago
  It gives one the freedom to choose not to actively participate. In person, it's not considered polite to take a breath and step away to think for 10 minutes before responding. So it's easy to get caught up in the whirlwind. Remote, there's room to pause, reflect, and decide how to respond. That makes it a lot easier to choose not to engage. Does that mean that you're often letting the white collar Machiavellis have their way? Yes. But perhaps that's not your problem. It's often easier to choose not to have it be your problem when you're physically removed from the situation.
- SunlightEdge 5y ago

slibhb 5y ago

> “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. A bit harsh but to me this is one long keening whine. This is the new elite in a nutshell: extremely privileged but obsessed with their own psychological frailty which they flaunt like it's something to be proud of.

smoldesu 5y ago
> This is the new elite in a nutshell: extremely privileged but obsessed with their own psychological frailty which they flaunt like it's something to be proud of. Absolutely this. Middle/upper class America has been doing this for the last decade, and it's left a horrible impression on our youth. I'm not going to teach the next generation of kids to give up so easily.
skystarman 5y ago
IMO it's preferable than the macho BS of pretending any and all vulnerability makes you a sissy incapable of ever amounting to much.
- cupofcoffee 5y ago
  I guarantee you that they are decimated by trauama on the daily and hide behind thin veneers of "just do it".

jdhn 5y ago

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

helen___keller 5y ago
> At what point do we say "Fine, stay inside and live your life as a hermit, but the rest of us are returning to normal."? Has this not already happened? Where I live all covid restrictions have been dropped, sports games are at full capacity, masks optional everywhere but public transit and hospitals, and so on
SyzygistSix 5y ago
I don't think most of the people who feel this way are neurotic. I think most of the people who feel this way are treated very poorly and are forced to work more than 40 hours a week and don't get paid a living wage. We don't hear from them because they don't write for The Atlantic. I don't hear people on HN who want to continue working remotely being accused of being neurotic or being molly-coddled, and they get get paid well and have very good work conditions. I agree that the author is courting some kind of depression or neuroticism. But the subtext I heard in the article is that a lot of the things that people have not had to deal with during the pandemic are things we have known are bullshit for a long time. And now that we have seen proof that they aren't necessary, people are reluctant to go back to accepting those bullshit conditions. Especially when we saw how poorly healthcare workers and service workers who did work during the pandemic were treated. And again, those people don't write for the Atlantic but I have a feeling they were well represented by this article.
- __blockcipher__ 5y ago
  I have the opposite interpretation. Only this class of people was actually able to "not participate in society" for 18 months: > I don't hear people on HN who want to continue working remotely being accused of being neurotic or being molly-coddled, and they get get paid well and have very good work conditions. By "this class of people" I don't literally mean people on HN but people in the typical yuppie lines of work. Someone who's actually working class has not had the luxury of doing so. Even if you got every stimulus check that covered maybe 10% of the expenses over the last 1.25 years. So the people who could stay inside indefinitely either never lost their job (transitioned to remote or already worked remote pre-pandemic), or they lost their job but had such a massive nest egg that they were able to weather it. Actual working-class people have not been sheltering inside for 18 months. In my opinion it's unhealthy to do so, so I'm not alleging that it would be a good thing if the working class hid inside too, but rather that the "I'm not ready to return to normal" crowd is driven by neuroticism and a crippling fear of life itself rather than it being some actual necessary result of this respiratory virus pandemic.

cat_plus_plus 5y ago

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.

helen___keller 5y ago
> Your tax dollars at work. What does this article have to do with taxation, may I ask?
- NelsonMinar 5y ago
  Absolutely nothing, unsurprisingly.

fairity 5y ago

Tl dr; The author, with all his pandemic-granted free time, has been mulling over the tenants of nihilism and is struggling to adapt. > 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. Yes, despite what some tell you, values aren'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?

uhtred 5y ago

Looking at the comments and their ranking on here enforces my belief that hackernews community is quite Conservative.

fallingfrog 5y ago
There is certainly a vocal contingent that will jump in and attack working people, young people, or poor people as being crybabies anytime corporate profits are in question. Get back to work, peons!
fallingfrog 5y ago
It’s for good reason of course: these are people who want to be the boss, so they’ve already in many cases started to see regular people through that lens. From the point of view of the boss, regular people are objects of contempt; never doing what you want, you have to pay them more than you’d like, etc. So you see them as beneath you. The ironic thing is that many of the people with that worldview probably think of themselves as libertarians, even though that attitude is purely authoritarian.
fuzzylightbulb 5y ago
You see a lot of angry young men who are convinced of their own genius, convinced that they alone are responsible for their accomplishments, deeply offended that someone else might received care and compassion for what they consider to be weaknesses. It is all an effort to justify their own juvenile selfishness and to recast it as a virtue. But sometimes there is a link to a cool github repo so here we all are.
- dang 5y ago
  "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." These things are mostly just projections and comments like this do nothing but make the place even worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
dang 5y ago
This is a classic cognitive bias. People with political passions perceive HN as being slanted to the opposite politics. Many examples here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870

gpsx 5y ago

Wow, it's funny reading the comments (and the article). Everyone is saying "The world is like X now", with a different value of X.

fallingfrog 5y ago

>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. All of this is spot on. The issue with government unemployment and minimum wage programs was never that they didn't work; the problem is that they do work. How are you going to get millions of people to work shit jobs for long hours with a smile once you'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?

zests 5y ago

I'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. 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 "keeping up with the Joneses" energy because there is no way I can do it all at once. The absurdity is that I don't really need a new job or to move to a huge city in order to be happy but I'm doing it anyway.

dwaltrip 5y ago
If you don’t need it or want it then why are you doing it? Just tell people you don’t want to.

thorough 5y ago

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. 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.

tyrrvk 5y ago

I'm surprised by the hand wringing angst at this "unproductive member of society". 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.

nate_meurer 5y ago
I think a lot of the tense reactions come from the notion that governments have leveraged the opinions you speak of to impose extremely illiberal sanctions on liberties we used to take for granted, such as telling us whether and how we are allowed to see our own families.

deleted 5y ago

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sharadov 5y ago

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'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?

penguin_booze 5y ago

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

doggodaddo78 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori - Nothing ventured, nothing gained. - You have to take the shit with sugar. - 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. - Theodore Roosevelt 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's better actually that they stay inside so others don't have to waste their time on disappointments from people who aren't reciprocal, social, or respectable.

Tomminn 5y ago

FYI: The author is Tim Kreider, who wrote "Lazy, A Manifesto" years before the pandemic (which is actually an interesting little book). So little has changed in his attitude due to the pandemic. I just think that'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.

ED_Radish 5y ago

Honestly I don'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.