I picked up on this last year and what frustrates me is I feel like I can't override the population-level unconscious anxiety and despair that many continue to spread through their behaviors (often being fed by these doomscrolling news narratives).
Words can be consciously dismantled in the mind, but actions are subtler and speak something subconsciously... It's like if you walked up to a pool and everyone was tiptoeing around it and not jumping in. No matter how fearless you are there's still something deep that triggers your own apprehension.
With COVID people are still behaving fearfully and there's nothing I can do about it other than suffer the harvest of ongoing social distancing stupidity, the idiotic glass walls still up in every grocery store, the "contact-less whatever the fuck", the lack of hotel room service... all the 100s of stupid anxiety-driven behaviors and changes that got implemented the past few years that were once never a thing.
Why did you expect the grocers to take the glass walls back down again? The item has already been purchased and even if corona is just a cold at this point... Why remove it now? You still increase the chance of infection for any airborne illness which would have the cashier go on sick leave. Literally no incentive to remove it now that the money for the purchase and assembly has been spent.
They likely won't put them into new stores but i don't expect them to go down until they're so worn down that you can't look through them anymore.
I don't buy your issues with the distancing either. There are a lot of people that always disliked others getting close to them. This group might've increased now, but that doesn't mean it's anxiousness because of corona.
You're just noticing things for the first time and blame a sickness that was overly zealously warned against for a short time.
I find that reminding yourself to be charitable really helps.
We just had most of the West undergo 2 years of non-stop government psy-op. Propaganda was constant. Dissent was suppressed at every step.
It's only natural that this has obliterated some people's critical thinking skills and their ability to operate in reality without being told by Authorities what reality is.
As for the hotels, I've just chosen not to participate. If you want to charge me 2X to deliver .5X that's fine, I just chose not to accept that deal. We can go through a recession and when the conditions bring us back to the previous 1X for 1X, then I'll gladly book a room.
My cynical take is that this kind of thing is just going to be gone because at this point it's just a (diminishingly) reasonable excuse to cut services aka costs.
I have a small storage unit I rent and the bathrooms have been closed for 2 and a half years "due to COVID" and at this point I'll be genuinely surprised if they ever reopen. Same reasoning as the "room service."
Absolutely true. Even if you shut off all doomscrolling, block twitter, don't use facebook, don't read the news, you'll still interact with people in real life who are spending their time looking at doom narratives or have some sort of propaganda being pushed to them. It is nigh impossible to fight it off.
Not to invalidate the conversation here, but it just occurred to me that reading through a conversation about doom scrolling is in a sense itself doom scrolling.
> With COVID people are still behaving fearfully and there's nothing I can do about it other than suffer the harvest of ongoing social distancing stupidity
With Covid there are still hundreds of thousands of Americans who died in the past year, and probably millions more who were newly hit with significant chronic disease. Probably at least a hundred thousand more Americans will die from Covid in the coming year. Many people are either at high risk themselves or routinely interact with friends or relatives who are at high risk.
Acting carefully in times and places where there is substantial community spread is entirely reasonable behavior.
> all the 100s of stupid anxiety-driven behaviors and changes that got implemented the past few years
Tens of millions of people in the world have literally died, in the most significant public health crisis in a century, and you seem to think it is all some kind of joke.
Instead of just declaring that everyone who is different from you is “stupid”, perhaps try to be a bit more charitable.
Words can be consciously dismantled in the mind, but actions are subtler and speak something subconsciously... It's like if you walked up to a pool and everyone was tiptoeing around it and not jumping in. No matter how fearless you are there's still something deep that triggers your own apprehension.
With COVID people are still behaving fearfully and there's nothing I can do about it other than suffer the harvest of ongoing social distancing stupidity, the idiotic glass walls still up in every grocery store, the "contact-less whatever the fuck", the lack of hotel room service... all the 100s of stupid anxiety-driven behaviors and changes that got implemented the past few years that were once never a thing.
Ahh whatever, back to doomscrolling.