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I really don't think this is a thing. Everyone I know is a young urban progressive, and many of them are the conspicuously political type of young urban progressive. While they all liked to talk about how covid was terrifying and we needed vax mandates - both in person and on social media - most of them stopped caring after less than 12 months.
We are way beyond that point now, and I don't know a single "young urban progressive" who avoids going to rowdy parties. Maybe they wear a mask on public transport to that party, but that's it. Most of them will happily share a joint with strangers at said parties. None of them are concerned about covid in a way that would stop them from going to a public event they had any interest in.
If young urban progressives didn't show up to this movie, its because they, like everyone else, was not interested in the movie. Not because of covid concerns.
My personal observation is that almost everyone I still see wearing a mask in public transport or while shopping is a senior citizen or a middle-aged person that seems obviously sickly. This might be because the current Finnish covid policy is very much guided protection aimed at those groups, though - I'm not sure if they are specifically encouraged to wear masks, but at least the fourth vaccine booster is not generally even available to people who are under 60 and don't belong to the risk groups.
In general, the people who went hardest for zero covid narratives were mostly (expections apply) young urban progressives but older centrists, "pillar-of-the-society" types. Young urban progressives mostly tailed this group - many of them got quite vocally anti-anti-vaxx, but even there this was an expressive frustration about perceived far-righters and hopes that a vaxx-first strategy would prevent lockdowns. The great majority of young urban progressives I know (ie most of my friend circle) ditched the masks quite early on and hasn't really cared about Covid at all for a long time, especially after winter-spring 2022 when everyone and their mother finally actually got Covid.
One general problem with the "Covid discourse" here is that people still continue to shove the Covid culture war into simplistic progressive/congressive boxes when the whole thing always was rather more nuanced than that.
I wonder how many of those people are like my husband, who wears a mask to stave off the chance of smelling perfumes and cleaning fragrances. He gets bad sinus headaches that last for days from artificial fragrances and he is very happy that now he has a normalized excuse for wearing a mask in public.
The typical mask cannot block these. If you're not smelling them because you are wearing a mask, that's either because you are rebreathing your own exhaled air (bad) or mouthbreathing due to added mechanical difficulty of pushing air past the mask (also bad). On the rare occasions I have worn a mask, it is indeed the latter that happened. I noticed I couldn't smell things, and then noticed the reason why is that I started breathing through my mouth.
Why is breathing through your mouth supposed to be bad? TBH that's just how I have breathed my entire life, I have never been able to get proper air flow through my nose.
Your nose has filters to remove (some of) the particulate matter in incoming air before it gets to your lungs. This is then ejected in snot - if you spend enough time in a polluted environment your snot will be black.
Interesting. Kind of a shame my nose has never really let me breathe properly, then.
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This is my experience as well. I think I know one yuppie (out of dozens) who masks in public barring unusual circumstances like "has a big international trip planned next week."
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