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On a personal level, has anyone else noticed just how much Covid broke people's brains?
I don't mean this in a cruel or offensive way, but the usual way things go is that people simply don't care about the thing that happened a year or two ago. We move on, we change focus, and we find new things to be offended or enraged (or perhaps happy) about.
I know a couple of people who would likely be avid users of r/MasksforAll, and a higher number of people who are perpetually incensed about vaccines and vaccine mandates. Oddly enough lockdowns are a huge thing here (I have never met a single person angry about lockdowns in real life, but here the number of people persistently furious about lockdowns is pretty large), but in my personal life there are still people utterly incensed that other people are no longer taking safety measures - I wear a mask on the train nowadays after A/B testing it in Excel for the better part of a year and finding I was drastically more likely to get a cold when not masking, but not anywhere else.
Ordinarily even the most politically vehement people I know really do shut up about politics, but two of my friends will no longer shut up about Covid. We catch up for a phone call (we live a few thousand kilometres apart each), and it invariably turns back to vaccines or Covid and so on. One of my aunts is frustrated that she can't get people to reliably mask when catching up with her (she's not immunocompromised or anything along those lines, and she's in her late 40s) without asking them beforehand.
I feel like being, well, a normie throughout this has inoculated me to these feelings. I never really got mad at people not wearing masks or taking vaccines (largely because by that point it was pretty clear Covid was far less dangerous than initially thought), except to note that the people who generally didn't mask back when mask mandates were a thing tended to be the sort of people who committed publically antisocial behaviour to begin with (playing loud music on the train, harrassing people for smokes, etc). Likewise, the more worried people seemed similar to me - I was happy to take a RAT test or whatever to see someone if it assuaged their anxiety.
It's not everyone, and the majority of people seem to have returned to normal. I guess this is a culture war issue in general which is why I'm posting here, but I can't help but feel a large number of people will be relitigating Covid for years, whether it's their anger at authoritarian monsters trying to destroy their lives and enforce the injection of experimental biological matter into their veins, or their fury at antisocial plague rats who were unwilling to take even the slightest measure to try and keep people safe.
I'm not trying to judge these people or look down on them, we all have our issues and our pain points. I'm not going to pretend I don't have mine. But it just strikes me as noticeable that there's a substantial chunk of the population now seemingly stuck on Covid issues.
Does this gel with anyone else?
It was definitely a couple of years of mass hysteria, but I'm actually impressed by how thoroughly it has blown over. The same friends who wore double N95s and a face shield when they had to fly on an airplane a year ago now don't even get tested when they have a cold.
The five-day in-office work week is dead as a default for white collar workers though. Maybe it'll come back if unemployment rates tick up, but so far no dice.
And some people still wear masks in public. It isn't just East Asian people anymore.
It seems like the 8-5 M-F was replaced by a new norm of salaried workers being on call 24/7 and their exact scheduling not being relevant as long as they did the actual jobs they're hired to do.
This has obvious benefits to employers; I doubt major white collar employers ever particularly cared if you did most of your work at 2 am on saturday as long as it got done, and 24/7 on call for all white collar employees is, from the employers perspective, a plus.
I do not work a salaried job, so this is just observations. But it seems like it's not necessarily a bad deal for companies, all told.
There was definitely a default expectation among white collar work pre-covid that you'd be in the office during working hours. Not a hard and fast rule, plenty of exceptions, no one batted an eye if you needed to take an afternoon off to run an errand, but generally expectation was to be in the office.
And it is somewhat harder to slack off if you're in the office. Your screen is visible and you don't have as many other temptations.
Honestly, I was probably more productive when I was in the office five days per week. Now it's much easier to spend a few hours on The Motte, or to go get groceries, or wander over to the living room and watch an episode of TV.
You're right that getting your work done is the ultimate check, but it's an elastic check... most of these jobs have some play in how much work a particular person has to do, and it isn't always easy to measure. So the old equilibrium was a combination of (loosely) measuring output and (loosely) enforcing butts in seats.
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