I Miss Ignoring People

Let's get back to minding our own business

I am not by any stretch of the imagination the most Covid-cautious person around, but I have changed my behavior in a bunch of ways over the course of the pandemic, most of them things that limit my time in contact with other people. Even when the college is in session, I mostly stay away from campus, going to my office only when I have something to do that needs to be done there. I’ve stopped going to the local Starbucks to write, but instead order on the app and swing through briefly to pick it up. The number of times I’ve eaten indoors at a restaurant between mid-March of 2020 and today is in the single digits.

I miss restaurant meals, and hanging out in a coffee shop where I know the staff and the other regulars. I miss the chance encounters and spontaneous conversations that come from hanging around campus. Really, I miss people— I spend far too much of my time sitting in front of a computer with no actual human contact. I miss talking to people without scheduling it first, and just being around folks who aren’t blood relatives.

But the thing I might miss the most will sound weird: I miss ignoring people.

For all my complaining above, I probably spend the most time around strangers of anybody in Chateau Steelypips, because I do the vast majority of the cooking, and accordingly am the one who goes out to shop for food. And SteelyKid and The Pip are picky enough eaters that the weekly shopping involves visits to multiple different stores to pick up items that are only carried by one of the three chains operating in our area, or the baked goods that are only available at the Niskayuna Co-Op.

When I’m out on these trips, I feel obliged to pay attention to the other shoppers in ways that I never used to. It’s not just a matter of tracking how many people are in front of me in the open check-out lines, it’s “Is that person wearing a mask?” and “Who just coughed?” and “Are they wearing the mask correctly?” When I’m out, I’m not just around other people, I’m up in their business, and I hate it.

I realize this is stupid and excessive— I’m wearing a mask, I’m wearing it correctly, and most important, I’m spending as little time as possible in the store. Worrying about the masking practices of people I’m not going to come within ten feet of in the course of a shopping trip where I’m going to be in the building for maybe fifteen minutes total is a waste of mental energy.

But then I’ve spent close to two years now braising in the Covid-panic Dutch oven that is Twitter, and to a lesser extent Facebook. Compared to a lot of my social feeds, I’m ridiculously inattentive and cavalier about this. I’ve spent months being bombarded with retweeted reports of maskless people in some supermarket four states away, or a group of students standing too close together at a college where I don’t teach. This kind of thing isn’t exactly Omicron-variant infective, but it seeps in, despite my best efforts.

This is part of a long pattern of social media giving aid and comfort to annoying busybodies— “You won’t believe this conversation two complete strangers had near me!” has been a creepy Twitter staple for years. Like everything else, this had started to be cranked up still further even before the pandemic thanks to the ever-expanding culture wars— a growing stream of updates on staff and customers at fast-casual restaurants screwing up the shibboleths of one side or the other— but it’s been supercharged by the pandemic. As any number of Twitter users are eager to tell you, when a respiratory virus is on the loose, it’s a moral imperative to be watching everyone, all the time. And, apparently, always ready to tweet about that guy in the produce aisle at the Safeway who was pulling his mask down so he could yell at somebody on the phone.

I really hate reading this stuff all the time (and have unfollowed several of the worst sources of it), but I hate it even more when I catch myself starting to do it. It’s a minor complaint among, you know, all the illness and death, but in a weird way, it’s one of the everyday things I’ll be happiest to see go away. This environment of everybody minding everybody else’s business is exhausting and corrosive and I’ll be happy when it goes away.

I want to go back to hanging around campus talking to interesting people. I want to go back to eating professionally cooked food that hasn’t spent ten minutes steaming in a takeout container. And I also want to go back to not spending a single second of my shopping runs thinking about what any of the other customers are wearing, on their faces or anywhere else.

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This is mostly personal catharsis, but screw it, it’s been a long week. If you found this entertaining, here are some buttons:

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