Will We Social Distance Forever?
 

I can't see people shaking hands in a few months due to fears. Even if say I was totally carefree and open to being in crowds, if my friends are averse to it, then I won't be doing it, either. I also have been hearing those in LA saying how nice the air is to breathe since everyone is video-conferencing instead of flying airplanes.

Even the regular flu is terrible enough - I had two weeks of it. It seems the world has been going this way, anyway. Instead of face to face, people use e-mail, phones, even using Skype (or porn) to get off sexually, and then moving along with your day.

Re: Will We Social Distance Forever?
 

Nah. But it won't just go right back to the way it was, either. There'll be a lot of this even as restrictions ease, probably all the way through the summer and fall. My expectation is we'll feel like it's mostly over before the end of the year, though, and next spring is when maybe things will start to feel genuinely normal.

But yeah, the fact that there's no one big Day where it all ends is one of the many sad things about all this. It'd be more tolerable if we knew there'd be a definitive end, and we could look forward to a shared moment where everyone is safe and can go out and hug a stranger and do all the stuff they've wanted to do for months. But it won't be like that. It'll be gradual, and therefore, a lot less cathartic.

Where I live you could get arrested for this. :p

Re: Will We Social Distance Forever?
 

Ya' got me there. Maybe it's for the best then...

My fear is people will use this incident to fear monger and isolate themselves. Hatred and fear does not do well in a vacuum.

We haven’t even scratched the surface of all the data that’s going to be collected from this incident.

Only for as long as I stay married.

Re: Will We Social Distance Forever?
 

Even Fauci says its going to come back in the Fall... I'm not saying EVERYONE will, but there won't be many people to be social with if those you know are going to play it safe.

There are a lot of people I know (including myself) who only go to certain events (music, standup comedy), if say your favorite bands stop touring (and focus more on album sales), then your choices are limited.

I basically concur with this. (In my mind I have kinda written off this year.)

I have no idea when church services will resume or when my volunteer work will resume. Just returned from giving out sandwiches & Archbishop says when this supply is depleted, we are not going to ask parishioners to make more. I really miss my volunteer work. :mad:

Re: Will We Social Distance Forever?
 

No.

Re: Will We Social Distance Forever?
 

I don’t think I will ever hug anyone again.

I don't act much different. I don't like being around people anyways. We have this thing called The Seattle Freeze here. They have this saying, "have a nice day, somewhere else." That's me, I embrace it.

I do think in the short run it's going to crush the travel, restaurant, and entertainment industry. How do you social distance at a Seahawks game?

This was before or after the virus?

Before, but especially after...


Personally, I have been isolating myself, only to avoid toxic people and/or future betrayals... I've had the flu since the 18th, and that's enough to social distance forever. I had getting sick, but I do have to get groceries 2-3 times a month, the only time I leave the house lately.

Humm, i never got betrayed, because i never trusted anyone, trust not in the "landing money" kind of sense, but in the sense of giving a part of yourself that can hurt you back, and sometimes it hurts more than just you, it hurts the people you love the most, your children's, some people can't live with that, so they stick with marriages for the sake of others, and that's the beginning of my at most respect for women's, they are the warriors of this world. I believe many people marry for all the wrong reasons, because there's nothing else to do, and they should do it, but they shouldn't go totally blinded by love, because i think love is like a great fog, it goes away in the first light of they day, the first light of reality, of characteristics you see as defects, once you get to know something it's not longer the same thing, that's the same in viewing the world true the intellect, once you see something and you try to intelectualize it, it's not longer the thing you saw. People that think tend to be suspicious of humans beings when they see them from a short distance, people that think tend to dislike humans beings when they them from a medium distance, if you see them from a far distance you don't even care about them anymore, what they do is just what they do, it's their nature and it's perfect. I used to be very insecure about a lot of things, i thought it was just me, as time went by i saw that everyone is insecure, sometimes a worse kind of insecurity, a insecurity so highly concealed in futility and conventions that it fells like security to them, they just don't ask the right questions, and they shouldn't. Don't get me wrong, i don't hate people, i love them, i think we are a magnificent imaginative specie, but if i didn't had the quiet shapes of nature i would quit the game.

Say you're infected. Boom. Done.

The current theory makes sense.....flatten the curve so that the healthcare system doesn't become overwhelmed.
There might become a terrifying moment when we decide that a worldwide depression will kill more people than the virus would.

This would result in a "back to work" order, where we bear with the death toll.

If only love went away at the “first light”. Sometimes it takes a very very long time for the “first light of reality” to appear. As I look back, problems I have with my husband existed during our very first dates, but I couldn’t or wouldn’t see them.

Re: Will We Social Distance Forever?
 

I rememeber seeing a comedian once who said something along the lines of; when you're in love and think this really might be The ONE, write down the 10 things you love most about them. Because, if you do marry them, those will become the things which annoy you the most. :D

Ermahgerd.

I might be be talking out of my rear-back like i normally do, because, facing it, i don't know anything about love, at least unconditional love for a single person, but i think, many people that do have it, what they really have, is a fascination for someone that haven't yet get to know, they are fascinated by a picture they created, that's the fog, the light comes to kill that fascination and it might take a lot of time or not, in the case of my mother it did, and she says the exactly same thing you said, it was like that since the beginning. When i look at my mother and father, my grandmother and grandfather, they had so many big storms, and they call love, or what society would call love, is to me a bond, a affection. When you live, fifty, sixty years with a person, you get to know her like you know yourself, in their last days, you depend on each other, when one goes away it's a big hole, you get that when you have a dog or a cat for ten years, now imagine a husband and wife for sixty. In my country husbands used to (they still do, but not something institutionalized) beat their wife's because that's the thing you do or the neighbors will say you don't control her. Most wife's knew it, and they took it, most young women's now question how was that possible, how could they cooperate with that? If you you'd for some reason talk with a women's from that time, like my grandmother, they knew, that when the husband reach an old age he would pay for what he did, and my grandfather paid heavy, like many like him. The less you romanticize human relationships, the cruder they become, steps into accuracy, sometimes it's better to be blind by love, until it ends.

And why do you think that is?

You have to love yourself first before you can truly love anyone else. Otherwise, it’s just infatuation.

And true love is forgiveness. You don’t have to be with someone to love them and, sometimes, you need lots of distance and safety before you can love someone.

My dad is a horribly sexist/racist dude at times. I rarely saw him as a kid. He was on the road all the time, and then he cheated on my mom and left us all a week before Thanksgiving the year I turned 18. I have forgiven him for everything, and we’re closer now: That’s love.

I don't know that it is. I just always thought it was funny.

I do think that it's odd that we (as a society) idealise love and its effects, even to the point of encouraging young love and thinking it's cute when children have their first relationship, when we all know the heart-wrenching pain when that love leaves/dies. It's a drug, and like all drugs withdrawal is an absolute bitch which will kick you like you never knew anything could. Never smoke a joint though, cos you'll become addicted and never be the same again.

Odd message to tell ourselves.

I don’t know a single country in the world in which domestic violence is absent. It’s not just Portugal. And it’s worse here right now since couples are self-isolated together.

I think we will always have the plexiglass screens that are in place now in so many stores, etc. At least until they fall apart; not sure if they’ll be replaced then.

The plexiglass screens just became a requirement at all stores (that are still open) here in NY, and they also just made face masks, (or face coverings like a bandana, etc.), a requirement to go into the stores too.

They also just announced that stores must limit the amount of customers in the store to 50% of their allowed capacity, and then customers must wait for someone to leave before the next person can enter the store.

.

Re: Will We Social Distance Forever?
 

⬆️ CT hasn’t taken the step of mandatory face coverings yet, but no doubt it will.

Horrified (again) to visit Family Dollar where the cashiers have no masks or gloves. Just handling coins & bills alone could kill you.

Re: Will We Social Distance Forever?
 

I posted this elsewhere, and there were many replies like "I've been social distancing for YEARS"

Re: Will We Social Distance Forever?
 

I don't like strangers in my person space.

Re: Will We Social Distance Forever?
 

⬆️ I’ve always hated people who, for some unknown reason, stand very close to me.

We went to the supermarket to pick up some stuff for my in-laws, and there was a line to get in the store. When one guy walked right along the line to get to the back, he was only about a foot away from the people on the line. Most people just tried to lean away from the guy, but one customer in front of us on line yelled at him because he wasn't social distancing, and then called him an a-hole.

It wasn't very nice, but he wasn't wrong. Most of the other people on line praised the guy who yelled for speaking out about the idiot who wasn't social distancing.

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Re: Will We Social Distance Forever?
 

It's been almost two years since I posted it, and my answer is still yes, for me. I make exceptions, but very, very rarely.

Overall this proved to be optimistic yet accurate...


I contracted COVID for the first time recently, i got the omicron variant, i don't know where i got it from but making a habit of not wearing a mask certainly helped...and yeah i understood the risk, i just overall feel that a little bit of lazyness and nihilism are okay survival strategies.


I tend to not like crowds anyways so that has kept me from getting sick up until about 3 or 4 days ago...that and my obsession with feeling good and being healthy...

I say no... that it is mostly temporary for most.

I've even seen changes in people's behaviors as far as personal contact just since the vaccines came out (but that was possibly because the initial projections that vaccines would provide immunity and stop the spread were wrong).

During the Spanish Flu, most people knew enough then to socially distance to some extent (as well as to wear masks, utilize outdoor hospitals, etc.), yet as soon as the pandemic passed people went back to their old ways.

Some say the hedonism & debauchery of the "roaring 20's" was a direct result of the end of WWI, or a reaction to prohibition, but many say the end of the pandemic had just as much to do with people's behaviors and desires to reconnect with others in every way imaginable!

Ah... So much suppression that people go nuts and go haywire?



I actually think both can be true. Let's say half the population believes that, and the other has a tendency to possibly continue the trend. Going so long a certain way that the habit becomes so regular that a change might make one uncomfortable.

Re: Will We Social Distance Forever?
 

Yeah, I think the prediction I had above did okay. The thing about improvement by year's end was somewhat right: that's when the vaccines appeared, though it took a few more months for them to become widely available.

It has definitely been slower than I expected, almost entirely because of the prevalence of the variants, but that can only go on so long. The variants are, of course, both weaker and more infectious, and that means we're at the beginning of the end. You could make a good case a super infectious, much much weaker strain that infects almost everybody was always going to be the way this ended.

i guess what could end up happening is there could be a version of COVID that kills 6% of infected instead of 3% like the most feared strain, and it would be just as infectious as the newer strains, however i want to point out that "more infectious" by itself obviously means "less dangerous", so hence it gets past the human perception of what should be feared.