https://www.pestemag.com/lost-to-follow-up/broken-sociality
"Pandemic life remains terribly lonely. It’s recently become differently so.
Elements of pre-pandemic normal social life have returned, but not for us those
of us who aren’t going along with the so-called “back to normal.” I want a name
for this painful situation. Lacking a better one, I’ve started calling it
broken sociality.
The pseudo-return in the “new normal” means social life and community appear
to be more available, but for many of us, they aren’t, really - no more than a
meal someone spat on is really available as food. Experiences of community are
offered but not actually present, in that they're present only via serious
risks which are often un- or under-acknowledged. I think of this facet of
broken sociality as social loneliness. This involves more time spent alone —
reduced time doing things and seeing people compared to pre-pandemic —
because fewer places are doing anything (let alone enough) to mitigate covid
exposure.
Sometimes we're required to be in places in-person that lack adequate
mitigation, and others in those places don't seem concerned. For instance, in
my first week teaching this semester I saw exactly one person at work wearing a
mask, a student. I felt terribly alone, specifically in the sense of being
alone in a crowd - around people but in important respects cut off from them.
(There may well be more people masking and feeling like I do and we’re just not
seeing each other; in the headspace I’m in at work now, my first impulse is to
move pretty briskly and disengage, compared to the place of openness and
excitement I used to have at work pre-pandemic. This colors my perceptions:
while I go from place to place, if I see, at a glance, that no one’s wearing a
mask, well, that fits with how I’m already feeling, so it feels like
confirmation.)
Social loneliness blurs into another facet of broken sociality, what I think of
as political loneliness. This is the sense of a gulf in values or in
understanding of some very important aspects of the world. Knowing that the
return to normal means even more dying and life-altering suffering is terrible.
Knowing that many people seem not to realize this, that people in officially
respected positions seem to find this acceptable, that fellow travelers on the
left don’t treat this as a priority, that all feels isolating to a degree I
find hard to overstate. What’s happening, I think, is that there’s no consensus
on the reality we’re living in: ideologically, the pandemic continues for some
of us and is over for others, while, of course, it hasn’t
actually ended; it
feels like living in a different world from other people, but still
interacting. In some cases, this means old relationships feel different, and
not for the better."
Via Violet Blue’s
Pandemic Roundup: February 23, 2023
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pandemic-roundup-79089154
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
