Why we hate each other more now than ever,
and what to do about it
I have a confession to make.
Most of my life I have been an extroverted person, friendly, helpful, and communicative. I would enjoying making jokes with strangers, such as cashiers at the supermarket, or waiters in a restaurant. I could, and often would, easily strike up a conversation with anyone over just about anything. When I did converse, I would make eye contact and try making a real connection. In total, I was an affable, interesting person, willing to talk to and connect with strangers.
Then came COVID-19.
At that point, my personality began to change. It wasn’t from the virus entering my brain, although that is a possibility. (See my article, Is the Virus that Causes COVID-19 Affecting Our Minds and Making us Mean?) I believe the cause of my newly developed attitude towards others was a direct result of how we were all treated by the government and its lockdowns.
I have always been a bit of a germaphobe, and have eschewed handshaking for years. But the fear of contagion from others during the pandemic sent my germaphobia into overdrive. People were no longer fun to be around. They became a personal threat to health and safety.
Masks didn’t make me feel any better about people, or safer being around them. I hated wearing masks, and knew that virus particles were not stopped by them. But what bothered me most about masks was the way it hid the face. As a communicator, I like to look at the person with whom I am talking, and look for body language and facial expressions for feedback. We all communicate a great deal of information about our thoughts and feelings through our expressions. But you can’t see these in someone who is wearing a mask.
Masks had a chilling effect on my banter with strangers. It was no longer fun joking with cashiers at the grocery store. First, everyone who is sick needs to eat, and will go to the grocery store sooner or later, making the supermarket a high risk area for getting infected. It’s hard to feel funny and make jokes in a place where you think you can get sick.
Second, it’s hard to joke with someone who is masked. Are they smiling at your joke? Did they understand what you said? There is only so much you can tell by only seeing the eyes, and it has a chilling effect on humor.
Of course, the ridiculous painted feet on the cement floor at the check-out, telling people to keep 6-feet away from others for “social distancing”, helped create further alienation from the other shoppers. And the Mask Karens, who liked to tell everyone without a mask to put one on, didn’t improve my humor, either.
But it wasn’t just the supermarkets that were dystopian. Everywhere you went there were masked people, frightened to be near anyone else. Social interactions were suddenly seen as life-threatening. Being friendly went out of fashion, since it’s hard to be friendly to people who threaten your life with deadly viruses.
And it wasn’t just your health that others threatened. It was also your freedom. Vaccine mandates were forced on people as a form of social responsibility, which meant that your freedom and personal health were subordinated to the interests of others. For freedom-loving people, like me, forced vaccinations to save others will simply result in resentment of others.
There was a time when public health officials would manage an infectious disease outbreak by quarantining the sick. However, with COVID, the healthy were quarantined, too. Since the “enemy” was a virus, and since the virus is harbored in people, it followed that people were the enemy, and needed to be isolated. And since the virus apparently could infect with no symptoms, everyone was suspect. We all became the enemy to one another, and were forced to shelter in place for years.
Whenever I did go out for supplies, I was disgusted by the constant sight of masked people, all avoiding getting near other masked people. Our society had gone from social cohesion to social repulsion. And everyone in a mask was repulsive to me.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing was when we were all told to mask when outdoors. We were forced to wear masks even when going into Nature to heal in the fresh air and sunshine. This was pure insanity, but we were pressured to comply, and would suffer consequences if we did not do as we were told.
I am a free-thinking, freedom-loving, independent person, capable of making choices for myself. In fact, I insist on making choices for myself. And given my medical training, I could see the lies and misinformation coming from the government about the pandemic. All this made the forced, manipulative, stupid COVID mandates even more bitter and difficult to swallow. And it all resulted in increased resentment, and decreased friendliness.
This COVID nightmare of lockdowns, lost freedoms, and social alienation lasted several years. Everywhere you went, there were people in masks. It got to the point where I didn’t want to go anywhere. Masks became a trigger for me, causing resentment, alienation, and a desire to escape from these masked people as quickly as possible. I wasn’t afraid of getting sick. I was just sick of seeing all these people with useless masks on, and sick of the need to occasionally don a mask to get through the store.
Eventually, I gave up on wearing masks, despite the glares from Mask Karens. But arguing with the Karens was useless. Everyone seemed like a Karen, telling everyone else how irresponsible they were for being mask-free, or worse than that, vaccine-free.
Despite the mask mandates ending, many people were so brainwashed into believing that they needed masks that they continued to wear them. It became the age of the germaphobe. Nobody was shaking hands. Everything you touched was now considered potentially contaminated by you. The pleasure of human contact had been replaced by the terror of human contamination. We had mutated from people into vectors of disease, threatening the health and life of everyone.
And you could feel that prejudice from others wherever you went. We were social distanced to the point of social deterioration. And we are now seeing our culture and the world being torn apart with hatred, intolerance, and wars stemming from that decay of the social fabric.
Few people wear masks now. But I have changed. I find myself less interested in engaging with others, especially with strangers. Any remaining impulses to be extroverted and friendly are easily suppressed. The alienation from others over a three-year period of lockdown insanity has left me permanently emotionally and socially scarred.
There is a term that can describe this feeling. I call it “Social Alienation Disease”, or SAD. I believe this is a new social disease that has infected our society and is making all of us more lonely, isolated, and alienated from others than ever before in history.
I was bike riding in the park the other Sunday, and noticed how many lonely people there were. At one time in the not too distant past, you would expect to see couples strolling in the park hand-in-hand, maybe even seeing some couples being affectionate with one another. Not any more. Now, there were single men and single women looking alone and unhappy. It was what you would expect from SAD people who lost their ability to connect with others.
The social distancing efforts of the pandemic worked, and are still working.
SAD may help explain why national politics is so vitriolic and polarized these days, too. When you stop having connection with others, you find little reason for compromise. And it’s easier to hate others when you lose empathy and the ability to connect. Social distancing causes social polarization. You need to connect to compromise and be tolerant of others.
Of course, the entire world went into anti-social lockdown mode, resulting in international polarization and wars. While there are always geopolitical reasons for war, social alienation helps to make killing others easier and more desirable. That’s SAD.
Of course, this is a disaster for society, especially for younger people. Children growing up during lockdown mania suffer from social, mental, and physical damage. These children did not learn to share and be kind to others; they learned to isolate and be afraid of others.
Making matters worse is the Internet, and what that does to social interactions. Kids were already having trouble with communication skills from using social media and not meeting people face-to-face. During the pandemic, the Internet was the only way to connect with others. This has made a generation of kids who are digitally-competent, but socially-incompetent.
Young adults who should be dating and meeting prospective spouses were already having trouble meeting and socializing in a world of social media. The pandemic lockdowns made matters worse, causing a new epidemic of lonely people who do not know how to ask for a date, or develop a relationship.
There are many more harms to us individually, and socially, caused by the lockdowns. Alienation from others is only one of those bad outcomes. But our social cohesion is the foundation of our society. We need to get over our SAD, and stop feeling socially-distant from our fellow citizens. We need to reconnect.
Here are some suggestions of how you can reconnect to others:
- Smile at strangers and say “Hello”. Even a simply smile and nod can do the trick. It’s called being friendly.
- Remember that the stresses and impacts of the lockdown have not gone away. Just because the lockdowns are over, it does not mean that you have recovered fully from its impacts on your mind, body, or spirit.
- Remember that others have suffered, too, from the lockdowns. We are all in the same boat. Let’s have some empathy for one another.
- Work with others in your community to put on social events where people can mingle and meet in person. Let’s bring back ballroom dancing, line dancing, square dancing, and other ways of touching and connecting with one another.
- Talk with others about how you feel and what the lockdowns have done to you. This can help you identify ways the lockdowns have affected you, and can help others discover how it affected them. This is a type of group therapy.
- Try getting schools to have more social activities for the kids, and to develop classes in communication skills. Kids don’t know how to talk to one another and need help.
- Avoid the Internet for socializing, opting for in-person social experiences instead.
I suppose the best antidote to SAD is love. So maybe I will add this last advice: Try being loving to others and set an example. What goes around comes around. We can avoid each other and dislike human contact; or we can embrace one another and find connection. I will do the best I can to reconnect with humanity. I hope you do, too.