I'm more than a little freaked out by this. Are you ever planning on going back to normal, or are these measures for life?
I'm confused, it was my impression that a lot of Chinese people, including in the West, have been masking strategically since like 2003 (the first SARS wave), i.e. wearing a mask if they are sick, or if the risk of getting sick is unusually high (e.g. a bad flu season at university). The only people I ever saw wearing masks for illness prior to 2020 were Asian (except for one very immunocompromised white friend). Honestly it seems crazy to me that the norm prior to this was just to do nothing to try to prevent illness, because being sick is both terrible in the moment and maybe/probably bad for you longterm!
I do think the trade-off differs for different people — some people, like my husband, absolutely hate every minute of wearing a mask, so it's a big cost for them; but for others, wearing a mask isn't that unpleasant, so it can be worth doing it for a few hours at a time in order to prevent future major inconvenience.
I, like Jeff, have been masking more than usual recently, since I, like him, am running music for a Solstice this weekend. This makes sense to me because (a) I don't hate wearing a mask that much, (b) it's only for short periods, not for like a full workday in an office every day, and (c) it would be really unfortunate to not be able to be in Solstice. I've put in a ton of preparation, and while we do have contingency plans in place, me being sick would still create a burden on other people, make the performance run less smoothly, and also mean that I wouldn't get to perform, which would be sad for me.
I guess my point is, everything in life comes with trade-offs, and it's up to you how you weigh those.
About a year ago I wrote that I'd now:
follow official guidance and mask regulations, cheerfully go along with precautions others need, and test+isolate when sick, but I'm not going to go above and beyond to attempt to reduce spread the way I did for earlier parts of the pandemic.
And yet I'm often wearing an N95 in situations where they're not required and a large majority of other people aren't masked. Are these in tension?
My views haven't changed. I still think that if my region and the communities I'm part of aren't going to put a serious effort into keeping covid from spreading then it doesn't make sense for me to make large sacrifices on my own for pro-social reasons. But if I get covid, or one of the several other things going around, I'll need to isolate to avoid getting other people sick. That means missing things I'd be very sad to miss, and I'll take steps to avoid that:
I masked at the MetaSUB conference the weekend before Thanksgiving.
I masked at Sunday's EA dinner and my work's holiday party because I'm running music for a secular solstice this Saturday (sort of an atheist church service inspired by ideas from the effective altruism and rationalist communities).
I'm planning to mask at the solstice event because it's just before relatives come to town for Christmas.
On the other hand, I didn't mask at Thanksgiving and I'm not planning on masking at Christmas because being sick right after that is, while not ideal, basically fine.
While this does have pro-social effects, slowing down the rate of transmission of airborne diseases, my motivation here is primarily selfish: I don't want to miss things.