The self-preservation paradox

Happiness is a complicated thing. I'm not going to bore you with trite generalities: philosophers and social scientitists alike have been trying to define and quantity the stuff for ages, and as far as I can tell they still don't have clear answers. For my purposes here though, let's go with something like "the ability to live a reasonably comfortable, healthy life where you can mostly do what you want and do your part in making the world a better place with minimal hindrance".

The people I have not yet annoyed the hell out of routinely worry about my happiness levels. One in particular, no doubt meaning no harm, was suggesting that I find ways to socialize that do not entail needing to make the space accessible for me, in the name of self-preservation.

Thing is? In the current state of things, that's mostly impossible.

Clogged horizon

I've written before about the way in which covid poisons everything. What I did not expand on is the sheer amount of stuff that has become at best much harder, at worst impossible as a result. So, have a very incomplete laundry list of grief.

I had taken up swimming. I stopped going in March 2020, eventually canceling my subscription after months of it going unused. I have not been able to register at a new pool.

I had booked a second year of wet felting classes for 2020-2021. I received the invoice during the summer of 2020, and lost my deposit when the answer to "are you taking any measures" was "it's only 10 people, not 12".

I had finally found a place to open the dye workshop of my dreams, that friends had sworn would be of use to them as well. It opened in March 2020. The rent bled me dry and I did not go as often as I'd like, with every trip a risk to my health.

I am not going to repeat myself on queer community, or on the heartbreaking math of safety. I either attend events as the sole masker and feel depressed, or am limited to a half-dozen events - most of which aren't for me! - that are organized by people with deep ties to the local mask bloc.

Gods, I miss just walking around town discovering random shops and galleries, stopping at cute cafés for a snack. Now shopkeeps and curators look at me weird and I can only eat if the terrace is not crowded and the weather is okay. Good thing the climate's fucked and it doesn't rain as often anymore, right?

So instead I nearly only go out when I strictly have to for survival, when a concert or movie is truly that appealing, or when the fact that I'll do some good outweighs the risk, meaning it ends up being more work than play. That is, again, more than some can afford. If it sounds like a bloody miserable way to live, well, guess what, it is.

The math's not mathing

Let's work from the assumption that I can somehow make peace with this pile of grief. Let's pretend I can stop being pissed at being cut off from so many things core to who I am. What if, asked the same well-intentioned person, I just hanged out with people who do meet my standards?

Well. Then we get to sheer numbers. Or, more accurately, the lack thereof.

In case this wasn't obvious, I'm a particular type of nerd. I'm an acquired taste to say the least, with niche interests and a quirky way to go about them. That's okay - I was able to run into just enough fellow weirdoes to find my place in the world.

That is, before. Add an extra circle to the usual Venn diagram - interests, personality, location - and it becomes extremely difficult. There just aren't that many of us still being careful!

"Lots of fishes in the sea" is bullshit and marginalized folks know this very well. In trans circles in particular, it does not take long before you start running into the same people all the time. You won't get along with everyone that shares a given marginalization and that's okay.

Now imagine that the shared marginalization is "being in touch with scientific reality". While that too often selects for a certain type of people - the French spheres strongly lean left, but also white and middle-class to a problematic degree - it does not necessarily bring together people who share interests outside of avoiding avoidable disease.

Organizing together and being friends are not the same thing, even though they of course overlap at times. On the particular topic of covid, the two collapse together fast because entirely too many of those who give a fuck also become activists of some sort. This is not healthy. This is not sustainable.

A short sidebar on separatism

Building together based on shared marginalization is common, obviously. Events, interests groups, online communities, dating apps, support and whisper networks, communes. We must make a difference between two goals here: community and safety.

"Covid-cautious" circles took shape around the most literal safety goal possible. We have very little bringing us together except fleeing from the violence of the world. As an amateur student of queer and feminist history... I become concerned. Those communes did not end well.

I don't want us to build tiny, unsustainable bubbles of white queers who can afford Aranet sensors and PlusLife devices. I want the world back, and I want the world safer.

Mens sana or corpore sano, pick zero

Keeping my body healthy is not a choice I have. I've got weird-ass health issues to begin with, I've tasted brain fog before, I refuse to play Long Covid Russian roulette. Though of course, being this miserable and cut off from the only type of exercise I actually enjoyed is not exactly conductive to physical health.

Keeping my mind healthy is not a choice I have. Socializing with people who look at me weird is not fun, for one. Building true friendships with those who live in an alternate reality is impossible. And were I to lower my standards, take more risks, long covid is plenty bad for your mind too.

I can't trade one type of self-preservation for the other. I'm fucked either way. So is everyone, really, most are just blissfully ignorant. My bodymind can absolutely not take another six years of this. Neither can yours.

The easiest path would be to close myself off: bottle the grief, focus on me myself and I, pour myself into work, get enough money to have the workshop I want at home, keep myself safe along with the few people who were lucky enough to make it to the inner circle before I shut the door for good.

The thing is? My parents are socio-democrats in the truest sense and they taught me well. I have means. Others have needs. If I finish my homework early, I help those who are not done. And so I simply must try to make things better: share information, share resources, advocate for us to get back in touch with reality. In doing so, I get hurt again and again.

I am boneheaded for a living

As a programmer I am professionally stubborn - a coworker once joked that our job was to hit our foreheads against brick walls until we make a hole in them. I've taken that tendency and honed it, again and again, becoming a specialist and appreciator of cursed legacy systems that nobody wants to touch. It's a great way to become popular and there's a perverse pleasure in it.

Put people in the mix and I'm at a loss, though. Computers I can handle. There's always a rational explanation for them crapping out on you and nobody's getting hurt by hilarious glitches. But people and public health? That's clearly doing me in and something's gotta give.

When I said that I could not possibly stop trying to make the world a better place, the aforementioned well-intentioned person laughed: "Well there's your problem!". I understand where he comes from. Gods know he's plenty open about his particular sneak of brain weasels.

He's not wrong. Maybe that is my problem. But I refuse nihilism as an answer, I refuse self-harm as an answer. I want the world back and I want it safer. There's got to be a way to square that circle.

For further reading, see Stop Telling Me What I Want, where Dr. Emily Price digs into the urgency of refusal when faced with toxic nihilism.