At what point do we say "Fine, stay inside and live your life as a hermit, but the rest of us are returning to normal."? I feel like these neurotic people have way too much clout and are holding back reopening progress.
I don't hear people on HN who want to continue working remotely being accused of being neurotic or being molly-coddled, and they get get paid well and have very good work conditions.
I agree that the author is courting some kind of depression or neuroticism. But the subtext I heard in the article is that a lot of the things that people have not had to deal with during the pandemic are things we have known are bullshit for a long time. And now that we have seen proof that they aren't necessary, people are reluctant to go back to accepting those bullshit conditions. Especially when we saw how poorly healthcare workers and service workers who did work during the pandemic were treated. And again, those people don't write for the Atlantic but I have a feeling they were well represented by this article.
> I don't hear people on HN who want to continue working remotely being accused of being neurotic or being molly-coddled, and they get get paid well and have very good work conditions.
By "this class of people" I don't literally mean people on HN but people in the typical yuppie lines of work.
Someone who's actually working class has not had the luxury of doing so. Even if you got every stimulus check that covered maybe 10% of the expenses over the last 1.25 years. So the people who could stay inside indefinitely either never lost their job (transitioned to remote or already worked remote pre-pandemic), or they lost their job but had such a massive nest egg that they were able to weather it.
Actual working-class people have not been sheltering inside for 18 months. In my opinion it's unhealthy to do so, so I'm not alleging that it would be a good thing if the working class hid inside too, but rather that the "I'm not ready to return to normal" crowd is driven by neuroticism and a crippling fear of life itself rather than it being some actual necessary result of this respiratory virus pandemic.
Has this not already happened? Where I live all covid restrictions have been dropped, sports games are at full capacity, masks optional everywhere but public transit and hospitals, and so on
(Granted not in the US and in a country with a much better COVID situation)