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Gym: How much can you wish for Omikron, fuck your own fault, no pity
Photo: Gaetan Bally / dpa
It's hard for me to admit: outside, the pandemic is raging harder than ever, but the pandemic is over for me.
I've arrived in an inner endemic.
The endemic is known to be the most likely final scenario of Corona.
At the beginning of the year, Christian Drosten said that "in the course of 2022 we can enter the endemic phase and declare the pandemic over."
Endemic is actually scientifically defined with some precision, namely with the formula:
R
0 x S = 1. But that doesn't matter at the moment when the everyday translation simply says: We have to live with Corona because the damn virus will probably never go away again will.
That's not new.
But what is new for me is the state of internal endemics.
It's, if I'm to be ruthlessly honest, a mixture of indifference, ruthlessness and resignation.
This may sound more negative from the outside than it feels from the inside.
In fact, it is a feeling of liberation.
It is perfectly clear to me that the prerequisite for the state of inner endemics is great privilege.
My son isn’t going to kindergarten yet, I don’t have any school-age children, over 90 percent of my job can be done from my home office and gives me financial independence, there are practically no people at high risk in my environment, and so on.
But in the meantime, the already somewhat stale waiver solidarity is with me - I'm not going on vacation,
if not everyone can do it (or something like that) – used up.
This may come across as self-centered or spiteful, but I no longer feel like I owe society a pandemic renunciation.
It's not like I'm pretending Corona doesn't exist.
But I behave minimally compliant when it comes to the rules.
With a tendency towards a certain laxity in the concrete implementation.
And with the willingness to leave my private life unaffected by most rules, because I rely solely on the personal responsibility of the people around me.
To be specific: If contact restrictions were to be imposed again, I wouldn't really care, I would still welcome five people from six households at home.
Except for FFP2 masks in sensible places, I have let go of almost all caution.
I see the difference especially when dealing with people who still avoid indoor spaces, closeness or the public.
Perhaps the most arrogant aspect of my inner endemic is that I now don't care if and how and how many infections there were.
234,250 is just a number, and the most exciting thing about the incidence for me is what new colors are used on the map, because the old color scale only went up to 1000.
I care about people, but after two years of a pandemic, internal endemic means: I have accepted that sooner or later everyone will be infected, as most experts say.
That's why I hug people, I shake hands, I fly on vacation, I go to cafes and restaurants and also to the cinema and – if they happen – to events and meet a lot of friends.
It's not like I'm tight dancing with unmasked strangers in the supermarket, but social distancing is dead.
I was wondering
why this is so, how and why I have achieved inner endemics, including my own minimal corona rules.
I identified three factors.
mask
For many mavericks, the mask feels like a threat, probably because it's the ubiquitous symbol of the pandemic and response.
For me, the mask is my best protection because, when used correctly, it prevents 99 percent of the infection - but it is also an indicator.
If someone doesn't have a mask on where it would be necessary, I don't care at all whether the person gets infected.
If you don't even have the minimum resources to avoid getting infected, you deserve it.
The next day I did a trial session in the gym, everyone was panting, gasping, sweating, of around fifty people I was the only one with a mask, how badly can you wish Omikron, it's your own fucking fault, no sympathy.
vaccination
My understanding for people who have still not voluntarily been vaccinated has largely been exhausted by now.
That doesn't mean that I hate these people, and I would still advise the state to persuade or urge them to be vaccinated, for example with a vaccination premium.
But my inner endemic also means that most people could have protected themselves from serious illnesses or death.
Corona is still not harmless, but with all vaccinations you really have to be unlucky to die.
My feeling is that we vaccinated could actually get on with our normal lives, but that society is still walking with the handbrake on because of the unvaccinated.
I find the most bizarre thing about the people who see Corona as a bad disease,
but still refuse to be vaccinated.
It seems almost more understandable if you don't get vaccinated because you think Corona is harmless or non-existent.
postpandemic society
We have arrived in the post-pandemic society, the pandemic is priced into everyday life.
Maybe different than you thought at the beginning of 2021, but my inner endemic got a big boost because so many people try to behave normally at almost any price.
We have been playing offensively everyday for a long time, and now the auto-suggestion works so well that everyday life is actually routed around Corona.
Peter can't, he has an omicron;
ah yeah awesome, tell me, do you know when the new season »Squid Games« will come out?
The magic of normality - this is one of my lessons from Corona and the key to the inner endemic - arises like the placebo effect: The simple belief in the existence of an everyday life has a measurable, surprisingly large effect.
Interestingly, it seems to me more and more often that the bitter opponents, the lateral thinkers and opponents of vaccination, are keeping the exceptional nature of the pandemic situation simmering.
Maybe also because after the pandemic, most of them are just ordinary crackpots that will no longer be reported on.
But in my estimation, the majority of the population has reached the post-pandemic society.
According to my observation, it mainly divides into two larger groups.
One has made the best of it for itself, even enumerating the advantages behind closed doors.
For example, that working from home is now possible where it was previously unthinkable, and that this has made it easier to combine family and work.
It's not a particularly popular attitude
because the pandemic has caused so much suffering, that's why you hear about it less.
But those who, despite all the difficulties, have benefited from the pandemic and are in a way pandemienetto in the plus are many, many more people than you would think at first glance.
The other big group are the really suffering people.
Due to the pandemic, they often had to realize that they were already in a situation that was difficult to bear.
Corona made the barrel of life overflow for them, but it was already exhaustingly full beforehand.
Corona has shown many from this group that the pandemic was above all a trigger for long-standing problems to escalate.
Whether they were able to do something about these problems themselves or not - in the meantime they had to find a way of dealing with them.
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Sasha Lobo
Reality shock: Ten lessons from the present
Publisher: Kiepenheuer&Witsch
Number of pages: 400 pages
Publisher: Kiepenheuer&Witsch
Number of pages: 400 pages
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Of course there are other, smaller groups, such as those where everything was actually fine and who were completely thrown off course by the pandemic in one way or another, economically, organizationally, psychologically.
Or those who have burned out professionally between care and health and are still being attacked by muddleheads.
These groups urgently need to be taken care of, perhaps with a post-pandemic recovery fund or simply with more humane, social framework conditions.
But the two largest groups have clearly found their way back to a new form of everyday life.
I'm pretty sure that we inner endemics won't let our hard-fought everyday life get out of our hands.
Neither by Corona deniers nor by politicians.