Not for me, no. Look, I get people are getting used to wearing masks, and why we "must do so," but perhaps its the fact that I've been homebound for most of the year thanks to everything closing down mixed in with my being in debt even right now (though I should be done by the beginning of next month, hopefully), but I in no way find wearing masks to be a normal of any kind.
I mean, imagine kids, especially with some form of autism disorder, growing up in this pandemic. All they'd be able to have to learn non-verbal interaction in public is one's eyes, and people's facial expressions communicate a lot of things that eyes alone just can't. I'm on the more Aspergian side of the spectrum (even if the DSM-5 refuses to acknowledge the differences between it and regular autism), and I try to be as conscious as I can of what other people are saying nonverbally.
But even beyond that, relationships are just getting destroyed by everything that's been happening, and I'm not just talking about because people can't pay the bills due to them losing their jobs. That's bad enough already. But now, we have some people who want to take the following scene and make it into reality:
Even in a day of Facebook Messenger, Zoom, Skype (does that even exist alongside Zoom nowadays?), Snapchat, etc., if one wants to be in a relationship where, sooner or later, two people want to get physical, now that's demonized. I remember an article earlier this year during the first lockdown where they were actively promoting people to masturbate as opposed to trying to do something with another person. I'm not saying masturbation is good or bad, but the fact that you have people promoting doing stuff by yourself, and just saying to be afraid of being around other people is not how us humans are wired to interact with each other. Yes, there's always going to be introverts, I get that, but even introverts (which I would describe myself as being IRL thanks to my upbringing for the most part) will want interaction of some kind, or why would they be throwing money at camgirls on OnlyFans?
At the end of the day, I personally think this pandemic, the lockdowns because of said pandemic, and the things people are trying to normalize will only serve to highlight how people actually are. You had people who, when the lockdown measures from the first were lightened, if not outright removed, who realized just how taken for granted their previous lives were. And it's not like I don't understand why people are afraid to get others infected. As someone who just learned of a cousin who's in the hospital because of this virus, I don't know why you have some people who will go and say that it's straight up fake! I can understand the paranoid fear of a government using a crisis to do things that they wanted to do but normally couldn't, and that's definitely been something this whole crisis has highlighted for sure. But this is a situation where we'll have to get through it as a society somehow, and hopefully, when everything is back to normal (as in, normal, and not "new normal"), we can and be ourselves again.
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