Pariahs at Parties

It’s almost two years since the first lockdown. Two years losing the joys that we all took for granted, with many losing multiple battles on the way. Life-changing for everyone, generation-changing for many. I wonder how many remain comfortable in their lives, having gotten through so much, which I happen to be one.

I am relatively less affected—and may be even somewhat positively affected—one would argue that this is a privilege. I have changed my lifestyle and have become far healthier than I have ever been. I have mastered the art of eating only when one has to eat, and have incorporated daily exercise in my routine. Hell, I even enjoy running these days, something that had been as unpleasurable as toast (rather than non-toasted bread) was once. For me, that is. I do admit occasionally to such crudeness, and today I’m feeling magnanimously humble.

The malapropism “social distancing”—which will likely remain the most appropriate among the indelible descriptors for this biennial period—has been a splendrous graduation party for the socially handicapped folk like me. Our world had become accepted. Our world had become the right one. Our world had become the safer one.

My current 30-month “phase” of depression—which can’t quite be labeled as such because of how individually/personally productive I have been during it—is currently manifesting only an as almost complete lack of social-ness. To be more precise, the lack of and the lack of desire for social interactions that can be avoided.

Social interactions for work—and not necessarily at work—within the confines of one’s roles and expectations, are acceptable. Those one must have when one is out on the road are too. Those that one needs to have, with a handpicked set of people who have somehow been demarcated from the vast swathes of humanity that were once friends, are acceptable too. But nothing beyond. Nothing else.

I ask myself why. And I have the most politically incorrect, crude, robotic answers. Podcasts bring in more condensed conversations with better production values—with a play-pause-rewind functionality and 0.5-4x speed controls. Books bring the wonders of thought, knowledge, imagination, and language, with the precision that human beings almost always lack in real life. YouTube videos go through more editing than a human could ever hope to do in conversations in their lifetime.

None of them involve the need to be face-to-face with people, breathing the same infectious air while adhering the conventions of interpersonal interactions. Let’s just admit it: real-life conversations at dinners and parties are mediocre at best—for quality, for focus, for entertainment, for knowledge, for comfort, for comprehension, for retention, for education, for refinement.

The pandemic is not yet over. Really, it isn’t. Especially for us. People like me should aim to systematically break down every attempt at breaking the current norm—by logic, reason, and science. And when we fail, when we decide that you ought to be more serious at fulfilling our social role—as siblings, as partners, as a friends—we will fail again.

Because we then suddenly find ourselves in these agglomerations of people, who revel in themselves and in their stupid anecdotes and experiences, sharing the compulsively often at the slightest of provocations, making themselves look life fools in the process, helped on the way by the excess food and wine than they help themselves to.

And there is nothing we can do but stare away from them, walk past them, ignore them. Hoping that they would think of something better to do than talk to us, and that they wouldn’t think “what a dork—what a loser”. We look at walls, leaves, and the sky, but all of these are finite. We look for the lone hammock in a corner somewhere and settle ourselves with a book, until a few ectopics from the agglomerations arrive at the conclusion that right by the hammock is a great place to smoke up.

And then we slip away and find ourselves a chair and hide behind the bushes by the pool, feeling the strongest wave of sleep that we will have for the next year or so. We read a bit, think a bit more, worry a lot, and doze off for a few seconds. Until it is time to have food—something that we really don’t want to have, but after having which we squirm our way out past more humanity, avoiding more stares and mindless conversations.

The social role that we once had has now become extinct, and with that, we have become even more so. Yet, we continue having the best times of our lives, alone and being brilliant. It remains to be at the cost of everyone who we choose to continue to interact with—or is it choose to continue to be a burden for? And that’s the price we will pay.

Our thoughts, especially the way they were decided to be shared, are most unflattering—easily categorizable as obnoxious, self-centered, egotistic. But we do have, to blame, the provocative situation of the agglomerations. Anyone’s guess as to how this situation is similar to or different from the aforementioned unprovoked sharings, the same that we try to run away from.