Why I Wear a Mask

It is the beginning of the summer in 2025, and I am still wearing a protective face mask. I wear it inside almost always (with the exception of one or two friends coming over—at which time I run our air purifiers and use our essential oil burner). At this point, over 5 years after the COVID-19 pandemic started, you would think that people would be used to seeing others with masks, and many are. But I’ve been approached several times, both by angry people who are really pissed that I’m wearing a mask and by people who want to tell me how masks “don’t really work”.

The masks I wear are washable N95-level masks called Cambridge Masks, and I have been wearing them since 2021 or so. A common start to the conversations about my mask often start with questions like “How do you breathe in that thing?”. These passive-aggressive (or aggressive-aggressive) reactions are most likely stemming from fear, politics, or propaganda—and ignore the very basic reality of what I’m doing when I strap on my mask every day. I am protecting myself from getting sick, and I am protecting others from getting sick (even if I am asymptomatic). So, you know—you’re welcome.

But let’s talk about fear and its part in this. Edmund Burke, a philosopher and a member of Parliament in the 1700s (and also widely considered the founder of Conservatism) stated that:

“No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.”

And fear is really the underlying current of our world today. Uncertainty is the name of the game now, and those of us in developed countries aren’t used to uncertainty. Members of the generation that lived through the Depression and the pandemic of 1918 are either very old or have passed away, and here in the US, a war hasn’t been fought on our soil since the end of the Civil War in 1865. We’ve remained blissfully ignorant and comfortable in our illusion of safety and perceived invincibility for way too long. As kids in playgrounds everywhere say, we can dish it out, but we can’t take it. This uncertainty (and the fear associated with it) is causing so many of us to throw reason, common sense, and scientific fact out the window—and with that, our compassion and ability to think critically.

The fear that arose in 2020 regarding the pandemic was pervasive. During lockdown and after, it felt like we were stuck inside every apocalyptic movie we’ve ever seen. Once “pandemic fatigue” set in after we realized that this wasn’t something that was just going to go away, we let our fear take over, and denial and anger set in. Yes, it was much easier to just pretend everything was fine and get together with our friends and family unmasked or to stop using hand sanitizer and washing our hands thoroughly. Culturally, wearing a mask was even starting to be looked at as something that only weak, stupid, or radical people did. Whenever you hear people talking about masking, you rarely hear them discuss the real issue at hand—contagion.

Just as the earth is not flat (seriously, this is a scientific fact), contagion exists. Even though contagion wasn’t accepted as fact in the medical community until the late 19th century, the idea of contagion has been well-known for thousands of years. During the Bubonic Plague in the 14th century, the rich often secluded themselves on their large country estates and saw the Plague as tied to class and wealth. However, the poor and middle classes knew differently, as it was widely known that being in proximity of a sick person meant that you would likely get sick. Unable to distance themselves like the wealthy (and exposed to unsanitary conditions such as raw sewage being dumped in the streets), the lower classes succumbed to the Plague at an extremely high rate. The Plague killed approximately 25 million people in Europe in the 14th century, and the population was only around 75 million to begin with. To put that in perspective, imagine if everyone in all of the states in the midwestern US plus Tennessee, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Virginia, Mississippi, and Alabama just died.

We have come a long way as far as medicine and science are concerned, but it is widely accepted in the scientific community that we have entered “the second age of pandemics”. The severity and frequency of pandemics is increasing and and is predicted to continue increasing as time goes on. Factors that have been shown in multiple studies to increase the likelihood of a pandemic are:

1.      Increased travel, by ground water and air. 

2.      The spread of urbanization, leading to higher density living and overcrowded, sometime unhygienic conditions.

3.      The effects of climate change on things like mosquito populations, animal-to-human infectious diseases, and thawing polar areas where long-dormant viruses frozen in ice are being released.

4.      A weakening health care system with a shortage of health care workers and doctors.

As you can see, our current reality checks all of these boxes. So I keep wearing a mask, washing my hands often, and work on keeping myself as healthy as possible. I’m not angry with others if they choose not to mask, because I have taken on extra precautions to protect myself. In today’s world, where compassion and empathy are hard to come by, it’s important for all of us to try to put ourselves in others’ shoes—and reel in the reactive, negative energy that has become so prevalent. I believe that wearing a mask and practicing good personal hygiene is the only way to be truly prepared for the next pandemic—and as a bonus, I rarely get sick in general now. There is no agenda, no political reason, but just contagion prevention, simple as that.

"We long to return to normal, but normal led to this. To avert the future pandemics we know are coming, we MUST grapple with all the ways normal failed us. We have to build something better."

—Ed Yong, Pulitzer-Prize-Winning Journalist in September, 2020