At my job, there are some people who do most of their work shifts outside. There's this one guy who's always wearing a mask, even when there's no one even remotely near him. And there are still some who work inside who never take them off. Me telling them things such as:
"It's barely worse than a common cold for your age demographic" and
"Masks do nothing to prevent the spread" or
"You spent more than 50 years of your life without constantly wearing masks and you were fine, so why are you so convinced that suddenly you need to wear one for the rest of your life?" or even
"See how your glasses are fogging up when you're wearing the mask and it's slightly cold? That's evidence that the air is not even being filtrated. It's just going through the path of least resistance, around your mask."
all do nothing to convince them to act any differently, so I stopped bothering a year ago.
Because it's not based in rationality. It is, as Assassin above pointed out, a security blanket. It does nothing, and they probably know that, but they don't care. It makes them fEeL like they're protected. And that's all that matters. The world could tell them it was poisonous (which with bacterial pneumonia, it kinda is), and they'd still wear them.
At my job, there are some people who do most of their work shifts outside. There's this one guy who's always wearing a mask, even when there's no one even remotely near him. And there are still some who work inside who never take them off. Me telling them things such as:
"It's barely worse than a common cold for your age demographic" and
"Masks do nothing to prevent the spread" or
"You spent more than 50 years of your life without constantly wearing masks and you were fine, so why are you so convinced that suddenly you need to wear one for the rest of your life?" or even
"See how your glasses are fogging up when you're wearing the mask and it's slightly cold? That's evidence that the air is not even being filtrated. It's just going through the path of least resistance, around your mask."
all do nothing to convince them to act any differently, so I stopped bothering a year ago.
Because it's not based in rationality. It is, as Assassin above pointed out, a security blanket. It does nothing, and they probably know that, but they don't care. It makes them fEeL like they're protected. And that's all that matters. The world could tell them it was poisonous (which with bacterial pneumonia, it kinda is), and they'd still wear them.