When I caught COVID at a completely legal restaurant dinner, I was surprised that I felt ashamed. Where did that sensation come from? Some leftish pundits seem to think that demanding anything beyond the essentials of life is immoral, and that any willingness to tolerate some risk (personal and society-wide) is reckless. Recently, a prominent San Francisco doctor wrote a long Twitter thread about his otherwise healthy, triple-vaccinated 28-year-old son, whose case of COVID was no worse than a nasty cold and was apparently caught from watching a movie with a vaccinated friend. To me, his apprehensive rundown of potential treatments and his admonishment that “even low risk stuff—things that were safe last [month]—may now be risky” felt like a dispatch from an alternate universe. How can people live with this level of fear?

Yet to publicly question the current level of restrictions is to invite accusations from your more COVID-averse friends, or even strangers on social media, that you hate doctors, reject science, and actively want people to die. I am not anti-lockdown; I lived through three of them without a single illicit wine-and-cheese party or Christmas quiz, unlike senior members of the British government. I got my vaccines the minute I was allowed to. I wear a mask whenever doing so is mandated. But I’m done, profoundly done. Or at least I’m what my colleague Derek Thompson has called “Vaxxed and Cautious Until Omicron Burns Through and Then Prepared to Be Done.”

And that’s because I am desperate for a party.