High school students voluntarily wearing masks all day is not normal and probably indicates developmental issues.

My school's mask mandate has been lifted for months now, but there's still a substantial number of students who choose to wear masks indoors at all times. I'm being left alone, and I ultimately don't care if other people wear masks, but I am still creeped out and concerned that these teenagers are choosing to hide their faces all day long.

In my view, there's basically two reasons that they might still be choosing to wear masks. They're not mutually exclusive, but they're both deeply messed up and concern me as an educator.

1.) They're still wearing their masks because they are actually still afraid of covid.

This makes zero sense for obvious reasons. Most of the school has already had covid and has natural immunity. Further, not just vaccines but boosters were mandatory, and they're all reasonably healthy and active. Even if they haven't had covid and aren't vaccinated for some reason, they should be able to look around and see that exactly NONE of their friends or teachers who got covid - including the self-declared "immunocompromised" - were hospitalized, let alone died.

If they're actually afraid of covid, we've given these kids an extremely skewed sense of reality and elevated their anxiety for no good reason. That's messed up.

2.) They're still wearing their masks because they're socially anxious and want to be anonymous/unobserved by their peers.

I think that this is the more likely culprit. I travelled in Southeast Asia in 2018 and was weirded out by how many youths there wore masks in public. After some research, I learned that this behavior isn't due to fear of smog or virus exposure (back then, it was common knowledge that surgical masks were useless in this regard).

The consensus was that they wore masks because they wanted to disappear when in public. Here's a quote from a 2014 article on this topic, before the narrative shifted so dramatically:

The reality is that the woven-cloth surgical masks provide minimal protection from environmental viruses

Studies have found that among many young Japanese, masks have evolved into social firewalls; perfectly healthy teens now wear them, along with audio headsets, to signal a lack of desire to communicate with those around them. This is particularly true for young women seeking to avoid harassment on public transit, who also appreciate the relative anonymity the masks provide.

With this understanding, it appears that my students who have elevated anxiety or feel alienated from their peers now think that it's a good idea to hide their face all day. They'd rather be antisocial & anonymous than be observed by others and have chance social encounters, whether positive or negative.

Being a teen is rough for many, sure, and can be particularly rough for girls and minorities. But learning to move through the world comfortable with others seeing you smile is an extremely basic level of self-confidence that I want my students to have. If you can't stand to let others see your face, how are you ever going to fit in or handle life's more serious challenges? How are you going to make friends and have fun and experiment if you don't have the confidence to leave your room without a mask?

So, I'm either seeing a cohort of hypochondriac teenagers who are failing to adjust to life's inevitable risks, or I'm seeing teenagers devolve into deeper antisocial maldevelopment beyond the previous trends induced by social media/video game addiction, or both.

Maybe as more and more people give up on masking, it'll become socially stigmatized again and my students will stop and figure out how to deal with their anxiety in a better way. But at this point, I'm really wondering if we'll never fully go back to normal and if we're going to see these teens turn into hypochondriac and/or antisocial adults.