The Facebook Groups Where People Pretend the Pandemic Isn’t Happening

Staying in character is paramount. When I tried to interview members of “A group where we all pretend to work in the same RESTAURANT,” I was told to make a reservation, come back when it was not rush hour, or go ask a host to see a manager. “We all take our roles seriously” Stephanie Illetschko, a group member, emailed me. “We aren’t allowed to get out of character. At. All. Which means by being in that group you now officially work at our restaurant.”

Many people join these Facebook groups just to look at them a few times and laugh at the general joke, but some become sincerely invested. Evan Mayone, a 16-year-old student from Portland, Maine, told me in an email that the restaurant was just one of about 100 Facebook role-playing groups he’d joined since the start of the pandemic, including a slightly morbid one in which members pretend to work in a hospital, but are forbidden from referencing COVID-19 or implying that any of their imaginary patients have it. “At the start of quarantine where I live, I had no clue what I would do for the next few months,” he told me. “So I turned to Facebook and found the right people for me to express my real humor. This has been one of the best social experiences of my life.”

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Role-playing the mundane is interesting when the mundane exists only in our imagination, says Aubrie Adams, a communications professor at California Polytechnic State University who has studied role-playing games. “It might seem like simple make-believe on the surface, but the emotions and opportunities for social engagement are real,” she told me. Role-playing groups provide entertainment, companionship, and social interaction during a time when those are sorely lacking for many people.

Like many of the new types of online social activity that have emerged during the pandemic, Facebook role-playing groups can throw members into bizarrely intimate situations with strangers—the same sort someone might normally happen upon by accident in a restaurant or a subway car. On Saturday night, as a police helicopter hovered over my New York City neighborhood, I dialed into a conference call organized by the members of a group in which people pretend to be at a Rainbow Gathering—a Burning Man-style communal-living experiment that happens deep in the woods in a different state each year. I expected to hear inside jokes about camping and cast-iron skillets, but instead I ended up listening to people break character to talk about the protests in their various cities.

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Even if they’re not breaking character, nobody is totally ignoring the real world when they enter into a fantasy. Many posts in “a group where we all pretend we’re in the same venue” are studded with comments of “ACAB,” an initialism for the phrase “all cops are bastards.” Although people don’t talk about the pandemic, and the protests come up only rarely, expressions of sadness and fear are common in the groups. These feelings are “looming, and part of the premise,” Sarah Kennedy said. You can’t openly discuss masks and quarantine and unemployment, but these things are precisely what brings someone to a random Facebook group filled with strangers in the first place.

While news coverage of the pandemic is preoccupied with the big questions about how we’ll eventually come out of the crisis, these groups ask the smallest and yet maybe also the most pressing questions people have about their lives: Will we ever again be sweated on in a crowd? Will we be frustrated by the length of a bathroom line? Will we hate the way someone prepared the break-room coffee? Yes, eventually, and then those things will be boring again.

Kaitlyn Tiffany is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers technology.