Let me address this directly since you won't address me directly.
COVID can linger in the air for hours after someone who's infected has been in the room.
You don't know how many infected people that bartender came across, not only that day, but throughout his week of the rest of his life where he may be going places other than work unmasked.
You don't know about the other people you mentioned either. So there already a lot of different opportunities for you to be reinfected. To me that's a whole lot of risk. And you're talking to someone with great risk management skills. I used to pole vault and I used to ride motorcycles without helmets. But I would never take the risk of walking outside in the middle of a pandemic without an appropriate mask. Especially at this juncture.
But aside from that, we're not just dealing with COVID. We're dealing with Measles, RSV, Influenza Bubonic plague and Avian Flu. Again, more of a reason to wear an appropriate mask religiously.
What's bothers me more is that you start to take a victim stance here as if people don't look to you and respect your intellect. So to disrespect people's intellect and talk about "I'm only human" and not address people in a way that's sincere, but instead places the onus of being an asshole on them who are expressing disappointment in you, is extremely immature as well as you refusing to take accountability for your possibly harmful actions. Because even if you don't care about getting sick, you could be asymptomatically carrying a virus that you pass to someone else and unknowingly harm or kill them.
That is so far from harm reduction and I imagine that's something you believe in if you're not center or right-leaning politically. Even if you are a liberal leaning or generally non-political, it is so dismissive of the most marginalized of us (the disabled). You were actively making the world less accessible. You don't have to be a socialist/communist, but you do have to care about your fellow humans to be a decent person. That goes for all of us and INCLUDES all of us.
But you know this, don't you? I'm not telling you anything new. You can't just decide to stop caring when people's lives are still being affected by your actions. You shouldn't have been there in the first place, but you made a decision to go there that motivated by other decisions and factors in your life. You should own up to it instead of making incoherent excuses. WANTING TO SOCIALIZE IS NOT A VALID ONE.
We are all sacrificing certain things to preserve our health. If you can't socialize safely, you shouldn't be doing it. You can socialize and not endanger others. Certain activities should never even cross your mind to be honest. Not if you're informed.
I'm a person that struggles with agoraphobia, but that doesn't mean I'm going to throw out public health practices that keep me and other people safe as someone community focused. I've been through other traumatic events, but that's giving me more of a reason to be religious about masking and protecting myself and others.
We've been in this pandemic for 4 years and it is still ongoing. It's best we act like it. And that means everyday. COVID's not dropping its mask. Or any of these other respiratory viruses. NEITHER SHOULD YOU.