Once every several weeks, we have a team meeting at my work. By which I mean, as has become customary for so many of us over the past 18 months, we all sit in front of our laptops and get on a remote meeting (I’m too much of a snob to call it a “Zoom” because we don’t use the Zoom platform and we’ve been doing this before everyone was forced to do it). We are encouraged to turn on our cameras, all one or two dozen of us. Much of the meeting consists of departmental news and updates, but before we get to those typically-more-mundane items, we individually go “around the room” (insomuch as there is a room) and provide our own personal headlines. What each person is currently working on is a common topic, of course, but in the interest of team building we are encouraged to give credit to our colleagues who have helped us recently, and also to mention a recent tidbit from our real lives outside work – especially if we can note something for which we are thankful.
It’s a nice touch and it’s good for morale, or at least it traditionally has been good for morale. As I mentioned above, our team has been doing these remote team meetings before it was cool or before it was forced, whichever way you choose to look at it. I am a remote employee for a tech company in which half the workforce – including the majority of my team – consists of remote employees. We are old hands at this sort of thing. Remember at the start of the pandemic when work-from-home was a novelty and social media was littered with memes about it and cutesy photos of family pets captioned with what “my coworker” was doing? I looked at all of those with that weary brand of snobbishness and thought, “sigh… look like you’ve been there before.” Because we all had been there, for a long time.
Yet, we had only been there to an extent. Our remote work existence also contained its fair share of face-to-face time in real life. Departmental or company-wide meetings occasionally happened in person. We collaborated with our colleagues onsite with clients, where a slight majority of our work was done. So, yes, while we frequently held these remote meetings, they were but one piece of the puzzle. For 18 months now, they have been the entirety of the puzzle.
Over that 18-month period, I’ve noticed a sad progression in these remote meetings. Circa Spring 2020, they were lifelines. Largely locked down in our homes, venturing out only for grocery runs or for other “essential” shopping or to take a walk through the neighborhood, we were desperate for any semblance of human connection outside our families at home – if we were even lucky enough not to live alone. Talking to your coworkers (or family or friends in other Zoom calls which usually actually were conducted on Zoom) provided a precious opportunity to see other faces without them attempting to keep six feet away from you for fear of collapsing from disease in the street. Every last morsel of anecdote we heard convinced us that, underneath all the uncertainty, people we cared about were still basically okay. Maybe your coworker Dave was prattling on about how he watched the second episode of “Tiger King” and you were secretly judging Dave for watching rubbish, but you were anxious to hear about it nonetheless. And Dave was eager to tell it.
Since those early weeks of the pandemic, though, the tenor of these updates has gradually but noticeably changed. The anecdotes, once so cheery and excited, have become shorter, more rote, more searching for something – anything – to report or for which to give thanks. Six months ago, there was a flurry of people thankful they’d been vaccinated. That was cute for a week or two, before it became depressing, forced, and a tad bit creepy-sounding. As if that original crop of vaccinations came along with hope we were at long last at the end of all this, only to discover (psych!), not so fast, Sparky, we’re remote a little longer. Not only were the employee anecdotes growing more muted, but the responses to them were as well. A year ago, colleagues were genuinely engaged and excited to hear the latest about each other’s kids and pets. Now, they receive the virtual, verbal equivalents of a clap on the golf course for a 2-foot par putt. In the most recent meeting or two, an unpleasant realization has hit me: I no longer have any interest in what my coworkers have to say in these virtual meetings. At all.
That sounds terrible, but it’s only terrible in a way. I care about my coworkers quite a bit. I like them – most of them, anyway. I like my job. I care about what’s going on in the lives of my colleagues. If one of them asked me to lend an ear or to provide advice or to help with something non-work related, I’d do it in a heartbeat. But while I care about the people, I no longer have any interest in what my coworkers have to say in these virtual meetings. I’ve had it with them. The meetings, that is. They are breeding indifference.
What’s worse, those feelings of indifference aren’t limited to work. They’re present with longtime friends, or even with family. I no longer find any interest in scrolling a loved one’s Facebook page to see family updates. I want to get together for real. It’s time. The Zoom calls which once were a novelty now seem forced, like chores. This practice reaches its depressing nadir in the oxymoronically-named “Zoom Happy Hour,” as happiness is to Zoom as parties are to a Totino’s Party Pizza. If I have spent eight hours staring and talking into a screen, the last thing I want to do is to spend yet another hour talking into a screen while making virtual small talk and nursing a real beverage I would rather be enjoying somewhere else.
The entire exercise in drudgery breeds indifference, spreading exponentially. And indifference is the opposite of love. I do care about and love my friends. I care about and love my family, of course. But the endless exclusive virtual nature of interaction has been replacing the love with its corrosive opposite. This is not healthy. It can’t be. And I both gather and intuit that I cannot be the only one feeling this way. So what’s wrong? Why is this indifference happening? I have some thoughts.
I was still a kid when compact discs ascended to supplant cassettes and LPs as the dominant format for recorded music. And, people loved them. CDs! The sound was so clear. No rewinding or fast-forwarding! They were more durable and not prone to skip like vinyl records.
Yet, while CDs had their strong points, their honeymoon proved short-lived. Something about them was unsatisfying, left the listener wanting. What was it? Well, there’s a good chance you know. CDs, for all their clarity, do not deliver the entirety of the music but rather a digital sampling of it. The sound may be crystal clear, but it is a crystal clear presentation of an incomplete sonic product. This is why, today, true audiophiles seek out vinyl records as opposed to MP3 files.
I believe the fatigued indifference I am feeling – and I’m sure I am not alone – the longer we rely on virtual as our primary medium, is the result of a similar sampling. The person you see on the other end of a Zoom may look like a person and sound like a person, but it is not a person. It is a pixelated, digitally-sampled representation of that person. We hear the voice (unless the person is on mute) but without the sonic fullness of being in the same room. We cannot see or hear nuance. The natural ebb and flow of an in-person conversation is lost and it is warped, into something resembling a tortured cross between a radio call and cable news talking heads in boxes. The senses of smell and touch are lost entirely. We cannot shake hands. We cannot give hugs. We cannot smell the cheap cologne or the deodorant or lack thereof. I know what you’re thinking, some of this is addition by subtraction. But, is it now? We are not engaging our senses as they are meant to be engaged. We are stifling them. And if you stifle the senses, that would tend to breed fatigued indifference. We are designed to respond at an instinctual level to an entire sensory experience. If we are deprived that experience for too long, our senses and emotions will dull and ignore.
More than 20 years ago now, Harvard’s Robert Putnam wrote Bowling Alone, the seminal book on the decline of social capital in America. A decade ago, MIT professor Sherry Turkle contributed a book called Alone Together, which looked specifically at how technology was dulling and harming our relationships. I wonder if, 10 years after Turkle’s work and 20 after Putnam’s, our artificially-forced “new normal” is synthesizing the loss of social capital on the macro level with the loss of emotion in our one-on-one relationships, then accelerating the process to boot. We are now bowling alone together, all of us earning medals in a “virtual” half-marathon with our faces hidden behind ridiculous cloth masks that are much more effective at stifling human emotion than they are airborne microparticles that may or may not be carrying the virus of an asymptomatic person.
Speaking of the masks, it’s ironic to note that Putnam’s and Turkle’s universities sit two Red Line stops apart in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a city traditionally renowned for academic inquiry but now as immersed as any in America in the very unscientific, closed-minded religious cult of the mask. All school children in Cambridge are forced to attend class this fall with their faces hidden – their emotions and emotional development stifled, their breathing constricted all in a comically futile attempt to use millennia-old textile technology to stop the spread of a virus none of them on a typical given day actually have, which is statistically of less danger to them than the flu, and against which their teachers are all presumably vaccinated.
It isn’t lost on me – nor should it be on you – that the stubborn presence of the masks out in the “wild” serves to make the virtual world to which we retreat in our homes almost appealing by comparison. Sure, the Zoom call may be pixelated and emotionally hollow, but at least I can see smiles and smile back. Staying home or going out becomes a “pick your poison” proposition. Do I stay in and forcibly dull my emotions? Or do I go out into the real world and more forcibly stifle them behind a covering fit for a bank robber but ill-fitting in every other regard? Might as well stay home and stay safe, right? If only there were statistical evidence that we truly are staying safer by staying at home or masking. Alas, after 18 months there is not. We are not safer at home. But we are undoubtedly emotionally poorer.
Ever since the start of the pandemic, since the entire Western world save Sweden cribbed the concept of lockdown from China, the support or opposition of these inhumane policies has largely been depicted as a question of valuing health versus the economy. Even if they fail miserably, the stated purpose of lockdowns and mask mandates is to preserve public health. Likewise, regardless of whether mandates and lockdowns succeed or fail, it’s beyond debate that shutting down swaths of business damages the economy, by both costing people their jobs and dampening the amount homebound consumers spend. And yet, I maintain that when these policies continue on and on, stretching from the original manipulative lie of “15 days” on into months and even years, much more is at play than the obvious COVID deaths and hospitalizations on the one hand and the quantifiable job losses and economic damage on the other.
We are experimenting with the very nature of our relationships and communication – hollowing them out - in a manner much more extreme than has been attempted in the history of western civilization. While it may be tempting to explain this away as necessary, to happily maintain “I love my Zoom happy hours! I can be just as effective working from home! I save so much gas on my car now! Why go to the store when I can get my groceries delivered by as essential employee I don’t need to see?...” and on and on, if we are completely honest with ourselves, taking our lives virtual has a real, deleterious effect on the way we experience each day, and it stands to reason, a compounding effect on our relationships for the long term. When our lives become virtual, eventually they become muted and hollow, a mere digital sampling of the genuine article.
Do we really know what we are doing?
I'd say we / they don't know what we are doing. From the get-go I felt and said we should treat this virus like Sweden did... you make great points in this essay... especially pointed at masking children. At some point we have to live with the virus... Most days I don't even think about it. Instead I've worked on my health. Doing my part for children means letting them come over to my house to play games and laugh. If kids don't see faces and live in fear it bodes very bad for our future. This is my favorite point you made: if you stifle the senses, that would tend to breed fatigued indifference. "We are designed to respond at an instinctual level to an entire sensory experience. If we are deprived that experience for too long, our senses and emotions will dull and ignore."
Nope, Matt. We do not know what we are doing. Well, almost all of us don't know what we're doing because we've conceptualized humans as individuals, instead of the collective network we actually are. http://empathy.guru/what-is-empathy