Zooming Through Transition

The endless summer

Summer is a time of transition. Nothing much seems to be happening. We all seem to be in a continuous state of waiting. Apathy and torpor are the words that most often come to mind when I want to describe what I see around me. Languidness too.

We’re waiting for the evening to come as the heat is not so intense then. We’re waiting for the days off from work so that we can go to the seaside or wherever else we have planned to go for the holidays. We’re also waiting for colleagues to come back from their holidays so that we can hang out again.

But no, scratch that last part. This no longer applies to very many of us. It does not apply to me anymore either. I have been working remotely ever since the pandemic started and it feels as if all those colleagues I used to hang out with are perpetually out of reach somehow.

Everything happens on Zoom nowadays. This gives the impression that everybody is far away. We’ve all become disconnected. The team no longer seems like a team because not meeting in person makes us feel like total strangers to each other.

When people show their faces in virtual meetings, they use virtual backgrounds that make one dream of holidays rather than pay attention to whatever it’s discussed during the meetings.

Everything seems to be taking place virtually nowadays. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I sometimes wonder if we don’t already live in the metaverse. We’ve all become so used to everything happening online that maybe we have forgotten that the transition has actually happened at some point.

Conversations with coworkers no longer seem like real conversations. A screen is mediating all of them. If one doesn’t have to show what one is thinking in real-time, what we will all display will be 100% curated.

I constantly have the feeling that we are all brains in jars rather than people and spontaneity will soon become extinct. Real life has been replaced by a play we’re all constantly acting in and we all have a lot of opportunities to write and then practice our parts. Online. We’re becoming better and better at being thespians while hiding behind screens.

When we’re in meetings and people don’t switch their cameras on, it feels as if we keep speaking into the void. We might know intellectually that this is not the case and that there is always someone else listening, of course, but there are times when it no longer feels this way.

Is it just me or do all these virtual connections and lack of real face-to-face interactions alienate us? I keep thinking that we forget how it is to be among other human beings, we forget how to relate to others, to sympathise with them. It’s like a muscle and it’s getting atrophied… a bit more every day.

We become stuck in the bubbles of our own minds and all the other bubbles tend to become more and more isolated and to get further and further away. Our world will soon be a world of mental bubbles drifting away from each other.

We don’t need this. Connection, real connection, is something we humans crave for.

Maybe what we are doing is just unconsciously easing the transition to AI’s dominating the world. If we keep on withdrawing from what’s real and retreating into the virtual world, we will all end up becoming some sort of robots in the process.

While I was still a student, my friends and I really dreaded summers. It was unbearably hot and nothing much seemed to be happening at this time of the year. There were no events to attend as everything was taking place somewhere else (the seaside). The city was dormant and its inhabitants were in a state of profound hibernation.

There was a feeling of boredom permeating everything and we were patiently waiting for the action to begin again, for people to come back, for our lives to resume, and for the city to become animated and exciting once again.

This work-from-home phase seems a bit like this. It is a time of waiting: waiting for our lives to go back to normal. The funny thing is that everybody seems to be having a hard time with it. Whenever I go to the office (we still have that option) and other colleagues join, everybody is complaining about this.

Many of my colleagues keep telling me when we meet how they miss dressing up and getting out of the house. They miss talking to other people face to face and playing games in the office. They miss the insight jokes. They miss having lunches with other people. They crave human connection.

All this longing does not however determine any of them to at least try coming more often to the office. In the past, summers were eventually ending and life was going back to being exciting. But that was back when we were students.

I keep wondering if we will all snap out of this lassitude, shed the lethargy, and go back to real living, which means, in my opinion, being among other people from time to time. I can only hope we will. If my colleagues won’t, I most certainly will find a way to. At some point.

The end of summer is just around the corner. Well, not quite, but it will soon be.