Sign of the Times

I am old enough to remember rotary phones and dialing 0 for the operator.  I even have hazy childhood memories of being on a party line with the neighbors down the road.  From junior high all the way through high school, when I called my friend in a neighboring town, the calls were kept to ten minutes or less.  She was a mere ten minutes away, but still long distance as far as the phone company was concerned.

My grade school friend moved to the neighboring state at some point.  We wrote to each other all the way through.  Long letters.  Big business size envelopes stuffed full to bursting with “extra postage due” stamped on them showed up regularly in our mailbox – and I’m sure she would say the same. 

Those letters may have stopped (I still have them though! Seriously, I do!) But I now can touch base with her on Facebook.

My friend that was an extra charge long distance phone call all those years ago?  I have her on Facebook too.  We now text back and forth about big life things or just a photo to show how some plant or another is flowering.  My other high school chum chimes in a lot.  I call the message group “The Double L Group” as both their names start with L.

I have both WhatsApp and Signal.  As well as SMS texting and email.  Multiple ways of contacting and connecting with friends, acquaintances and family.  And all of it through this pocket sized computer called a “phone.”  I put that in quotes because it gets used so rarely to make an actual phone call.

My purpose in relating all of this is not to take a trip down old school lane and show how much times have changed; but to highlight an irony:

How is it, that in this era of social media, with all these ways to connect – in an era where we can hit “send” and say howdy to someone on the other side of the country (or even the world) – how is it that with all these ways to connect and socialize, more and more people are reporting feelings of loneliness and disconnection?

I’m still waiting for more data to come in on that, but I do have a suggestion at least.  Perhaps it’s not the quantity, but the quality.  Maybe it’s not that we’re socializing less; but the way we do our socializing.

Does your posse spend more time actually getting together; or in the group chat Talking about getting together?  Full disclosure: my posse is terrible about that.  But we have tentative plans to get together at our go-to restaurant later this month.  Hope springs eternal.

That book club meeting you were so excited about: did you go in person or just click on the link to attend virtually?

Did you talk to your bestie today – or just “like” one of their posts and consider that keeping in touch?

Did you call or visit the family member whose birthday was yesterday?  Or just send a two word text to wish them well?

More and more it appears our socialization is taking place over Wi-Fi rather than in person.  I submit that if communicating digitally was sufficient, there would not be that epidemic of loneliness mentioned earlier that sociologists have been speaking about for some time now.

The majority of communication is done non-verbally.  Body language.  Eye contact.  Voice intonation.  All the emojis in existence cannot replace that.   They are a poor substitute at best. 

Thanks to Covid, we had a worldwide experiment that should prove once and for all that Homo sapiens just do not do well in isolation.  None of us.  Even us proud introverts.  We need that face to face.  That shared look.  The facial expressions.  The wild hand gestures when someone is getting carried away telling a funny story. 

You won’t get that from a blank, smooth, expressionless dead screen.  And the more we continue to try, the more we may find it wanting.

More and more research is coming out about how our level of happiness is proportional to how connected we feel to those around us.  That sense of belonging somewhere.  I further submit that we should start spending less time interacting with our gadgets, and more time interacting with ourselves and what is going on inside our own head.  More time interacting with our neighborhood and what is going on in our community.  Less time online and more time simply outdoors.  We need more safe, green spaces and less Wi-Fi hotspots in my opinion. 

Reconnecting and healing those frayed ties with ourselves, our communities and Nature.  That is what will make us happier.  That is what will save us.

Not some damn app in Google Play.