I hate Zoom.
This sounds curmudgeonly: cranky Carll. Doesn’t Zoom convene folks otherwise apart? Doesn’t it permit absent parents to make goo-goo eyes at their bairn? Enable scattered siblings and pals to “stay in touch”? Isn’t it a lifeline for shut-ins? No, it’s not the same as being together physically, but these days, when we’re all so peripatetic, that’s hard, and isn’t something better than nothing?
Yes, to all of the above. Yes, Zoom and the other online connecters have been lifesavers, facilitators, convenient, essential to education, communications, commerce. I’ve a friend who’s a member of half a dozen boards of companies scattered around the globe. He’s much in demand. Zoom enables him to benefit all those enterprises. How great is that!
To confess antipathy to Zoom et al. is not to advocate their elimination. I bless Zoom often for sparing me the ordeal of lugging my body to confer. I can Zoom with lawyers, old (surprisingly old) schoolmates, docs (for minor aches), salvaging time for me to scribble. Deny me Zoom and I’d get grumpy. Zoom is efficient, convenient, affordable – what’s not to like?
Zoom is symptom of our dread disease, a bubo announcing our fatal plague. Humanity is dying of loneliness. By replacing actual society with faux, we hasten and aggravate the contagion. Our conveniences isolate us. Isolated we feel less necessary, less loved, angrier. We kick the cat. Today, in America, an entire political party is kicking the cat. We kill ourselves. We get crazy. We bury our consciousness in innutritious crud.
When the Surgeon General labeled loneliness epidemic, many rolled their eyes. Loneliness is a fact of life, not a disease! What next? Will we be prescribing pills for what Pope called (heartbreakingly) “this long disease, my life”?
Yes, there was always loneliness, but modernity has worsened it. Easy mobility atomized community: how many neighbors do you depend on? The Internet confines us to our cushioned cubicles. Folks die in their apartments, and no one knows till they stink. “Loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling,” says the Surgeon-General,
it harms both individual and societal health. It is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death. The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity. And the harmful consequences of a society that lacks social connection can be felt in our schools, workplaces, and civic organizations, where performance, productivity, and engagement are diminished.
A symptom isn’t a cause. Zoom can’t be blamed for loneliness; it may ameliorate it somewhat. Even so, it reminds me – which is why I hate it. Love is physical: one cannot love a screen. Love has taste, smell, heat, alters with time. It can’t be replayed or erased. Difficulty intensifies love. Love remembers being together – the danger, hope, suspense.
Community is the cure for loneliness. Not the fake community of frequent fliers or Kamala boosters, but the real community of living together because you must, where you depend on one another because you have no choice: a community where you experience, explore, struggle together, where love takes root in exertion and time.
I console myself that our little congregation is such a clutch. Yes, online speeds you these words, but that’s only their envelope. They must be unwrapped, dealt with, reacted to. Some of us have journeyed together – daily – for a decade. That’s my defense against loneliness and, I hope, a part of yours.
Zoom evokes quick, convenient, lickety-split. Love trudges, aches, takes time.