Isolation

I suspect many if not most of us have suffered to some degree from the effects of isolation over the past months. We are social creatures and the drastic change in the ways we interact, work, study, or simply go about our daily business have diminished our ability to maintain the constructs that we have followed for years. Unless you are inclined to solitude and living apart from others for extended periods the impact of such isolation appears to be taking a significant toll.

Recently I had dinner with a close friend. Normally a gregarious person, my friend has suffered not only the limitations of working from home with the phone and occasional video meetings as his chief form of interaction with clients, friends and colleagues, but having lost his spouse of 40 years not so long ago he is also alone at home much of the time. My friend is experiencing a very different reality these days—not merely loneliness, but a more profound loss of social skills and habits that characterized his behavior in the past.

One example does not make a case for the ill effects of forced isolation—even when it is mostly voluntary. But I have noticed among friends and acquaintances that I interact with virtually, changes in our behavior that are discomfiting. A book club meeting that I attended by video the other day proved to be deeply unsatisfying. Under normal conditions we gather once a month at one member’s home, have some dinner, discuss the last book we read and choose another for the succeeding month. For obvious reasons we have not met in person for several months but decided to renew virtually. I genuinely enjoy the company of these men and their insights which are always welcome. Absent the face to face visual cues, the body language and the ability to sustain side conversation, the meeting, which lasted only 45 minutes rather than our usual several hours, was painful.

Once we navigated the technology—a 15 minute delay as various of the dozen attendees signed on and waited –and the application stuttered and posed novel challenges to being seen or heard, the meeting proper stuttered along –folks talking over one another due to a delay in the audio, while others muted and unmuted introducing background audio from nearby TV sets, music, and conversations. But that was not the worst of it—far more dispiriting was the lack of real exchange. In person we rely on dozens of clues and cues to help us know when we are engaging or losing someone’s attention, perhaps talking ad nauseum, or zoning out. Lacking those prompts we had more than our share of such moments and I watched as my friends’ conversations, and indeed my own, devolved into a mushy compost of banalities, over repetition, and mind-numbing dissertation. It reminded me of the worst lectures I attended in graduate school.

I’ve observed this in working situations as well. On a consulting call the other day to discuss a series of technical issues that were a bit obscure, what should have been a relatively straightforward conversation managed to resolve nothing. It was not lack of knowledge or interest much less ability, but something about the lack of physical presence created a boundary that confounded the real issues which had little to do with technical matters and a lot to do with unspoken concerns. Having been in such circumstances in the past, I rely on those cues to signal a background agenda. But in this case the virtuality of the conversation only served to bury the real issue and it took some offline phone and email exchanges before the light seeped in.

I’ve been an advocate for virtual learning in my professional life and an organization with which I was associated was a leading provider of resources to assist teachers and students to teach and learn using online tools. On the plus side, allowing students the freedom to move through material at a pace best suited to their own interests and abilities is a good thing—but we never supported the notion that all students would learn on their own. What we advocated for was a change in the traditional role of teacher and student—homework and schoolwork. Rather than acting as the lecturer at the front of the room dispensing lessons, our model shifted the ‘lesson’ elements to brief online videos and interactive models studied offline and outside of the classroom, freeing teachers and students to work in class individually or in small groups to work through the concepts and information together.

This approach does not do away with socialization, if anything it increases it in a powerful way that lets everyone act as guide at times and not simply an empty vessel into which information is being poured. Which brings me back to what I find so challenging in the isolating experience all of us have been through. We are alone—too much. The commerce of conversation, the engagement with one another in which we act in many roles, sometimes student, sometimes mentor, friend, advocate, colleague, manager and many other parts, is an essential ingredient to our evolving humanity.

So much of who we learn to love, respect, relate to or model ourselves upon depends on in-person, up-close real contact. When we lack first-hand experience with others—are isolated, by self-imposed, economic, parental or societal limitations we learn to fear, reject, even grow to hate what and more importantly those we do not know. It is at the heart of what I find so dangerous about social media. Rather than acting as a mechanism for promoting interaction, exposure to others, and a wider knowledge of the tremendously varied world in which we live, it has increasingly become a tool for isolating ourselves. We mingle only with those whose views we share. Interaction in these virtual spaces, such as it is, largely consists of memes, barbs, vitriolic comments and fiery denunciations that only serve to enhance the divisions between us. Worse yet this behavior spills over to the physical world.

To paraphrase John Donne, no man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, we are the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's loss diminishes us all, because we are involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.”