Working from home and staying sane: Staying Connected

So far this week, I’ve talked about how to be productive when working from home and how to keep your body and your mind in good nick. Now we come to the next area: social life, or the “social” in “social distancing”. I want to preface this post by saying that I’m a fairly introverted person, as should be obvious by my choice of career and working style. I was introverted when I was a child, too, much more content sticking my nose into a book than dealing with groups of people. My parents strongly encouraged me to at least try to interact, though, so I had to develop social skills and ended up with a very large social network by my 20s. And because that was the 1990s, it was all in-person – in other words, I have experienced both large-group, in-person socialising (including working in large offices) and being by myself about 90% of the time, with very limited in-person meet-ups with one or maybe two people at a time, and various configurations in between. They all work, and they all require slightly different skills. Speaking to the extroverts here: I know you may find it difficult and unsettling not to have large groups to surround yourself with for a while, but it doesn’t have to be distressing, lonely, isolated, or negative.

We live in the age of social media, so that may seem like the obvious solution here: but I want to point out some problems and areas worth considering carefully. Hopefully, everyone knows about the many options for managing who you are in contact with, from unfriending and blocking people who are actively harming you, to unfollowing those you don’t want to confront but also don’t want to interact with too much. I will say as well that, as things change, it’s always worth paying careful attention to how you feel about what you see on your social media feed: do you feel uplifted or stressed? Do you experience FOMO, envy, jealousy, bullying? If so, here is your permission slip to stop reading anything and everything that makes you feel awful about yourself. I am not talking about creating only echo bubbles of people who agree with you – it’s not a good move for your mental development, but you do you! If you need this for a while, go for it! – but I do think it’s a good idea to remove people from your circle who always leave you feeling depleted. Curate your online spaces to inspire and support you. Ideally, stay away from people who peddle misinformation, especially if it’s being used to sell stuff or create an overall feeling of fear and anxiety. Be extra careful about following celebrities and realise they are only human beings, too: they aren’t more special than you just because a lot of people look at them.

The second thing I want to say about social media is that it’s good to be aware that everything is heavily edited there. Of course people post only/mainly their highlights and/or carefully stage what they want others to see, we know this. Consider all things to be types of marketing and propaganda, especially when people receive monetary rewards for their posts. The other part of this point is that the media we ingest via our screens lack aspects of in-person interaction: if we are social animals, we are primarily geared towards having our bodies in the same meatspace (to use an old cyberpunk term), and this aspect bears careful consideration in times of social distancing. There isn’t an awful lot that can replace a hug or a kiss! So consider how and with whom you might meet those needs, and when and how you can separate them from verbal and visual social contact. The latter falls under a broad category of human need I’d call sense-making: we are (also) story-telling organisms, our brains are very much geared towards narrating our lives as a way of making sense of and to ourselves, and this includes aspects like (the passage of) time and cause-and-effect chains. Social media are largely storytelling spaces, and their success is partly due to their capacity to meet this deep human need. Can you instrumentalise your social media channels in the service of storytelling? And/or what aspects of your friendships can you adequately experience without meeting in person?

A kind of halfway house – or “uncanny valley”, depending on your view – is telephone calls. The benefit to them is that they are spontaneous and less heavily edited than written communication, and they add the nuances of voice back into the equation. My personal preference is video calls: I find it easier to understand people when I can see their faces, partly because I augment my hearing with lip-reading. I’ve already mentioned virtual co-working as a productivity hack: I also like video chats as a way of being mostly physically present with someone without breathing the same air… or being in the same country.

Given that in-person hangouts with large groups of people are pretty much the worst when it comes to containing viral epidemics, the question is, how can we still share group experiences? I’m seeing a lot of interesting things pop up these days, from broadcast concerts (many for free) to heavier use of Discord, video conferencing and webinars, online learning, and so on. If you do find yourself with a lot more time these days, switch off Netflix for a hot second and think: What do you want to learn? What could you teach? Where might you find people who share your interests, and how might you hang out with them if you no longer need to be in the same physical location? I gotta tell you, as an early adopter of internet socialising from about 1995 onwards, there are a LOT of weird and wonderful people out there who are interested in the same things as you! I know that many online spaces can be toxic, but it is always worth seeking out those that are well-moderated. If you did not have to expend your social energy on irritating colleagues, what kinds of people could you find and befriend?

The last point I want to make in this post is to be very, very careful about the media you consume. If it wasn’t clear from everything I’ve said above, I strongly advocate for curating your input in every way you can, ideally by checking in with your emotions and your body whenever you consume anything. I would make this point doubly and triply when it comes to (mainstream / broadcast) media. It’s one thing to spend time listening to your friends share their lived experiences; it’s quite another to give your attention to professional communicators whose motivations for sharing information may not be transparent. This is the age of “fake news”, memes and misinformation: be critical of what you read, pull people up when they spread misinformation, and keep your wits about you. If you feel a compulsion to keep watching the news, consider reflecting on that and deciding whether this habit makes your life better or worse.

In summary, then, here are some aspects of social contact I think about:

• socialising for making meaning: how can you narrate your life now?
• socialising in the form of bodies sharing space: what are your needs for physical contact, and how can you meet them without the risks of group situations?
• socialising as input: how can you give space to your friends’ needs to narrate their lives? How will you curate the input you receive from all forms of media?
• balancing input and output: what do you want to learn? What could you teach? What do you want to create?

In my first two blog posts, I shared mostly recommendations for things I find helpful and useful; this third post has featured more of a mix of stuff I recommend and aspects I’m wary of; the fourth and final post will be entirely about things I think are worth limiting, removing, and otherwise not engaging with at all. See you for that tomorrow!

Back to the overview post.