What I’m sure of: I miss my friends. I haven’t seen them for more than a walk through the park in months. I want to catch up with them, grab food, watch movies, and just exist amongst the people I enjoy most.
What else I’m sure of: I don’t want to do a “virtual hangout”. I don’t want to play online games for an hour, I don’t want to have a glass of wine with my laptop and the reflection of their faces. I simply want nothing less.
So how can these two truths co-exist? If I want social interaction, I should also want to do these equivalent social activities with them, right? I mean it’s the same thing, isn’t it? I can see all their faces, hear all their voices. We can share stories and laughs.
But it doesn’t feel that way. It’s not the same. It’s so not the same that I’d rather do nothing at all than see them through a screen. And I’ve been struggling with the guilt of this truth for months now.
Option 1: I don’t actually like my friends that much. Maybe I just don’t enjoy their company as much as I thought I did. Maybe I don’t care to catch up with them. 2020 is the year of realizing things, after all.
Option 2: I’m doing it wrong. It being the maintenance and growth of human relationships via the internet. I mean, my generation grew up on tumblr, most of us had Internet Friends at some point. Perhaps it’s about time we learn to cultivate authentic and meaningful relationships virtually.
Option 3: Zoom call hangouts truly just suck. They’re deceptively the same as being the same room with your friends, but they’re just subtly different enough that it’s hard to figure out why we don’t experience the same benefits. In an effort to justify my guilt, I’ve compiled the following list of differences:
- Lack of preparation and commitment: Visiting a friend always takes a degree of planning and sacrifice. Whether it’s getting dressed and groomed, transportation, food preparation, cost of dining or activities. It takes a little something to get to the fun of an experience, and that makes the experience feel real, dynamic, and memorable.
- Just being in public: I think there’s something to be said about the way we all feel when we’re surrounded by strangers. Maybe it’s main character syndrome; or just feeling like we’re part of a collective that is somehow both so integrated yet so independent. Maybe it’s hoping that someone will think your shoes are cool, or even just knowing that you and the 10 other people waiting on the subway platform have at least one thing in common. It makes us feel like we’re a little more than an isolated being.
- Reflections: It’s been 10 months of serial self-analysis on video calls. Maybe some of us have the discipline to make other callers the bigger part of a video call screen, but I gather that’s a small minority. At this point, I can tell exactly when someone’s eyes dart to their own tile on the screen to check on how they look. The good thing is, I bet we’re all just looking at ourselves so it doesn’t matter anyway. In any case, talking to friends but looking at ourselves makes them a background character in a scenario where they’d otherwise be a focus and source of joy.
- Eye contact: Something that makes us all feel heard and valued. Something that can communicate so much through so little. My prediction is that we’re all going to need to re-learn this skill when we begin to see each other again.
- Side conversations: The absolute best part of most nights with friends is breaking out into jokes and stories that take the conversation into a whole new direction. And doing so in a way where it’s optional for some to join while others stick to different ramblings around the room. It’s where we learn what our individual relationships are with different people. We follow up on personal experiences and shared interests. When group calls force one single stream of conversation, it can so quickly kill a room full of otherwise bustling conversations and relations.
I hope that the third option is the reason why I don’t want to virtually hang out with any of my friends. And I hope that if you’ve been feeling the same guilt as I have over the past few months, this serves as something of a reassurance that you aren’t a bad friend or a lousy conversationalist — you probably just yearn for social interaction in a different way, and that’s okay.
