We live in a time out of touch. Or, one might say, starved for hugs, skin, and the warmth of bodies like ours. Many lack the physical contact that makes us whole — cared for and cared about.
How did we get here? How do we rediscover the priceless physical antidote to the growing separateness of the world into which we were born?
The digital world created the miracle of Zoom. It gave with one hand and robbed with the other. You cannot embrace the digitized image of a friend, nor will relationships grow as they did when face-to-face acquaintance was the one method of coming to know people.
Your grandparents played table games within a foot or two of each other. They attended concerts and sporting events alongside companions who lived down the block. It was polite to pick up a pencil the other dropped.
Zoom acquaintances who live 80 or 800 miles away cannot be your football or soccer teammates. They will not build up a sweat, nor will you feel the slickness of their arms on a hot day.
Does the beautiful woman in your online class use perfume? You cannot inhale it.
No matter how bold you are, reaching for her hand will result only in bruised fingers and damage to the computer hardware.
Walk a metropolitan street, and what do you find? Heads looking down at cell phones. Some of them wear earbuds or headphones and listen to music. The implication is no different than a sign emblazoned with the phrase:
I’M NOT INTERESTED, STAY AWAY!
Eyes do not meet. Smiles have become rarer. You might pass a potential buddy or the love of your life but lack the ease of opportunity to make them so. No one will inform you of who you missed or the joy of time spent with a confidant or soul mate.
This push toward isolation increased with the arrival of desktop computers and portable telephones. Do we control them, or have they captured us? Before their creation, physical presence was essential.
The summer mornings of my youth featured walking into the alley behind my home and entering a friend’s backyard. “Yo, Kenny,” one or another of us called out. Or Johnny or Jerry or Steve. If this failed, you knocked on the back door of their residence.
Though stationary phones existed, they were the domain and property of adults. In some residences, the expense of use made them prohibitive.
Soon, the group assembled in the alley to play ball. I knew these kids by how they hit and caught, but more than that, other qualities made an impression.
I listened to their words and met brothers and sisters, moms and dads. We all discovered which of our buddies swore and encountered their manner of dealing with victory or defeat. Camaraderie and occasional conflict continued after the game. There were bumps, bruises, and unavoidable bodies if we played touch football.
The school was a prominent meeting place. Houses of worship remain today, and some broadcast their services. No one seems to recognize the irony of watching sermons about loving your neighbor alone in your home.
In the metropolitan past, you saw more than a few people walking along in the neighborhood and standing at the bus stop. Not every family owned a car. Local grocery and drug stores took a few minutes to reach on foot. You came to know other shoppers and those who owned or ran the stores.
Making a date was a matter of talking to the girl before class started, in the hallway, or finding the nerve to call her. There was no getting around direct communication unless a buddy fixed you up with a young lady.
The world moves faster now and has become more impersonal. Distant suburbs sped up their growth after the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act funded superhighway construction.
We live farther apart and require motorized transport. The distance results in greater time spent moving through ever-enlarging and far-flung communities, mindful of what the watch and phone tell us about the need to rush.
Human connections fray like the strands of a rope, strained and coming apart. Strangers proliferate because they aren’t remade into friends. Without names, the outsider is suspect. Like an unrequested weed on a lawn, he is lucky not to be sprayed with weed killer.
Portable, in-window home air conditioners only reached the market in the 1950s and moved us inside. Conversation on the street diminished.
On a hot day before that time, you sat on the stoop of your building and got to know someone while you both beat the heat trapped indoors. Steamy evening weather found considerable numbers retreating to public parks where one could sleep on top of a blanket.
The up-close knowledge of the peopled Earth declined with the convenience of communication via digital devices. One can praise the speed of email or text messages while decrying the loss of someone whose hand you can shake or hold and whose tears are in reach of being wiped away rather than wishing it were possible.
Computer-enabled acquaintances in other countries include people you might never meet. On one occasion, I met a kind and thoughtful blogger who lived across the Atlantic. I’d become acquainted with her online. She gave me an enormous embrace.
Had I the need to wait years for such tenderness in my daily life, I would have been at a loss, craving the affection of an isolated incident. Yet many live with this absence every day.
The downside of digital communication convenience includes its provision of ways to escape the social discomfort it has fueled. If you are ill at ease in close-up situations, encountering eye contact, not knowing what to say, and embarrassed by what you wear, the text or email seduces you with an avoidant alternative at your fingertips.
Escape is easy, but the only companions left are on a screen full of pixels, like a meal seen in a magazine photo while you are starving.
The message still gets through, but the electronic medium defeats learning how to manage the genuine thing — the beating heart of another individual walking on two visible legs who might judge and reject you or come to love you. Without practice, free-flowing interplay and fear of awkwardness make a trip out the door challenging.
At the extreme of unrelieved social anxiety, the digital world’s minimization of discomfort creates an imprisoned, static experience without the richness and reward of in-person relationships that work.
The Pandemic reduced socialization for almost all of us, not to mention forcing the terror of illness and loss of life upon us. For those with well-developed people skills and family connections, previously acquired talents made “social distancing” survivable.
One waited to regain customary human engagement when the doctors gave us the “all clear.” But their signal didn’t heal the communal injury of a society of humans seen as obstacles rather than future friends.
Why? Because of hesitation, uncertainty, and self-doubt combined with a handy method of avoidance held in a universe of hands.
In addition, the closure or reduced use of offices meant more time at home. The absence of working with others in a place of business, encountering new employees and customers, and facing up to the boss — literally — got the world out of the habit of learning personal diplomacy, adapting to undesirable conditions, using humor, and much more.
Some have lost the ease of being with others unmediated by electronics and have yet to retrieve any intimacy in the community of the living.
The most troubling residue and unintended consequence of all these changes falls upon those who are young and who have never found out how to engage successfully without a computer in their pocket. The need to acquire such talents diminished. Building interactional skills wasn’t required. Instead, the new circumstances were like having a chauffeur from an early age and never learning to drive.
Pets are also huggable, of course, and dogs, for example, provide comfort and their form of love with licking and body-to-body warmth. They are lovely companions but are not our species and do not speak.
At some point, as people grow up, more than a few realize they are not yet who they wish to become. Were you surrounded by a puddle preventing passage into a better, braver self, a hop, step, and jump through the water would push its necessity upon you.
Today, however, we have alternatives. Why suffer someone’s nearby, mocking laughter as they say, “You’re all wet,” if you can dodge troublesome interactions indoors using the computer or the phone?
Of course, if water surrounds you, you could pray for a drought. Considering that billions live under the sun, it is best not to wait for them to stay indoors.
In a courageous moment, you can take on what you’ve forgotten how to do or what you never learned. What would happen? You might discover that some of us will welcome your presence.
Therapists who treat social anxiety are available, too. Empirically supported research indicates that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is the “gold standard in the psychotherapeutic treatment” of anxiety disorders.
Entering the counselor’s brick-and-mortar office often provides benefits faster than Zoom, but if in-person treatment is a step too far, they will be there for you on the video display.
Lift your head. Not all pedestrians will look away. One of the most wonderful things you can do in a lonely moment is to show your kind interest and, like a flower, watch strangers bloom.
No phones or earbuds allowed.
Begin.
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The top two paintings are the work of Edward Hopper. The first is Automat, and the second is a Hotel Room. These are followed by two works by Gustav Klimt. They are Park at Kammer Castle and Forester’s House in Weissenbach II (Garden). Thereafter comes, once again, the achievement of Edward Hopper: New York Movie. To finish the gallery is The Fountain of Love by Jean-Honore Fragonard.
The Hopper paintings come from Edward Hopper.net, while the two of Klimt were sourced from Neue Galerie, New York. The Fragonard painting was found on Wikiart.org/
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