Will we ever socialize again?
The pandemic has shrunk our social circles, and many of our routine interactions are probably never coming back.
The number of people with whom I actually socialize in person is rapidly dwindling. And as I sit in my computer chair looking out at full-fledged snowfall in October, I realize that list is only going to get smaller over these long winter months.
In recent years, I have occasionally wondered how long it would take before our society becomes almost entirely virtual. With each passing year, we seem to eliminate more opportunities for human interaction. The coronavirus pandemic has obviously accelerated this dystopian trend. We no longer even shop for our own groceries.
With that in mind, I think I can stop wondering about what it would be like to live in a virtual world. We’re here. And you have to wonder just how much in-person socialization we’ll actually even want to get back.
As somebody who’s worked from home for most of his life — even during pre-Covid times — my gym trips were often my sole source of socialization for the day. I would walk around between sets, make small talk with acquaintances, and maybe even check out that guy from Grindr. If I went to the gym in the late-morning, sometimes I would go over to the cafe next door for a sandwich. The manager gave me free cookies. He was nice.
But now, I have no desire to return to the gym, even when our big and beautiful vaccine gets developed. Peloton workouts are fine for me, and actually more effective — never mind more efficient. I’m putting in a hard 30 minutes rather than languishing on the gym floor, alternating between half-hearted bicep curls and mindless scrolls through Twitter.
Also, the Peloton app is like $15 per month. See you later, BSC.
A skyrocketing number of people will never return to their office buildings, that’s for sure. This week, LogMeIn became the latest Boston company to announce it will lease much less office space going forward. Once the pandemic is over, chief executive Bill Wagner says he only expects five percent of employees to return to the office five days per week. According to Wagner, fewer than 10 percent of employees say they want to return to the five-day-per-week office grind.
Those results are not unique to LogMeIn. Most people prefer working from home. A survey taken in May found 57 percent of workers would prefer full-time remote work. And that was in the early days of the pandemic, when wearing sweatpants all day still seemed a little weird.
That’s understandable, of course. Boston has the worst traffic in the country. Drivers in Boston lost 149 hours last year due to traffic congestion.
Nationwide, Americans on average lose 99 hours per year due to traffic. That number is certainly poised to decline in 2020.
There are many reasons why a work-from-home society would be disastrous for our empathy gap, never mind economy. I’ve written about that before. But the social impacts would be catastrophic as well. There will be no more spontaneous post-work drinks, lunchtime walks with your work wife, and coffee with the new guy. Sometimes, these interactions are tedious and forced. But once in a while, you meet a new friend, or at the least, form some sort of bond with another human being beyond “reacting” to their Slack messages.
All of those chance interactions get eliminated when we work from home. And the truth is, we don’t think they’re worth losing 149 hours of our lives sitting in traffic to reclaim.
Right now, it is a luxury to work from home. Anybody who can earn a living pecking away at their laptop should feel blessed — monotony be damned. But one day, we will get past this pandemic. And there likely won’t be much appetite for bringing our old lives back. (For starters, it is far cheaper for companies to be mostly remote and downgrade their office space, so you know WFH is here to stay.)
That’s not to say there won’t be some yearning for in-person contact. Hell, I eat inside of restaurants now, despite evidence they’re probably not the safest places to be. White people will do reckless things for brunch.
People — or at least gays — will still want to go to bars and nightclubs. I will still want to play in my flag football league. The hermit existence will not be indefinite.
But every social interaction that isn’t purely pleasure — going to the gym, eating lunch with your kind of boring co-worker — will be phased out if there isn’t an overwhelming demand for them to return. And why would there be? Life is more convenient this way.
But convenience comes at the expense of thinning out our social circles. Over the last nine months, I have realized how many of my social interactions were entirely fleeting. Many of them are probably never coming back.
But as long as these fleeting connections post on Instagram, then we’re all caught up. Who wants to leave home when you don’t have to?