It’s been almost half a year since humanity has been dealing with the biggest battle post-World War II. Yes, it’s obviously no physics numerical, and I am in fact talking about the deadly, the very contagious, COVID- 19.
With the spread of this virus, we seem to have imbibed within ourselves certain terminologies pertaining specifically to the COVID- 19 virus. Words and phrases like isolation, quarantine, social distancing, became the talk of the town, and were on the tip of everybody’s tongue, irrespective of their mother tongue!
What struck me was how casually the entire world was using the term ‘social distancing’ instead of ‘physical distancing’. This was particularly striking for me as I had been noticing the gradual social distancing of people since my growing up years.
Oddly enough, I have seen families sitting in their living rooms, amidst an eerie silence, and every one’s eyes are somehow glued onto their phone screen, with no interaction with each other whatsoever. Let’s face it, we have all been guilty of being in such situations. So yes, we have unknowingly been practising social distancing due to our dedication towards our phone screens. But, now is the time to use this very technology to strengthen relations and therefore, by keeping in touch with our friends and family.
The largest community gathering that I am seeing off late are on Zoom and Webinar, mostly for academic purposes. These community gatherings can also be found on Instagram Live and Facebook Live, and used for multiple things, starting from education to entertainment.
In today’s day and age, when most people rather ‘meet’ each other online than in person, or if they do in fact meet in person, there’s that awkwardness that usually disrupts the smooth flow of conversation they otherwise had online, why are we fixating on having social distancing when in fact we should be focusing on physically distancing ourselves so as to avoid coming in contact with the virus?
It was much late that the World Health Organisation intervened in the matter and decided to trade ‘social distancing’ with ‘physical distancing’.
Much to my relief, they accepted that asking people to practise social distancing was inadvertently giving out the wrong message. Due to this, people decided on disconnecting with their friends and family, when, in fact, what we should all be practising is ‘physical distancing’ so that we do not push ourselves to the extent of suffering from anxiety, depression or other forms of mental ailments.
It is especially during these grim times that we need to be in touch with our loved ones so as to maintain our sanity when almost nothing worthy seems to be taking place in the world.
When the pandemic struck, a lot of people were quite excited at the prospects of working from home. That’s what they had always wanted, right? An extended ‘holiday’ and never having to wake up early on a Monday morning and that’s exactly what they got; at a very high cost though.
Eventually, we saw that Apple, Facebook, Alphabet (Google) asked their employees to work from home till the end of 2020 but Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey soon after gave the option of working from home- FOREVER to all his employees!
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, however, had a different concern contrary to the popular opinion prevailing in San Francisco. He believes that permanent work from home could prove to be disastrous for the mental health of the employees. In an interview with NYT, Nadella was quoted to be saying that all-remote setup would be “replacing one dogma with another dogma.”
Public health experts feel that in these turbulent times, as humans we need to be emotionally and socially connected with other fellow beings. Technology can prove to be a boon in such an arduous situation and with the help of umpteen video conferencing apps, we can try and virtually bridge that distance between one another. That being said, we cannot quash the worth of human touch, a handshake or a hug and no form of technology can fill the void of human intimacy which have been AWOL recently.
COVID- 19 has truly shown the irrelevance of our existence in front of the larger plans of the universe. What we can do is flock together (virtually) and try to fight this pandemic by physically distancing ourselves but socially being very much connected to one another.