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Lost Normal

I was thinking about the waning days of 2020 recently and how everyone talked about they were waiting for the year to be over as if 2021 was imbued with some magic that would right the wrongs of the past year. The slew of virtual happy hours got tiring after a while and I found ways to avoid most of them. Skills can be forgotten at any age if unused for long enough. I believe such is the case with in-person conversations and mingling in a party. The later does not come very easy to many and when we have the choice of sitting it out in our home office with limited ability to get on the video because too many people are already on there, the skill only erodes further. The NYT carried a whole story on the topic of social awkwardness being a side effect of the pandemic.

Psychologists and neuroscientists say something similar is happening to all of us now, thanks to the pandemic. We are subtly but inexorably losing our facility and agility in social situations — whether we are aware of it or not. The signs are everywhere: people oversharing on Zoom, overreacting to or misconstruing one another’s behavior, longing for but then not really enjoying contact with others.

I am definitely not enjoying is made up social situation to simulate what has disappeared from the real world. The longer it takes to return to normal, the harder it would be to do these pretend things even if they all well-intentioned. As the NYT author says:

People inevitably change over time and certainly after something significant, like a pandemic, upends their lives and shakes their confidence in what they thought they knew. Values shift. Personalities alter. None of us are the same 

The online happy hours and coffee on Zoom continue unabated as I write this. I am struggling to embrace this change and not become reclusive. The small group settings are a bit easier on my nerves. Seeing the screen spilt a dozen ways into that may many lives on video is over-whelming for me. The more creative among us are finding ways to break ice online, trivia games and fun facts are the order of the day. Somehow jokes are way harder to land in this format and most of us miss by a mile, And we have to smile and laugh on cue so we don't suck the air out of our gathering. 

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