So this is the first time that I’ve ever referred to an ongoing current events situation, but of course, right now this whole virus pandemic has gripped the attention of everyone, it seems.
And although, in some sense, I can think well, there are other things to be concerned about, I can understand why everybody is so focused on this.
And one interesting thing that comes out of it is that we are being instructed by the public health authorities that one of the effective ways of helping to mitigate the situation and make everything better, slow the spread, make everything more manageable, is to maintain “social distancing”.
Now when I first heard this term, it really seemed like this is some kind of a, you know, observation about how we’re so isolated from each other.
This is the kind of thing that, until the time of this outbreak, this idea of social distancing would be seen as some kind of a sociological problem.
It would be investigated as, you know, “Oh, these poor people these days.
They’re so isolated from each other.
Everybody is so lonely and cut off from others.” Social distancing sounds like it’s some kind of a regrettable trend in society.
And yet now this term social distancing is now something good.
This is something that we should be doing.
It’s a really strange situation to be in, where we are being asked to accelerate this social condition.
In order to reduce the problem of a physiological disease, we are asked to – I assume, imagine, temporarily – advance this social and psychological disease, you might say, of simply reducing human contact.
This seems to be one of the biggest problems with our modern world, especially in the recent years of advanced communication technology, which sounds like it would make us more connected, and yet it’s making us more isolated by being able to get everything we need without actually interacting with humans.
Now, more than any time before it really is possible to live your life without any contact with humans.
Now that I see at the grocery stores with the automatic checkout, or of course, ordering food online, and being able to order anything you want through some kind of online shopping service, you really can, if you were to choose for some reason, live entirely without ever communicating with another human.
You could simply assign your deliveries, you could order your deliveries, you could get everything you need through electronic communication, and then you could simply avoid all human contact.
And it seems like, for some people, it does seem like maybe this would be a good thing.
Maybe this would be a welcome change.
And part of me can kind of appreciate that, because, you know, human interaction is always so messy, and, you know, it’s convenient to just be able to type in a command of what you want and then have it done without having to deal with social niceties, and, you know, “How are you doing?”, and, you know, personal feelings.
And it seems like it’s highly convenient to be able to get everything we want without any social connection.
And yet, something seems to be so wrong about this.
There’s something that just seems like it’s taking us in a direction that leads away from living genuine life.
If we are completely cut off from other people, having actual human, real-life interactions, somehow it seems like we can’t be fully human.
And I’m not sure how to analyze it logically.
I’m not sure exactly logically why we can’t live without it, but somehow it seems like we can’t.
So I’d be curious to hear what you think about this social interaction and this new trend of social distancing.
#socialdistancing #isolation #humanconnection