Wean yourself off Zoom before you forget what it means to be human

Avery curious sensation has been hitting me in the past few months. I have been describing it to friends as existential nausea. By that I mean a weary revulsion at the very idea of this or that. This nausea has a few triggers, most of them related to lockdown-induced monotony. Sometimes even the idea of Hampstead Heath makes me feel queasy, I’ve seen it so much the past year. But there is nothing that has come to elicit a greater repugnance than Zoom.

Zoom, I have become firmly convinced, is not only not a substitute for life, it has become a drag on it. It has usurped everything, distorting and downgrading our expectations of reality. Don’t get me wrong – a year ago it was a lifesaver, enabling human contact and parts of the workforce to continue when getting within a mile of anyone was both truly risky and not allowed. But as vaccination rates have soared, Zoom’s charm has fallen off a cliff. Even Zoom’s founder, Eric Yuan, has admitted to Zoom fatigue. Speaking – virtually – to the Wall Street Journal CEO Council summit last week he recalled a day last year when he had 19 Zoom meetings back to back. “I’m so tired of that… I do have meeting fatigue.” Yuan is now calling Zoom’s employees back into the office two days a week (which still seems rather little).

Other employers are also calling time on the purgatory of the endless home video conferencing call – not out of pity, but because miserable humans behind screens aren’t actually as creative or productive. Jamie Dimon, the chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, the investment bank, said at the same event that remote work was bad for the generation of new ideas, bad for keeping any kind of coherent company culture, and bad for competing for clients. “I’m about to cancel all my Zoom meetings,” he added. “I’m done with it.”

So are most of us, deep down. But now that we’ve been fed the Zoom diet for more than a year, we’re stuck. Real life is harder to arrange, somehow. It is more expensive. It includes coffees, travel expenses, and worst of all, time, including the time spent getting from meeting to meeting. Thus even with the whole workforce nearly vaccinated and mass testing finally achieved, Zoom groundhog day remains. I worry it’s too late and that we have sleepwalked into accepting the barest substitute – a face on a screen – instead of the less convenient real deal.

It’s reassuring that the odd banker and entrepreneur like Yuan and Dimon are calling time on the Zoom life, because public institutions like universities are most certainly not. Partly out of an overabundance of caution, partly because they’ve invested in tools like Microsoft Teams to enable remote teaching and meeting, and partly because it’s just easier to stay at home, higher education establishments seem curiously reluctant to return to the pleasures of the in-person, both for students and staff.

At the university where I am currently based for a research fellowship, I had very much been hoping that the departmental seminar, at the very least, would resume in person in the autumn.

But it has already been decided to keep all history faculty talks, seminars and meetings online even then. Since I began in November I’ve barely met anyone – campus has been deserted. And now, with everything remaining on a medium that I have pulled back from because the thought of it makes me feel ill, I worry I’ll never get to know my colleagues. What made academia so alluring to me nearly a decade ago, when I was drawn back to pursue it, was the way people gathered in rooms, listened, and then – always over wine – asked questions and talked, then went for more drinks and dinner.

In the years before Covid, when I was at Cambridge and then Sussex, I forged an extraordinary number of strong, intellectually stimulating relationships with fellow scholars and professors of all stripes. It was easy, because there were so many workshops, lectures and seminars, and it was the norm to turn up – physically. I took countless slow and faulty trains through East Croydon and Brighton to get to Sussex during my PhD – hours each way – and never regretted it.

Zoom was a short-term solution to an unprecedented problem. We must not be lulled by custom and ease into thinking it’s a long-term solution. For it is anything but. With many of us left with little choice but to keep our working lives entirely online, even now, we are losing sight of what it is to be human. I can barely remember what it’s like to go for a drink with colleagues in a spontaneous fashion – not least because it’s hard to imagine ever wandering into a pub, without booking weeks in advance, again. We must wean ourselves off Zoom before our horizon of joy, not to mention our horizon of ideas, has shrunk beyond all recognition.

Miserable humans behind screens aren’t as creative or productive