Zoom, FaceTime, phone chats... I’ve got lockdown social burnout

As someone who spent her teenage afternoons yammering on the phone to her friends, I have felt sad that in our terribly busy, digitally enabled times it’s often difficult to get anyone on the blower at all. Social communication these days is all about text and instant messaging, tap tap tap rather than blah blah blah.

Until now. One consequence of lockdown has been true and fulsome satisfaction of my hankering for more telephonic fat-chewing. Indeed, in zealously guarding against loneliness in lockdown, we may well have gone too far the other way. I know I have. The sheer buzz of being able to finally talk to people

à la 1990s, combined with a terror of going mad “in isolation” has led to an almost compulsive engagement with my handset. And not just me: lots of people are now finding that at the end of a day at home packed with videoconferencing calls, all they want is some peace and quiet.

I, for one, am spending teenage-level amounts of my time in expansive conversations with friends old and new – including trans-Atlantic chums I haven’t spoken to in a year or more. I’ve done breakfast FaceTime with Julie in LA; walk ’n’ talks ( jabbering as you walk) with Melissa in Brooklyn; weekend Houseparty with my family (parents in the US; brother in Israel); and countless regular nightly FaceTime sessions with friends I normally only speak to rarely and briefly. I’d used FaceTime about twice before lockdown. Now I use it three times a day.

Then there’s Zoom – nobody quite understands why we are all Zooming, but we are. Zoom – basically a new version of Skype – has replaced the ordinary phone call and has a brisk, office-like ring to it. It makes you feel energised and proactive to use it, since it requires an invite to “a meeting”. Friends will now send a brief text and suggest a Zoom catch-up and off we go.

But the novelty of Zoom is beginning to wear thin. Do we need to see any more screen grabs of a gallery of strangers on a video call on someone’s social feed? We do not. A tipping point came when a friend in Vancouver told me he and his wife had been invited to a 40th birthday party, with a friend DJ-ing the event from LA, but they couldn’t face “going”.

Like them, the thought of one more attempt to recreate a classic real-world gathering via Zoom made me feel zapped, tired and suddenly confused.

Lockdown should at least be a time when the tyranny of our diaries is relaxed. But no. We seem to be cramming them just as much, if not more, with appointments, meetings, virtual parties and hangouts courtesy of this videoconferencing company few of us had so much as heard of a month ago.

How to escape? After all, in present conditions you know perfectly well that nobody has to be anywhere – at least not physically. Everyone is home, every night, something which has at least been good for my FOMO (fear of missing out). But now everyone is too available and we all know it. As a friend put it: “Has everyone forgotten that before corona one of the greatest joys in life was having people cancel on you so you didn’t feel guilty about not wanting to socialise?” Or as another friend, who recently did a prenatal class by Zoom, said: “It’s as if we have taken the three worst bits of our civilisation – email, webcams and meetings – and fused them.”

One of the weirdest aspects of this Zoom-enabled “business as usual” approach is the continuance of dating. To me it is patently not a time to date. If in the era BC (before corona) it was touch and go whether a potential date would be able to maintain interest or concentration enough to make it to an assignation five days hence, why would you invest time now when the first date could be six months off?

The first physical date, that is. Apparently singles are merrily satisfying themselves with virtual dates. Bumble, the app in which women must message first, claims to have seen an uptick in users since lockdown began, with 80 per cent of its customers keen on video dating. I was vaguely appalled to read last week of a couple who decided to have their first date on FaceTime, each ordering the other a Deliveroo. “Neither of us know what the other has ordered,” tweeted Nina Sawetz. “We both then FaceTime and open them together. We’ll know instantly if we’re right for each other.”

But Nina, surely the only thing worse than being stuck on a bad real first date with someone is being stuck on a bad FaceTime date with them, watching them try to eat a Deliveroo while being charming to camera at the same time.

It’s great that we are rejuvenating friendships and keeping our hope in romance alive, but to prevent lockdown burnout, we need to row it back a bit and relax. Our friends won’t vanish if we don’t talk to them every day – and there will still be proper dating on the other side of this.

In guarding against loneliness, I have gone too far the other way