Don’t become a ‘Zoombie’ during the virus pandemic

In the 2013 film “World War Z,” Brad Pitt travels the world derailing a zombie pandemic. It features the prototypical zombies, with one striking change: they move fast instead of slow. Like the standard zombies, they are not very happy with their lot, walk around aimlessly and infect people with their disease.

Sound familiar?

We shoot off brief texts and emails that encourage others to also stop taking in the beauty of life and instead spend most of their waking hours looking down at a screen.

The video conferencing program Zoom has been widely used for work and social meetings during the coronavirus pandemic. Yet anything, taken to its extreme, becomes dysfunctional and unhealthy.

You may feel like you have become a “Zoombie,” a term that emerged after my wife spent eight hours in Zoom meetings a few days ago.

We find any excuse to use Zoom during the quarantine. The problem with spending inordinate hours on Zoom every day is that we’re staring at our screens even more than before the pandemic.

Let’s consider what such behavior produced before the lockdown: According to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation study, children from families of higher socioeconomic status consume 10 hours of electronic media per day, while children of lower socioeconomic status rack up 11½ hours per day.

What are children missing when they spend so much time on their devices? For one, vital time to connect with their parents. According to a study from The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, teenagers who participate in fewer than three family dinners each week are four times more likely to use drugs or smoke tobacco and over twice as likely to drink alcohol.

These findings are ominous, as they suggest that technology-mediated addictions, which naturally decrease face-toface time with family, can subsequently lead to substance addictions.

“Yes, but our world is becoming more and more digitally mediated,” you may be thinking. “At this point, what can I do about it? Zoom is the platform my personal and professional contacts use to interact, especially during this quarantine.” You have a point. Here are a few strategies you can try out to get the best from Zoom without becoming a fast-moving Zoombie.

Your colleagues may be apprehensive about making this suggestion themselves. However, they will appreciate you being the first to share this idea and preventing them also from becoming Zoombies.

Every Zoom invite has a call-in number. So you are not sitting in front of your computer, call from your phone. Then you can walk around your home and do other things while you participate in the conversation. This, we should recall, is the reason the videophone never caught on a few decades ago — along with not wanting the person on the other end of the line to see what you’re (not?) wearing.

Ask yourself some tough questions about your values with respect to the amount of screen time that is healthy for you each day. Agree to join Zoom meetings by video or audio that enable you to strike this balance. And the other Zoom meetings? Just. Don’t. Do. It. Instead, internalize the expression, “Always put off until tomorrow what you shouldn’t be doing at all.”

In short, use Zoom when there is no reasonable alternative and it’s highly useful for you. Your values surrounding how you will integrate technology into your life will guide you. And never forget: saying no to a Zoom meeting always equates to saying yes to something else.