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Watching the World Through a Computer Screen Is Agonizing
Here’s how I’ve learned to cope — and even find joy — while working remotely for the past year
The world is scary, and it looks scarier when you’re isolated at home. I realized this about a year and a half before many of my colleagues in New York and San Francisco began working from their kitchens in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
When you’re working at home, alone — as I started doing in November 2018 — your computer screen becomes your window to the world, and the view it provides is distorted. Though it allows you to clearly see a disaster from every possible angle, it is missing the texture of daily life. You no longer know when your co-workers are taking a break to make a cup of tea or that they’ve decided to wear pink today. You don’t need to move aside for someone to board the subway or acknowledge an acquaintance when they step into the same elevator. And though it’s hard to notice the impact of all these unremarkable interactions until they disappear, they serve as useful reminders that, even during a real crisis, a good deal still lies outside the internet’s kaleidoscope of doom.
As health officials told Americans to “hunker down” and workers at Amazon, Google, and countless other companies were sent home last week, the internet flooded with tips for staying and working from home efficiently — things like putting pants on every day and resisting the siren call of your snack drawer.
Having spent a good deal of time working remotely, I don’t think this is the isolation advice you actually need. As the coronavirus shuts down entire pillars of our economy, like the service sector, those of us with a job that we can do at home are lucky. We’ll figure out how to get it done at a different desk. A bigger challenge, at least for me, has been keeping my perspective separate from the one readily available on my computer screen, reminding myself that no matter how large the world’s problems, life is never completely consumed by them.
The best solution, if I’m being completely honest, is to get a dog. You’ll be forced outside in an appropriately distant way at least a handful of times each day and grounded by a buddy who just wants to be fed and…
