I wrote a piece for Real Life this week about how the pandemic has pushed us deeper into the digitally-mediated world that we already inhabited beforehand, and how losing access to shared physical space accelerates that process while revealing the painful limitations of online-first existence. In the essay, I argue that physical space is a necessary complement to the internet: The latter is at its best when interwoven with the former, rather than existing independently of it. With every week that passes, we gain appreciation for the mundane rituals of embodied existence that we rarely noticed before they became forbidden, like hugging a friend or being in a crowd, but it’s possible we’re also idealizing a mode of existence from which we’d drifted away long before coronavirus put it entirely on hold. Spending six weeks at home has been surprisingly easy because a robust infrastructure was already in place to support remote work as well as the
#124: The Way We Never Were
#124: The Way We Never Were
#124: The Way We Never Were
I wrote a piece for Real Life this week about how the pandemic has pushed us deeper into the digitally-mediated world that we already inhabited beforehand, and how losing access to shared physical space accelerates that process while revealing the painful limitations of online-first existence. In the essay, I argue that physical space is a necessary complement to the internet: The latter is at its best when interwoven with the former, rather than existing independently of it. With every week that passes, we gain appreciation for the mundane rituals of embodied existence that we rarely noticed before they became forbidden, like hugging a friend or being in a crowd, but it’s possible we’re also idealizing a mode of existence from which we’d drifted away long before coronavirus put it entirely on hold. Spending six weeks at home has been surprisingly easy because a robust infrastructure was already in place to support remote work as well as the