This Week in Viewpoints continues the trend of looking at the effects of the pandemic on the American population, especially the college-aged population.
Hopefully there will come a time, although probably like after I am no longer your Viewpoints editor, that the COVID-19 pandemic will be a distant memory, but for right now it is the work of journalists to be reporting on how the disease, and subsequent lockdowns, have decimated the economy and sapped our collective spirit—after all, it’s not the morning news is someone didn’t get shot overnight on the corner of Crump Boulevard and South 4th Street is it?
Some of you might have been playing a lot of video games since the pandemic started. I know I have, but perhaps you’ve wondered what it would be like to be a recovering video-game-aholic suddenly forced to leave your job and spend hours locked away in your home with the siren song of the vidya calling your name. The good folks at Wired UK have your morbid curiosity covered there in an article from Feb. 22 ominously titled “They had a gaming addiction. Then the pandemic happened.”
Matt Reynolds goes on to chronicle the sordid details of the lives of several lapsed video game addicts. Most startling to me was the story of “Joe,” a 35-year-old former gamer who runs a vegetarian food stall. After having his stall closed due to the pandemic:
At home, worrying about the future of his business, Joe’s mind drifted towards video games. He downloaded Steam, opened up Medieval II: Total War and got as far as the loading screen. At each step he told himself that – as long as he didn’t start playing – he hadn’t relapsed.
“I was powerless over that,” says Joe, who is 35. “I ended up relapsing for two weeks.” Within two days he was playing video games almost constantly, pausing only to sleep for a few hours each day. He stopped eating proper meals and washed only once every three or four days. On phone calls to his girlfriend he would lie about how much he was gaming and try and hurry the conversation along, telling her he was about to go to sleep when he really was playing games until six or seven in the morning. Although he’d been in recovery from drug addiction since he was 31, he stopped attending his Narcotics Anonymous meetings altogether to spend more time bingeing on video games.
But it all turned up happy for Joe, who reconciled with his gaming addiction over New Years’.
If not for his relapse, next month would have marked three years since Joe last played a video game, but he doesn’t see this as a failure in his recovery. “That doesn’t matter. I’d rather be more steadfast in my recovery than have three years of a lesser recovery,” he says. “I think I’m stronger now than I was previously.” It’s also helped him reflect on why he felt a compulsion to play video games in the first place. “The reason I used it was fear. Fear of this, fear of that. Fear of not being enough, fear of what other people would think.”
Stories like Joe’s just serve to remind us that the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns aren’t consequence-free for healthy people, and threats to a person’s mental and physical health can even be exacerbated by long lockdowns, even from unlikely sources like video games. If you or someone you know has a gaming addiction, this had to have been a rough year—but as the Wired story illustrates, there are people out there ready to help.
Not all of us struggle with video game addiction, however, but nearly all of us do struggle with something else: letting technology, namely our phones, dictate the course of our day.
Srinivas Rao writes on how screen-use, first thing in the morning, is seriously impeding our productivity and quality of life.
If you woke up in the morning, smoked a cigarette, ate 2 donuts, and washed it down with 2 cups of coffee, it wouldn’t be surprising that your physical performance is subpar. You’re probably not going to go out and run 2 miles or win a prize fight after that kind of breakfast.
But when it comes to our brain, we’re not nearly as mindful about the idea that we should treat the information we consume like the food we eat.
If we start our days by checking email, instagram, or the internet, we keep reinforcing the behavior of distraction until it becomes our new habit. Some of the smartest behavioral scientist and designers in the world have worked really hard to make sure that their products are addictive, habit forming, and only provide you with a temporary sense of fulfillment so the you are always jonesing for your next fix. As Mark Manson so brilliantly said, cell phones are the new cigarettes, And a significant amount of what’s on the internet is nothing more than junk food for the brain.
By contrast, they recommend “healthy” food for your brain, extending the dietary analogy:
If you woke up in the morning and had a really healthy breakfast, that revitalized and energized you, you’d likely hit the gym or a morning run expecting to be at your peak. The same goes for our brains.
When we start the day with health food for the brain, instead of a self imposed handicap, we give ourselves a massive competitive advantage.
They recommend some “healthy” options for daily productivity and mindfulness being replacing the Internet with paper books and the practice of meditation and journaling. Just for a lark, I started sleeping with my phone plugged in across the room, and I noticed an almost immediate difference. You can read the whole article here.
Finally, Rich Haridy at New Atlas writes about a recent Stanford study on the problem of “Zoom fatigue.”
A new study from Stanford University communications expert Jeremy Bailenson is investigating the very modern phenomenon of “Zoom Fatigue.” Bailenson suggests there are four key factors that make videoconferencing so uniquely tiring, and he recommends some simple solutions to reduce exhaustion.
The study examined the phenomenon we have all experienced of being inexplicably tired after a full day of Zooming for work or school:
People were reporting a unique kind of exhaustion at the end of whole days of videoconferencing, which seemed counter-intuitive. After all, we could spend our entire day in the comfort of our own home instead of trekking around town from meeting to meeting. Why were we seemingly more exhausted after six or eight hours of videoconferencing compared to a regular long day of in-person interactions?
Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University, was not surprised. He had spent more than two decades studying the ways virtual communication affects individuals, and he quickly penned an editorial suggesting the unique fatigue that accompanies a day of videoconferencing could be due to a kind of non-verbal-cue overload that occurs when one substitutes virtual platforms for in-person interactions.
The article discusses some ways to mitigate Zoom fatigue, and examines the broader cultural milieu of the video conference:
Twenty-five years ago author David Foster Wallace’s epic novel Infinite Jest presented a stark picture of a future world. Among the novel’s many prescient observations, Wallace imagined a world where videophones were only popular for about a year.
Wallace suggested people would quickly revert back to audio-only communication once the novelty of video-calls had worn off. He figured one of the strengths of audio-only communication was how it enabled people to enter a fugue-like state where they wandered around doing other minor tasks while talking.
“A traditional aural-only conversation […] let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exaggerated-facial-expression type of conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet – and this was the retrospectively marvelous part – even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end’s attention might be similarly divided,” Wallace imagined back in 1996.
Bailenson points out a growing body of research is finding movement can improve cognitive performance. One recent study, for example, found walking on a treadmill can enhance creative divergent thinking compared to sitting.
Even in conventional face-to-face meetings people tend to move about the room, stand while presenting information, or pace around while thinking of new ideas. Zoom meetings, of course, can remove all of these locomotive factors and in some cases this can lead to less efficient meeting outcomes.
Here Bailenson suggests the medium a meeting is conducted in should be closely considered. Does every meeting need to be via Zoom? Is there a benefit to certain interactions moving back to audio-only platforms?
For meetings that need to take place on Zoom, Bailenson recommends creating more distance between oneself and the camera. This can be achieved through the use of an external camera, separate from a computer, generating personal distance that allows for one to move about a room.
Read the article in full here, and in this twilight of the COVID pandemic, revel (cautiously of course) in some of the social evils you might have narrowly avoided this COVIDtide.
Image Credit / DeBuren.eu
