Finding Connection in a Socially Distanced World

Shalini Nina
7 min readFeb 2, 2024

The Nets game sucked.

To be fair, the whole night did.

I was quite excited for my first real NBA game. Walking up to Barclay’s Center, I was directed to the VIP box the company reserved for us. We ate catered food and drank free wine and sat on the edge of our seats as the Nets and Kings darted back and forth across the court. At the end of the game, Stephanie pulled out her portable ring light, and we did the obligatory documentation for social media. Then we headed to a bar. Once there, we ordered several rounds, poked fun at Blake’s choice of a chocolate drink and hotly debated social ethics before heading out.

As soon as I got home, I flopped upside on the couch and thought about the evening. How much we laughed and carried on shouting conversations in that drunken sort of way. On paper it was fun. On paper, it was a perfect night out. If so, why did I feel so empty inside? Why did the experience leave me feeling drained and exhausted by how vacuous it all felt? I longed to hop on Zoom and virtually hang out with some friends, but at one in the morning, who could I call?

Evenings like this have become the norm for me in a post-Covid world. The excitement of going out is often overshadowed by the great effort of it all. As someone who loves the company of people and loves a good time, it is not simply the woes of an introvert. Empty conversations leave me racking my head for something to talk about, and I transform into a wallflower. I lean out of conversations and say to myself, “This can’t be all there is to life”. The experiences leave me feeling empty, and I gleam nothing from it despite my overwhelming optimism that maybe this time will be different. The effort has become so great that increasingly I prefer to stay home by myself, read, write or binge-watch an old show because those experiences, while not always enriching, won’t leave me feeling depleted either.

Luckily, I have friends who actually “get” me, but we are literally separated by space, miles and miles of it, and time…zones. In reality, it’s not an on-demand friendship, and at times, it feels just as lonely as standing in a bar with people to whom I have nothing to say.

Covid has left me chronically yearning for companionship. Unlike some people, I have been unable to readjust back to life the way it used to be. Perhaps it is because I am older and have different interests, or perhaps it is because the quality of human interaction has fundamentally changed.

During Covid, my world opened up. As organizers began moving events online, accessibility skyrocketed, and the world suddenly felt more connected. I found myself exploring beyond my geographical limits and connected to people and things that were meaningful to me. I attended poetry readings in LA, sat in on town halls for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and watched presentations at the Pearson Institute. Every morning, I turned on Monterey Bay Aquarium’s live cam while I wrote my morning pages. I found a singing coach in Boston and a career coach in DC. At least once a week, I pushed all my furniture to one side of the room and did a ballet class at home. Most significantly I joined an international community of writers at the London Writers Salon and became friends with people across the world. When I say my world opened up, I mean it. My world became bigger, and I was connected with people who enriched my life, who understood me and left me feeling full — not drained. More times than I can count, I would be in awe of people I sat across the screen from and would think, “How did I find you?” But absolute perfection is an unattainable idea, and the downfall of these perfect relationships was that they were, in fact, perfect.

I spent years in a long distance relationship. After, I spent the next few years thinking about that long-distance relationship. I could write a whole thesis on the problems with long-distance, but instead I’ll boil it down to this: the problem with being long distance, whether it be with a partner or with a friend, is that things will always appear perfect. A virtual connection, scheduled or not, removes an element of reality from the relationship. Sure, you can have real moments, or even just exist together on the phone, but these types of relationships are still a fantasy because they are never required to hold the weight of what an actual relationship must endure. One never has to see or sit with the bad days, the gruesome days, the ugly days. For the most part, in a long distance relationship, all one gets is the filtered version of it.

That is the fallacy of long-distance friends. Although we talk honestly and openly, we are still missing the truth that comes with little interactions with one another. We are missing the mundaneness of the day-to-day life with one another, the deep true familiarity with another person, and natural highs and lows that every relationship cycles through.

These perfect relationships get to remain a fantasy because they never have to live up to the reality of life which will always feel harder and uglier. Although my relationships are real, honest and truthful, they also don’t get to withstand all the true tests of a relationship such as the hard times, the times when I’m not able to put on my best self, the times when I am at my lowest, and I am being a total brat, but need acceptance and companionship anyway. To some degree, we’re still putting on a face, setting up the camera at just the right angle and putting on some kind of performance, even if it is, what we think, an honest one.

After years and years of connecting virtually, I began to plateau in my ability to create a deeper connection with people solely online. While some relationships will never fade, others felt tenuous and not as sturdy as I thought they were. I did not know how to traverse those distances to feel connected to people again when we were and probably would always be far apart. Virtual relationships were beginning to feel empty to me, or hard to maintain, and I was losing my ability to grow in them, so I turned to finding connections in the real world.

I severely underestimated (or completely forgot) how glorious it was to laugh in the company of good people. It is like water for your soul if yours is thirsty, and mine was parched. Unfortunately, those times have been few and far between, less than a handful since things opened up again. Instead, most interactions circle the drain of small talk, wind its way to empty conversations, or die altogether because we’re all still a little socially awkward. Hence, my leaning back, withdrawing and pondering, “Is this all there is to life?”

Worse, over the past three years, accessibility to easy distractions have skyrocketed. We get so many apps to our phone now: streaming platforms, video shorts, social media posts, music, podcasts, audiobooks, games. The content wars have produced so much that is meant to fight competitively for our attention, that even if we are only consuming .001% of the content accessible to us, we are still filling hours of our time with it. Now add the element of human interaction. For that interaction to be worth your time, it now has to surpass a threshold of “interesting” that we have subconsciously established. Conversations with strangers, new friends, colleagues rarely meet this standard, so we disengage and retreat into our world of digital content because it is at least interesting or less boring than this conversation.

Retreating into our phones and computers made sense when the world shut down and many of us had time on our hands, but we never came out. Many people’s content consumption has not decreased since the pandemic. This, mixed with the barriers that still exist to human interaction, leaves people with the feeling that it’s just not worth the effort. If we’re lonely we turn to virtual connection for companionship, and thus begins the cycle all over again. Will we ever find a way out?

I felt like there wasn’t. I truly believed there wasn’t, and I was ready to swear off humanity, retreat to a tropical location and disappear into the world of books forever. Then I attended a talk by the author Louise Coghlan.

In her talk, Coghlan spoke on several things, one of which was the importance of digital connection. The evidence was right there in the room, as the audience comprised of friends she made through her Facebook page for her book, Granny Nancy: Ireland’s Oldest Lady, and through the London Writers Salon. No one, even the organizers, had met Coghlan before, yet we all came out to meet her, hear her speak and hug her in real life. While she embraced the digital world, she also spoke about the importance of “looking up”. Physically “looking up” from our phones, and metaphorically “looking up” and being open to the unknown possibilities and magic that life had to offer. She spoke of being open to opportunities and to keep an eye out for them, which we cannot do if we are constantly buried in our phones or consuming content.

The talk resonated hard with me. While it was not a perfect solution for the lack of connection I felt, it gave me a sense of hope that one day we will figure out how to marry our virtual worlds and our real worlds. Perhaps the answer is as simple as getting on a plane and visiting someone you miss. Or perhaps it is moving relationships off line into real interactions. Maybe for me, it’s simply realizing that every interaction has something to offer, even if it is brief or seemingly superficial. I wish I had a solution, but as we navigate the world post-Covid, I am still mapping out this terrain. All I know is that people will continue to move in and out of our lives — some staying for brief moments, other for years — and it is up to us to decide what we make of each connection.

This essay was written in March 2023.

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