Social Distancing Is Not New and Will Only Continue

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

Like most people, the term “Social Distancing” was unfamiliar to me prior to February. Now, it’s become a universal mantra, abided to by people of all ages, geographies, economic classes and (for the most part) political persuasions. It’s amazing how quickly we’ve redefined our social norms. Deeply ingrained inter-personal customs, from shaking hands to high-fives, would now be interpreted as acts of aggression. Even the briefly popular interim greetings of the fist bump and elbow tap are now taboo.

Hunkered down in our shelter-in-place workspaces, Zoom meetings, Google Hangouts and Slack interactions have become business-as-usual. Our personal lives revolve around Facebook updates, Instagram feeds and Netflix binge watching. But, for many of us, these modes of communication, social interaction and entertainment are hardly novel — more like an acceleration of what we were already doing: spending less and less time interacting with other human beings in-person and more and more time interacting with a screen.

This is the case in both our professional and personal lives. In three of the last four companies I’ve worked at, the majority of my team was remote — located in India, the Philippines and Colombia. Dozens of other employees worked from home, in Denver, Phoenix, New Jersey and other locations. Remote teams and working from home has become standard for many of us. Over the last twelve years, the number of people working remotely has increased 159% to over 4.7 million today — a number that exceeds the population of every U.S. city except New York.

The same trend towards living our lives through screens rather than in-person has been occurring in our personal lives as well — particularly for young people. The number of teens who say they meet friends in-person on a daily basis declined by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2015. By contrast, the percentage of teens who admit to checking social media “more than once a day” more than doubled from 34% in 2012 to 70% in 2018, according to the nonprofit Common Sense Media. It’s not just teens who are addicted to online interactions -- 51% of all Facebook users (who tend to skew older) say they check the site multiple times daily, logging an average of over 2.5 hours per day on social media — more than three times the amount of time we spend socializing with actual human friends.

At times during shelter-at-home, the current pandemic can feel as if it was deliberately engineered by technology companies (at least those not in the travel or hospitality categories) to accelerate their product adoption. All the things we told our children to do more of — socialize with friends, play sports, get out of the house — are now forbidden. Apart from reading, online activities like social media, video games, and streaming are practically the only things we’re still allowed to do. As medical science has advanced from the Black Plague to the Spanish flu, one of its inevitable and disturbing conclusions is that interacting with other human beings could kill us. With each global pandemic, those fears are exacerbated. The solution presented to us as a species in the last twenty years, and most intensively the last month, is technology.

Mental health experts are increasingly stressing we practice “physical distancing” not “social distancing.” Never fear, video conferencing, Snapstreaks, VR/AR or some other technology will allow us to maintain our social connections while protecting us from the risk of infection due to physical proximity. But it’s not clear this approach is sustainable for our psyches.

As social interaction via technology has increased and in-person social interaction has decreased, many statistics suggest a precipitous decline in mental health. Suicide rates for Americans across all demographics have increased significantly in the era of social networks and smart phones, with the heaviest users, teenagers, showing the most detrimental impact. The suicide rate among 15-24 year olds has increased by 50% since 2007, the year the iPhone was introduced — more than twice the increase of suicide rates overall (though still well below the most suicidal demographic, middle-aged white men). Teen depression has risen even more steeply — with one study finding the number of mental health disorders in teens has doubled in the last ten years.

These statistics suggest that social connectivity and psychological health can’t really be achieved without physical proximity. Despite all the ways technology connects us and all the benefits it brings, it seems to be lacking something important for our species. In less than twenty years, we are re-wiring how human brains have worked for millions of years. There is a reason that physical contact is part of every country and culture. Research has attempted to understand the chemosignaling that happens when human beings physically interact — not only by sight and sound, but how touch and even smell instill trust and build relationships. Whatever that is, we’re losing it.

One prediction that I’m confident making is that, while our lives will hopefully return to “normal” at some point, the trend of social distancing is certain to continue. As technology continues to rapidly improve, doing an ever-better job of mimicking real-world interactions, and the perceived drawbacks of physical proximity continue to increase, from viral pandemics to housing prices, we will find fewer and fewer reasons to interact in-person. Maybe soon touch, taste and smell can be digitally simulated too, further tricking us to release endorphins into our brain receptors as we lead a hermetically-sealed human experience. In the meantime, I’ll be with my family in our Zoom Easter celebration.