Tapestries-15 | ‘Distance’ brought us here
The effect of a virus on our small but distant world
Photo by Jongsun Lee
‘Distance’ in a social sense seems to be the only thing people are talking about. ‘Distance’ in a general sense is what I’m thinking about.
We have now placed physical distance between ourselves and our loved ones, colleagues, and strangers. The experience has been a jarring one, and I feel that this emotion is somewhat born of a startling reversal.
Up until now, we — individually and as a society — have successfully developed the ability to exert control over distance. We have made the world a smaller place physically and conceptually, and have reoriented our worlds to be the centers of our universe.
We conquered distance, and then coronavirus came along. This is a piece about how we overcame distance, what that did to how we think and interact with each other, and why in the depths of an unprecedented crisis, reacquainting ourselves with distance presents hope. Give me a few minutes of your time and I’ll try to explain why.
How we overcame distance
We overcame the tyranny of distance with technology, capital and globalization. We became the masters of our domains, able to effortlessly procure products, attain experiences and project personas, however and whenever we desire.
We see this clearly when looking at how our products are made, where we travel and what we eat. We have little regard for where the goods we use everyday came from, or who made them. When we set our sights on travel, we begin with the far flung and remote. We have even optimized our food and produce for traveling vast distances from farm to our plates, just so we can consume seasonal and exotic produce year-round, irrespective of origin or season. Distance is no longer a barrier to obtaining goods or experiences.
While our control over the physical world is clear, our power within the virtual domain is more nuanced, but arguably more relevant to this discussion.
Two months ago, I wrote that we now express a large portion of our identity virtually and invest enormous time and energy cultivating optimal avatars. We are able to effortlessly project our online personas and everything they purport to say about our values, lifestyle, career and aspirations. Distance is no barrier to telling family, colleagues or customers about what’s on our mind.
The benefits for communication and commerce are clear. But an important and less desirable outcome is that we’re constantly consumed by how our avatars are received and assessed by those in our dispersed network. Regardless of where we physically find ourselves, our mind wanders the digital expanse. We are preoccupied with what’s happening in the minds of people we cannot see, at the expense of the world around us.
What it means for how we interact with each other
The victory over distance has been swift and decisive, but there may be some downside.
When the things we need or desire are not within our grasp, we are forced to acknowledge our own limitations and more accurately perceive our place — physical and otherwise — in the world. However, when we have everything at our fingertips, we start believing the world is ours, and everyone else and the earth is just living in it.
We have constructed our realities around us to convince ourselves that we are all the centers of the universe, with our world and lifestyle orbiting around us. Distance was a parent, teaching humility by keeping things from us in the hope we wouldn’t become entitled brats.
Some troubling behaviors have emerged from this self-centered-ness, chief among them a lack of empathy. Where we believe the world revolves around us, we are inclined to more strongly identify with the views we hold and place greater importance on our own narratives, without fully acknowledging the validity of different viewpoints. This is especially so on complex and polarizing issues, something I wrote about at length here.
The last few years have been marked by an angry public discourse. We have become divided, and forced to apply labels to each other: left, right, liberal, conservative, SJW, pro-life, pro-choice, open borders, etc.. But as distance once again exerts its traditional physical control in the time of the coronavirus, perhaps it will return some semblance of perspective and humility.
Making the world a smaller and more interconnected place is what helped enable the virus’ global spread; this is one impact of shortening distance. Becoming more engrossed in our own lives and the avatars we project is what helped make us more polarized and less empathetic; this is one impact of increasing distance.
Why there exists hope
As we sit here in our homes, practicing social distancing, we are forced to optimize for what’s important today: those physically closest to us and our immediate necessities. Our ability to travel as seamlessly or procure as easily has been suspended.
In a world where distance once again reigns, those people we proclaimed to be so different to us — by virtue of being from a different zip-code or through subscribing to a different political ideology — now have new labels: son, mother, sister, husband, essential worker, volunteer, community member.
This global fight is the first time in my recent memory where humanity is united against a common foe. I once read that war is fantastic, except for all the death and destruction. As we struggle together across the world, perhaps this sentiment rings true.
For the last few years, we have injected emotion and fervor into relatively trivial differences; for so long the stakes felt so high, and now we’re reminded of what’s actually important. We are forced to acknowledge the universality of the things everyone cares about: health and family. Socially distancing in our homes, there is nowhere to run from this truth and little to distract us.
Bringing it together
In time, this trial will hopefully pass, and we’ll return to yelling at each other across different aisles. But when we do so, we must remember that nothing is truly existential. The distance between our views, and the distance between our physically-isolated selves, represent something different today. They hold lessons for understanding who we are, where we sit, and how we should learn to view each other.
The coronavirus is so named because the physical structure of the virus resembles the sun’s ‘corona’, the outermost part of its atmosphere. As we deal with the virus’ fallout, let’s focus on the corona’s ability to illuminate, and its capacity to give life to a new perspective. Let this be a new dawn.