The residue of the pandemic, for all of us, has proved difficult to scrub away. Studies have shown that we emerged from quarantine with less ability to make eye contact or conduct ordinary conversation with acquaintances. “The interactions that make us less lonely come naturally to us, but they still need to be practiced, or our skills atrophy,” Ian Marcus Corbin, a Harvard Medical School philosopher and senior fellow at Capita, which helped fund Weissbourd’s study, told me. “And in 2020 and 2021, a lot of people who were in a formative period of their lives saw those muscles atrophy.” Concurrently, the usage of “frictionless forms of interaction,” like self-checkout displays or meal-delivery apps, ballooned. Corbin sees these developments as evidence of “cocooning”: a retreat into a digital world that provides everything you need except the thing you need the most, which is the “meaningful connection” mourned by respondents to Weissbourd and Batanova’s survey.
Read in The New York Times Magazine