Blaise Pascal famously said - all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. I'm not here to dispute his thought but I think if he had lived past 1662, he might have added a little more to his comment. Imagine his reaction to ZOOM, or even to a simple phone call - all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone, but there is also a slightly smaller issue that we cannot sit quietly with another on ZOOM, or the phone.
I don't think this has much to do with people but with the implicit promise of technology. A phone is for conversation, ZOOM is for a conversation with video. I have plenty of evidence that people are perfectly comfortable in silence with others, using their presence to communicate with meaning beyond words, but this seems impossible when connected through technology. It's a shame that such important advancements strip most of us of this extraordinary power.
Pascal seemed pretty smart, maybe even smarter than me. I'm sure he would have seen this problem with technology, and said something immortal about it - all of technology's problems stem from their insistence that there is no need to ever sit quietly in a room, alone.
