One of my core personality traits, for which I have been lovingly teased for years, is that I always want to do everything. In my twenties, especially, I would often plan an evening like: happy hour with colleagues after work, followed by a movie date with my sister at 8 pm, rendezvous with friends after the movie if it’s on the way home … okay or even if it isn’t on the way.
I don't do this so much anymore, for lots of reasons, but the urge is still there. I still sometimes try to plan a carefully timed string of activities (like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day! After an eternity of practice, he perfected his day into a down-to-the-second choreography) ... though I'm far more likely to drop one of them now, instead of zooming around in taxis, praying I make it in time. I guess that's growth for you.
This whole Coronavirus thing, global pandemic, has pushed the entire world online, onto Zoom and FaceTime and Google Hangouts and Facebook Live. And that means that while the nature of time as we experience it hasn't changed, the physical limitations on how many places we can be at once have! My inbox has been flooded with notifications of things I can now do from the comfort of my own home (where I absolutely must stay). Author talks, operas, lectures, workshops, birthday parties, aerobics and yoga, even community organizing campaigns.
And now that I don't have to get from Queens to Harlem, or rely on the F, C, G, or L trains, I can do it all. In theory. It's sort of amazing, and of course it immediately led me to sign up for All The Things. A thousand tabs were launched.
But much like my traditional, in-person activity ambitions, the virtual ones exceed my capacity, too. There’s a new pain point, too: the temptation to participate in simultaneous events. Like Kiese Laymon's author talk, which conflicted with my weekly Philosophy of Fashion course. Which I was already squeezing between two different family Passovers. Without the laws of physics to prevent me from being in two places at once, it’s just a question of juggling browser windows and platforms and attention, right?
The stress of trying to do that, it turns out, is pretty comparable to the stress of staring at minutes as they tick by while you wait for the train, or the cab, to whisk you to the next event. You hope they’re still there. You hope you haven’t missed too much. You hope it will be worth the hustle.
The pressure-release valve in this situation is that for, say, a Facebook Live event, a recording or replay is still available after the fact. And so I missed an online panel talk on Economics and Epidemiology, but kept the page open and finally watched the recording maybe a week after it happened. This means my glut of browser tabs is worse than ever, though. Now it’s my computer—instead of my body—that’s under constant threat of crashing from the weight of my own expectations of all the places I’ll go and things I’ll do.
Guess it just goes to show: Where you (don't) go, there you are.
