Welcome To The Great Constraint
One year into the Pandemic, when my daughter screamed my name three times to tell me that she was sick, really sick, I ran from a Zoom meeting being conducted in my spare room to her classroom a.k.a her bedroom, and quickly realized that she might be seriously ill. She was green, her breath was faint, her body was limp, and her eyes were glossed over. Calling downstairs to my husband, also in a Zoom meeting, was the loudest I had yelled in the six months we’d been in lock-down. My mind detonated in a dozen directions but my first fear was “Oh God, does she have Covid?” Shortly after, an image from season six of The Sopranos, one of the 4 billion shows we’d binged since March 2020 came to mind: Does she look like Christopher Moltisanti did after his Escalade rolled down the hill? And then, oh god, am I still in a meeting? Are my camera and microphone still on?
When my daughter most needed me to be her mother, I was everywhere and nowhere, everyone and no one.
Two years into this pandemic, we are in the throes of what my scrambled brain can only think to call The Great Constraint. This non-peer-reviewed term refers to the crashing and flattening of our personalities, responsibilities, and selves, driven by our devices and greatly accelerated by Covid. Our identities and roles as parents, children, friends, colleagues, caretakers and so many more have reduced us to single flat human beings. Many of us have remained hunched over, in the same room, Slacking, Zooming, emailing, therapizing, grieving, giggling, sobbing, all on the same small screens day in and day out, with fewer places in the outside world open for us to safely stretch, explore, challenge, or lose ourselves, or to be any oneself at one time. In my experience, the symptoms of this confinement include discombobulation, disorganization, despair, and inertia. All work and all play on screens all day make us void to our inner selves and to those around us.
Moments later, as my daughter lay in her bed sick, my mind kept cycling through the same scattered and shameful thoughts: Will she be OK? How did I fail her so completely? Is there Wi-Fi in the ER if we need to go?
“YOU HAVE ONE identity,” a 25-year-old Mark Zuckerberg famously told journalist David Kirkpatrick in 2009. “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or coworkers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” And then his moralizing kicker: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” Strap on your Oculus blinders and ignore the fact that there may have been times that Facebook (now Meta) has displayed multiple identities or a lack of integrity. Zuckerberg’s prophecy has been thoroughly fulfilled.
However, the big constraint started long before 2009. It probably began with the advent of personal computing and being able to open multiple windows at the same time but throughout the 2010s, our lives and brains got mega-crunched. The share of Americans who owned a smartphone rose from some 35 percent to 85 percent over the decade. The proportion of our lives that we compressed into our smartphones jumped at about the same rate. The average American adult now spends more than nine hours a day planted in front of a screen, more than half of our waking lives crammed into an Apple, Google, or Microsoft device.
The cost of this convenience is a pocket-sized self.
These shifts have collectively eroded the physical and mental boundaries within which we play and construct different aspects of our identities. As our social media connections broadened from close friends to second cousins to kindergarten classmates, the pressure to generalize how we presented ourselves grew. When we’re talking to everyone, as Joshua Meyrowitz writes in No Sense of Place, “We would have trouble projecting a very different definition of ourselves to different people when so much other information about us was available to each of our audiences.” As Jenny Odell adds in How to Do Nothing, this generalizing also creates an “inability to publicly change our minds, i.e., to express different selves over time.”
Meanwhile, the air between our generalized social media selves and any of our other selves continues to shrink. It might seem like pure efficiency to eschew the trip to the bank or store, and instead, move your fingers a few to open up Capital One or Instacart. But as Cal Newport, an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University and author of A World Without Email, explains, because everything can be opened and done on the same device or browser, we try to do and be everything all the time. “Your mind is going to go, ‘Why not now? Why not now? Why not now?’ You can only win that argument so many times,” he says. Losing that argument doesn’t just torpedo our focus, what’s known as “attention residue” it’s also a catastrophe to the self. “The human brain cannot just quickly jump back and forth between different contexts,” says Newport. Constantly switching from one forum to another, a dating app to a Zoom meeting, meaning how we present ourselves in one is bound to bleed into the other, what might be called identity residue.
It can be seen as an obscene luxury to be confined in one space, able to make an income from your bed or couch and to afford the devices we’ve smashed ourselves into. For certain, the lockdowns, closures, and social distancing that have exacerbated our containment have saved lives. And there are countless examples of the internet being a means of freedom, allowing anyone isolated, oppressed, or misunderstood to find community and be a version of themselves they can’t be elsewhere. But maintaining this separation of selves feels less and less possible. And any notion that the pandemic’s end will mark the end of confinement is a farce. We will soon undoubtedly be able to conduct even more of our lives on our devices with even less friction. What is the metaverse but the endgame of Zuckerberg’s one identity edict, a desperate silly ploy to get us to immerse ourselves in a headset so deeply that we have no identity in the real world whatsoever?