Julia J.-M. is staring at the red notification badge on her taskbar, a tiny crimson circle containing the number 19. It is mocking her. It is a pulsing reminder that she is needed, or at least, her input is required for a thread about the color of a button that 49 people are currently arguing over. She just sent a text message meant for her therapist to the entire regional leadership group. ‘I feel like I’m screaming into a void and the void is just asking for a status update,’ the message read. It hung there for 9 seconds before she could delete it, but in digital time, 9 seconds is an eternity. It is long enough for 29 people to see the notification and for at least 9 of them to wonder if Julia is finally cracking.

I did something similar this morning. I sent a grocery list to a client. ‘Organic kale, heavy cream, gin,’ I told a man who pays me to be a professional. There is a specific kind of horror in the digital slip-up, a realization that our private souls are only one misclick away from our curated personas. We live in these boxes now. Julia, a corporate trainer who has spent the last 29 years teaching people how to shake hands and look each other in the eye, now spends her days teaching them how to use the ‘heart’ emoji instead of the ‘thumbs up’ to foster a sense of ‘psychological safety.’ It is a farce, and she knows it. She tells me that she sees the same 149 faces every week on her screen, but if she bumped into them at a grocery store, she’d probably just walk past them, focused on her own gin and kale.

The Village Without People

We have built these elaborate digital villages with none of the village. There is no smell of woodsmoke here, no shared weather, no accidental brushes of the shoulder in the post office. There is only the hum of the cooling fan and the relentless, rhythmic tap-tap-tap of keys. We are more ‘connected’ than any generation in the history of the species, yet the silence in our actual rooms is deafening. I have 309 ‘friends’ in a professional community, and I couldn’t tell you the names of their children or what they fear when the lights go out. We’ve optimized for communication quantity while effectively murdering the quality. We mistake the delivery of data for the delivery of meaning.

The High-Five Mirage

Julia J.-M. often talks about the ‘High-Five Mirage.’ In her training sessions, she points out that we feel a temporary surge of dopamine when someone reacts to our post with a celebratory icon. It feels like a connection. It looks like a connection. But it has the nutritional value of a handful of sugar. You can consume 89 of them in a day and still go to bed starving for a real conversation. She once tried an experiment where she asked a team of 19 designers to go a full day without using a single emoji. By lunch, 9 of them reported feeling that their colleagues were angry with them. The lack of a digital smile was interpreted as a physical scowl. We have lost the ability to read the air because there is no air in a fiber-optic cable.

It’s a strange contradiction, isn’t it? I hate the platform, yet I’m writing this while my status is set to ‘Active’ so my peers think I’m productive. I am performing presence while being entirely absent. I’m digital-Julia, a version of myself that doesn’t need to blow its nose or get distracted by the neighbor’s dog. This curation is the death of intimacy. Intimacy requires the messy, unedited parts of us-the stuttering, the awkward silences, the way your voice cracks when you’re tired. Slack doesn’t have a setting for ‘tired.’ It only has ‘Away.’

I think about the creators who are trying to build real movements in this landscape. They use a Cloudways coupon to establish their voice and find their audience, carving out a space where they can actually own their narrative. But even then, the struggle remains the same: how do you keep the ‘human’ in the ‘human-centric’ business? How do you ensure that your community doesn’t just become another list of 999 names in a database? Julia J.-M. suggests that we need to start being ‘aggressively inefficient’ with our time. She means we should stop trying to ‘scale’ our relationships. You cannot scale a friendship. You cannot automate a heart-to-heart.

Drowning in Pings, Thirsty for Touch

I spent 59 minutes today looking at a thread about ‘work-life balance’ in a channel specifically designed for that purpose. There were 29 links to various articles and 49 comments. Not one person mentioned that they were actually lonely. Not one person said, ‘I am sitting in a room by myself and I haven’t spoken to a human being out loud in three days.’ We discuss the theory of connection because the practice of it is too terrifying. It requires us to be seen in high definition, without the filters of an avatar.

The Monument on Rented Land

Julia told me about a man she trained, let’s call him Mark. Mark was the king of the #watercooler channel. He posted 19 memes a day. He was the first to ‘congratulate’ anyone on a promotion. Everyone thought Mark was the life of the office. When Mark went on leave for 49 days due to a severe depressive episode, not a single person from that channel called his personal phone. They all sent ‘get well’ messages in the Slack thread, of course. They tagged him. They used the ‘flower’ emoji. But when he came back, he realized that he had been building a monument on rented land. He had 199 digital acquaintances and 0 friends who knew his home address.

This is the cost of our current optimization. We are building networks that are a mile wide and a millimeter deep. We have replaced the ‘village’ with a ‘workspace,’ and then we wonder why we feel like employees in our own lives. I catch myself doing it too-I’ll spend 29 minutes crafting a perfectly witty response to a tweet rather than spending 9 minutes calling my mother. I am a victim of the same friction-free trap. It is easier to type than it is to talk. Talking is unpredictable. Talking involves the risk of being misunderstood in a way that an ‘Undo Send’ button can’t fix.

The Power Outage Revelation

There is a certain irony in Julia J.-M.’s profession. She is paid to fix the problems created by the very tools her clients use to hire her. She travels to 19 different cities a year to tell people to put their phones down, while she herself is tethered to her phone to manage her travel arrangements. She told me that the most successful session she ever ran was when the power went out in a hotel conference room. For 69 minutes, the 39 executives had to sit in the dark and just talk. No slides. No polls. No ‘raise hand’ feature. She said she heard more truth in those 69 minutes than she had in the previous 9 years of her career. One man cried. Another confessed he didn’t understand the company’s new strategy. They were human because they had no other choice.

The Revolution Within

We need to find ways to let the power go out more often. We need to stop treating our relationships as ‘threads’ to be ‘resolved.’ There is no resolution to a human connection; there is only the ongoing, messy, beautiful process of being known. I am looking at my screen now, and that red ’19’ is still there. I think I’m going to leave it. I think I’m going to go outside and find someone to talk to about the weather, or the price of eggs, or the way the light is hitting the trees. I want to be in a place where my mistakes aren’t permanent records in a searchable database, but just ripples in the air that disappear as soon as they are made.

Maybe the real revolution isn’t a new app or a better way to organize our workspaces. Maybe the revolution is just turning the damn things off and remembering that we have bodies. Julia J.-M. is planning to retire in 9 years. She says she wants to move to a town with a population of 499 people and no cell service. She wants to be the lady who forgets her phone at home and doesn’t care. She wants to be someone who is only ‘Active’ when she is actually standing in front of you. I think I might meet her there. I’ll bring the gin. She can bring the kale. And we won’t take a single picture of it.