Connections, Part One

When the pandemic hit and nobody could travel anywhere, I, like many others, found connections through Zoom calls. I had multiple scheduled calls with different groups: a daily morning call, a weekly Friday call, two board game groups, a poker night, a Call of Duty group, and semi-regular calls with various individuals. I am very grateful for the friends I have made over the years and that those friends were there over the pandemic helped avoid the feelings of isolation many felt.

Now that most people have moved back into old (or perhaps new) routines, the regular online calls have mostly disappeared. And with a decision pre-pandemic to stop speaking at conferences, I haven’t been attending them, either. That has meant missing out on one particular avenue of connecting and reconnecting with people that I’ve known for years. Long gone are the days of hanging out in the hallway of a conference chatting with people in between sessions. Or going out for tacos and then to a bar where somebody is dancing in a head-to-toe Batman costume. (Yes, that happened.) But even conference attendance is down.

Pre-pandemic, I’d often be visiting a city and then put out word on Twitter that I’d enjoy meeting up with people and sure enough, I’d be at a table with a handful of fellow web practitioners enjoying a lovely meal and listening to their experiences and sharing mine.

The scattering to the smattering of social networks along with those abandoning social media altogether has made this, too, more difficult. It takes a more concerted effort to stay connected. Yet Another Social Media Site doesn’t seem like it’s going to solve this.

This was one of the factors that spurred me to re-engage with social media: to maintain these loose connections, albeit perhaps more loosely than before.

I have close friends with whom I speak to near daily. I have friends with whom I speak with every few months. And then I have those people with whom I’d normally have connected with in person and those in-person connections are happening less and less.

I don’t know that I have any answers. I don’t know whether this is even a “problem” that needs to be fixed. Perhaps it’s just a fact of life that some connections are lost to time.