Candice Cardenas
Blog Contributor
Background Photo byClark Van Der Beken via Unsplash
Socially Distant
by Candice Cardenas
I’ve been in self-quarantine now for a little over a month and, to my surprise, the transition to working from home has been very smooth. In many ways I have been thriving in this environment. This makes me wonder, how much of this ease is attributed to my own personality and how much of it is attributed to my millennial upbringing? So many of my social interactions throughout my life have been filtered through the eyes of technology. I remember receiving my first iPhone and texting my friends instead of calling them or meeting them in person all the time. I made my first Facebook account when I was sixteen and that opened up a whole new layer of interaction. I had control over my profile, and I could lay it all out there, in one page. It was a mixture of images and words that I could use to show “me”. I could show everyone the good parts, I could be as personal as I wanted to be without any actual human contact. This became the norm. To this day most of my interactions with my friends and family are through text or Instagram. My best friend and I often have two separate conversations going, one through text and another through Direct Messaging on Instagram. It feels natural and it feels like connection. Until I actually sat down to think about it, I didn’t really notice that almost all of my communication is through some technological avenue that requires no physical person being there. In fact, I talk to my co-workers more in person and to my friends and family more digitally. Isn’t that odd? It’s flipped. If a co-worker began to text me regularly that would seem pretty personal to me, but talking to them face to face every day is more formal.
I’d like to take a moment to say that this isn’t a blanket statement saying that all millennials have adapted to quarantine easily. In fact, I know many millennials who actively pursue social interactions face to face frequently and are legitimately struggling with the change. However, I will say that their transition compared to someone who is not used to communicating with technology is somewhat easier.
For work we have regular gatherings on Zoom, which is a video conferencing application. It has been amazing to me to see people who would normally never go close to anything like this, trying to tackle this technology out of sheer need for social interaction. When I worked at Apple, I was frequently met with such great resistance when trying to teach someone much older than me how to use a specific app. Now, participants in our Zoom gatherings who are older, are not only stepping out to try this, but doing it on their own! This just goes to show how important face to face time is for those who grew up with that style of communication. How hard it must be to feel isolated and not know how to use technological tools to reach out. I suppose what I am trying to say is that while there are many challenges to this temporary change of living, I find that I haven’t had to change much in the way of my communication. What does this mean? Perhaps, that I have been more socially distant before this than I realized.
Generation Next Ministries exists to connect the history, wisdom, and experience of one generation to the energy, knowledge, and dream of the next.