When You Are Feeling Out of Sync

For nearly two months, our TV has on the fritz. It’s liberating in some ways but in others it’s isolated us from our friends, neighbors and colleagues in revealing ways.

No longer having the option available to just turn on the TV at the end of the day or when I need a break is freeing. It has not resulted in me reading more books but it has created space for Charles and I to leisurely talk over dinner instead of unwinding with David Muir and quickly catching up while speeding past all the pharma commercials on the evening news.

When we do watch “TV” these days, it’s on my small laptop screen, perched on a TV tray that’s pulled close with us huddled together on the sofa and the cats trying to squeeze in. We started our new way of consuming media with Apple TV, situated conveniently on my task bar.

First we binged Severance. Loved it for the questions it explores about identity and asking what part of ourselves should we bring to work, and what happens when we don’t. Can’t wait for the next season. Then we moved on to Loot, which we also really enjoyed and had some genuine belly laughs which is always a welcome therapeutic remedy.

On calls with colleagues, I’d share the mishap of the broken TV and the “new to us” series that we’re enjoying. And that’s where my awareness of the asynchronicity of our lives really came into focus.

No one else was watching Severance at the same time. Some had seen it and loved it but it was all a past memory, lacking the immediacy of discovery we were feeling. They also weren’t sharing in the anticipation of what’s to come with the next episode. Similarly, people had either finished Loot, were yet to start or hadn’t even heard of it. Even Palm Royale, with new episodes every week, wasn’t being viewed by our friends on the same day and date so we couldn’t share plot points or jokes that prompted a laugh. We were alone in our viewing, out of sync with our community and society.

Recently I was having a conversation with an industry friend who is the head of insights for one of the major cable channels. We were talking about the challenges of building a streaming business and how all the asynchronous viewing has made it harder to create events that galvanize audiences, build community and nurture the growth of a business. It was exactly what Charles and I were experiencing. Asynchronous viewing in an asynchronous life.

How do you effectively maintain empathy with others when the shared moments are so infrequent?

Increasingly, we live an asynchronous existence. So much choice and flexibility has yielded enough opt-outs that we are still in a minority when we do opt-in. From where and how we work to the platform we choose for content consumption and the choice of content itself, the opportunities for shared experiences is diminished.

Further separating us are the algorithms feeding suggestions on what we might like based on what we’ve already watched. What about serving up selections based on what people I actually know and like are watching so we might have a chance to start something together?

The workplace also provided the water cooler where we could gather and share experiences. Even being in the same workspace with others provides its own shared experience in a day. I’m a big supporter of hybrid and remote working arrangements, provided there are points of meaningful interaction - synchronicity - creating shared moments of joy, maybe some tears, and connectedness. Organizations would benefit from finding ways to foster community in the “distributed” (aka “asynchronous”) work situations to help keep everyone in sync with each other.

The polarized nature of discourse has led to more feelings of isolation. The pandemic and the initial lockdown which physically isolated us should have become a rallying moment, fueling a sense of societal unity. The lockdown and rallying together to support our broader communities in the face of adversity could have been a true synchronizing experience. Instead, amidst a death toll over 1.1 million people, we quickly dissolved into finger pointing and mocking based on mask wearing, attitudes toward experimental treatments and individual perceptions of safety. We still haven’t come together to mourn the dead, the changes to our lives and the trauma of what we endured during those years. Again, we continue to move through life out of sync.

We’ve been drifting toward this point for years. Politics as zero-sum game sport that began in the 90s, advances in technology, the advent of social media and then the pandemic.

Synchronicity is important, it can help us feel like we belong to something bigger. A community. A society.

We have never fully been unified as a society - that’d be creepy - but the magic of shared experiences is now limited to the Super Bowl, anything Taylor Swift and Beyonce do, as well as cosmic events like solar eclipses and aurora borealis viewings. It seems the only channel we can’t change is the cosmos.

Without these shared moments and gatherings, it is harder to have empathy. It doesn’t mean we can’t, but the shared language is missing and needs to be established again to come back into sync.

What Can We Do?

1. Make the Effort to Connect - Being in sync with a colleague doesn’t just mean aligning on work tasks. Neither does it mean limiting conversation to the weather or an inert overview of work when talking with a friend or family member. Ask good, exploratory questions - even “tell me about your weekend” and following it up with “what was your favorite part of the weekend?” is a good starting point.

2. Share of Yourself - We are constantly mirroring the people we have around us - the mirror neurons are said to be part of our empathetic response. If you give short answers when someone is asking you to elaborate, you are indicating to them the amount you want to share. If you go a bit deeper, maybe add a few words on how something made you feel, it can open the conversation up further.

3. Create More Synchronized Moments - The final episodes of Bridgerton, season 3 came out last week. Could you and some friends or family control viewing of that - watching in sync together in some fashion so you can share that experience? Or pick a new series or movie to watch, even if it is viewed together, apart. I know resisting the autoplay is hard but it could be adjustment we need to bring us back to a more synchronized orbit.

A few worthwhile and related reads…

Why Boys Today Struggle with Human Connection - by Ruth Whippman exploring the loneliness that boys face today due to social media, technology and changing norms of what it means to be male.

The first time I had heard the phrase “Mid-TV” - the era we are in now where there’s a lot of good TV but not a lot of truly great TV. Or maybe there is so much great TV that it’s diluted down to being good.

PTSD Has Surged Among College Students - results from the latest Healthy Minds study shows the rate of PTSD among college students more than doubled from pre to post pandemic. It’s currently at 7.5% of students. There’s also more explanation on what qualifies as Trauma compared to acute stress disorder and triggering events, which is why I refer to the events of the past 4 years with a lower-case ‘t’ - trauma.

Q&A: Does having empathy mean I have to be nice ALL the time?

No.

It’s another misperception about empathy that people have. Seeing another’s point of view doesn’t mean you agree with them. It also has nothing to do with being nice. Narcissists use cognitive empathy to figure out other people and use that against them for manipulation. That’s not being nice.

There is a choice to be made in each interaction whether to be nice or not. I believe the more empathy you are able to generate, the harder it is to be a jerk to someone. As we become more aware of the complexity of the human experience, it can soften the impulse to lash out.

So focus on being empathetic and then see how that informs how you treat the other person.